[member=174828]messyhoose[/member], I want to thank you for engaging in this conversation; I hope it isn't feeling too much like being in the lion's den! Hopefully we will all improve our understanding as we discuss these issues
1. I don't think many of us would argue for farming for pelts. Those of us on the meat-eating side of the debate probably all feel that skins / pelts etc from animals that were being killed anyway should be used. What would be the vegan view on using skins and pelts from animals that had lived out their alloted span?
2. Gosh, we could have a whole topic on just this aspect. I have mixed feelings about the idea of us all hunting wild animals for our food... unfortunately, plenty of suffering is caused by hunters not getting a clean shot, so I think that if we are to eat meat at all (other than roadkill), then personally I would prefer the animals to be slaughtered humanely by trained operatives with all the appropriate equipment and backup. And the same applies to being prepared to kill our own meat; I understand completely the rationale behind saying that meat eaters should kill their own meat, but in practise I would again prefer that no animals are killed by anyone who isn't trained to do it, and who doesn't have all the appropriate equipment, and backup present, to ensure that suffering is minimised - especially if something goes wrong.
3. In practise, this would not be possible. There would have to be a phased approach, where the numbers are reduced over a period of years, or there would have to be a mass slaughter. In either case, there will have to be slaughter of animals over a transition period. I will explain some of the reasons why. Just looking at sheep, Googling tells me that there are approx 14.5 million breeding ewes in the UK, and approx 14.5 million lambs / sheep are slaughtered each year. Introducing a ban on slaughter after lambing would be impractical; many farms (my own included) do not have the facilities to keep all the lambs on over winter, and there simply isn't the ground / shelter / feed in the country to keep all one year's lambs alive for the rest of their natural lives. So it would cause untold suffering and other animal welfare issues to introduce a ban on slaughter once the season's crop of lambs have been born. So the first thing would be to ban tupping, so that from that point on, no more lambs are produced. Now we have the situation where there are 14.5 million ewes, and probably around 300,000-500,000 tups on top of that, who need to eat, have medications, be sheared, be checked every day and so on. If you ask a farming organisation or you ask a sheep sanctuary, you will get a similar answer - in terms of actual spend, it costs approx £30 per annum per sheep to keep them alive, well and happy. I make that around £450 million per annum, decreasing over five to eight years, as the sheep die off naturally. Total cost to feed and treat the national flock until they have died off, approx £2 billion pounds. Where is that funding coming from? And on top of that, you have the time of the humans to undertake all that care. There won't be enough volunteers to shepherd 15 million sheep, so if we said one full-time human could shepherd 2,000 sheep (they will take less looking after if they are not lambing, so this is my best guess), then we also need to find wages for approx 7,500 full-time shepherds. That's another £120 million per annum, taking the total cost of your plan - for sheep alone - to around £2.5 billion. (And that is without accounting for the thousands and thousands of jobs lost in the agricultural services sector, which I would agree is something that would just have to be absorbed - but does have to be funded from somewhere. I have no figure for that, but I can't imagine it being less than another £billion.)
I won't go through the whole rigmarole in detail again for cattle, but Google says we have 10 million breeding cattle, and the last I checked it cost £300 pa per head to keep a cow. Cows live longer than sheep, and I suspect would need more than one person per 2,000 to care for them. So at a rough guess, the cost of your plan for cattle would be around £20-£25 billion. (And the unbred 10 million cows would be coming a-bulling every 21 days for up to ten years, screaming the place down, busting fences, desperate to get laid... )
And none of that contemplates the use of the land for the animals to graze, the buildings and equipment to care for them, etc. Approx 3 million hectares are used at present. Stopping breeding would reduce that, but even if the need for grazing land reduced to 1 million hectares, this ground has to be paid for. Compulsory purchase would cost maybe around £5 billion, then of course there is ongoing maintenance to fund.
Next, pigs. Approx 400 million breeding sows... And another issue here, besides the simple cost per head / lifespan costs. Most of these pigs are housed, and many would not adapt to a life outdoors, even if the land could be found.
So, if we were to change to a vegan society, there would seem to me to be two options. Option 1 is to plan a transition period of 10-20 years, with the production of farmed meat being controlled over that period. By the end of the period, there would be effectively no sheep, cattle or pigs. Option 2 is to do the mass slaughter and export all the meat / meat products / byproducts to countries which are not going vegan. I suspect this would cost considerably less than your plan. There is probably a composite of Options 1 and 2 which is what would actually happen, with the transition period being speeded up as we export as much meat as possible over the period to reduce numbers as quickly as possible, but with the whole being funded by the sales of meat throughout the period.
4. I remain interested to hear about the actual crops, the actual diet, that could be produced locally, ethically, etc, to feed the 66+ million people in the UK. I am sure you do source your own food as ethically as you say. But I have never yet had an answer from anyone about how this could be scaled up for the whole population. I say this not to be provocative but because, in the absence of an answer, as a farmer, I genuinely do not understand how it could be done in the UK. (Much more feasible in the US, where the land mass spans so many different climates, soil types, etc, that pretty much anything can be produced somewhere.)
5. As someone who cares for the environment and about animal welfare, I would support a law which bans the export and import of live animals except in very tightly controlled circumstances. And - whether we go vegan or not - another law banning the import of unnecessary foodstuffs.
6. How things came about isn't particularly relevant any more, in my view. We are where we are, and we have to get to where we want to be from here. In
my Utopia, where all our meat and plant-based foods are produced ethically and locally, there is a wonderful cycle where we and our animals live synergistically. We provide grass for our cows and sheep, enabling them to fulfill their life goals of producing and rearing young. We take the surplus milk and meat from this equation. Our waste food matter feeds pigs, who similarly live productive, happy lives, and again, surplus comes back to us. We would eat a lot less meat than we do now, but the livestock with whom we share our ground enable us to keep our land in good heart and the acreage in the UK is able to sustainably produce enough for us all.
7. I respect you, messyhoose, as I can clearly see that you practise what you preach, and like myself, you engage in conversation not just to educate but also to learn. Well, I do not do particularly well in practising what I preach when it comes to the plant-based elements of my diet; we produce what we can here, but the ground is exposed, coastal, shallow clay and is really only suited to growing grass! But we are, here, pretty much self-sufficient in beef, lamb/mutton and pork/ham, in milk / dairy, and will be, when we get the chickens reestablished, in eggs. The labour costs to achieve this are insane, and yet we do it anyway, because of our passion in caring for the environment, animal welfare, and living as sustainably as we can.
The world will still have wild animals when all the domestic ones die of old age and are not replaced due to continued breeding
I think we can't know that this is true. The amount of land, and management of that land, needed to grow the plant-based food for the entire world population, may well put just as much if not more pressure on natural habitats and wild creatures.
