"Boycott KFC (Kentucky Fried Cruelty)"

[The Forms]

I don't think it's ok to kill as many as we want. But there is nothing wrong with killing as many as are needed to feed people

Again, the issue isn't entirely the killing of the animals, it's the conditions in which the animals are kept prior to their deaths. That's the central issue in a lot of this.

Now, as far as killing only so many as are needed to feed people, the argument can be made that we don't need to kill ANY in order to feed people.
Being that people can get by living a healthy lifestyle without eating animals, how do we justify the mistreatment and killing of them?

And I think it's perfectly valid to point out that animals dying in a field for nothing is far worse than a cow being slaughtered to put food on people's tables, regardless of their quality of life

These field animals are dying to put food on our tables too. Isn't that most of your argument? That these animals die so the vegetarians can eat their vegetables? So they're not dying for nothing. They are actually dying for the exact same purpose as the food animals. Granted, we don't eat their flesh, yet their death is no MORE senseless than the cow being put to slaughter.

The next step you might make here is to equate, then, the slaughter of the field animals with the factory farmed animals (in terms of moral blame to PETA). But that doesn't really work because most of the argument peta has is about quality of life. A chicken that has been used to produce eggs until it can't move and then killed for it's meat is much worse than a rabbit who has led a fully rabbit life and was killed by a combine.

 

[ConantheLibertarian]

We can live without harvesting wheat, right? But we do that, and as a result animals die. But I guess there is no other way around harvesting wheat, just as there is no way around butchering animals for food. It can be readily argued that you can live a healthy lifestyle without meat. It depends on what your definition of "healthy" is. It can also be argued we can live without wheat, so then how can we justify grinding up field animals so wheat can be harvested? As a matter of fact, we've been eating meat a lot longer than we've been eating wheat.

I suppose I agree that the chicken is worse off than the rabbit, and the deaths of the field animal and the farm animal are no more senseless than each other, since there no way around either of their deaths. Obviously the chicken's death is worsened by its poor quality of life. I support any responsible and well intended means to improve these animal's lives before death. As for moral culpability, they are all about improving animal's lives, why not do something for those field animals? Because they're not suffering before they're unwittingly killed?