We're all just going to die eventually anyway. Why do we bother going to all the trouble of reducing our own pain and suffering in life? Once you've done your job and produced the next generation and seen them well on their way, might as well off yourself and stop hogging resources that they could be using.
We evolved to be omnivores. Consumption of meat helped give us the necessary energy boost to develop our bizarrely large brains. We've still got a taste for it, and living without it isn't terribly easy from the nutrient side of things.
If we're going to go ahead with raising animals for the purpose of an early death for meat, we could at least grant them some of the things we typically want for ourselves, like a life with as little suffering as can reasonably be given, and a painless and quick death.
Something along these lines was discussed in a philosophy class:
If you were to torture someone, but then do something to the person's brain so that they would not remember it, has harm been done?
Once memory of the event is gone, one might say there is no harm.
But for the person who is there in the present, enduring unimaginable pain, that future does not matter in the slightest.
That's what we have today: A lot of people who exist in the present, wishing to reduce pain or suffering when they encounter it, but they still face the inevitable termination of their own existence. Once that occurs, awareness stops, and thus one's pain can no longer exist since it cannot be perceived. So given that, what would be the harm in torturing someone to death?
If we're going to retain the carnivorous side of our biology, can't we at least grant the animals we eat a little bit of the benefit of the millions of years of evolutionary progress we have over them? At least show a shred of benevolence toward them.
http://www.upc-online.org/experimentation/experimentalConclusion.htm
http://www.wired.com/2012/02/headless-chicken-solution/
The Headless Chicken Solution
Another scenario is getting rid of the birds’ heads. In 1993, Robert Burruss wrote an essay in The Baltimore Sun in which he predicted that the future of chicken and egg production will include birds “beheaded and hooked up en masse to industrial-scale versions of the heart-lung machines.” Since these birds won’t move, cages will be obsolete. Nutrients, hormones and metabolic stimulants will be fed “in superabundance into mechanically oxygenated blood to crank up egg production.” Since no digestive tract will be needed, “it can go when the head goes, along with the heart and lungs and the feathers, too. The naked headless, gutless chicken will crank out eggs till its ovaries burn out. When a sensor senses that no egg has dropped within the last four or six hours, the carcass will be released onto a conveyer, chopped, sliced, steamed and made into soup, burgers and dogfood” (Burruss).
Interesting. (Also....I'm pretty sure I had this idea back in middle school, except for cows.)
No brain, no pain.
Ford argues that his solution is no more shocking than existing food-production techniques. “The realities of the existing systems of production are just as shocking,” he told Wired.co.uk, “but they are hidden behind the sentimental guise of traditional farming scenes that we as consumers hold in our minds and see on our food packaging.”
True. You see commercials or shows with farmers holding a healthy chicken, or looking at a roomy pasture of livestock.
You don't normally see food commercials that show things like
chicken harvesters.