Comment Re:Why did we become so dependant? (Score 1) 453
The trouble is that antibiotics and livestock seems to have allowed the industry to be completely negligent of conditions and the health of their animals.
I often wonder how our economy and society would change if we legislated the humane treatment of food animals.
I would hope that as the price of meat increased the demand for meat would fall accordingly, and that a side effect of that would be decreased land and water usage. Assuming that eating too much meat is bad for you (I don't know whether that's true or not) we might also see a healthier more productive population and reduced healthcare costs too. And of course with humane conditions animals wouldn't require the antibiotics that we're currently feeding them.
If these outcomes came to pass, then treating animals humanely seems like a very cheap price to pay indeed.