Request for advice from animal suffering EAs (and, to a lesser extent, climate EAs?): is there an easy win over getting turkeys from Mary’s Turkeys? (Also, how much should I care about getting the heritage variety?)
Background: I routinely cook for myself and my housemates (all of whom are omnivores), and am on a diet that requires animal products for health reasons. Nevertheless, I’d rather impose fewer costs than more costs on others; I stopped eating chicken and chicken eggs in response to this post and recently switched from consuming lots of grass-finished beef to consuming lots of bison.
I have a general sense that “bigger animals have better lives”, and so it’s better to roast turkeys than roast ducks, for example, but am 1) not clear on the relative impacts of birds and mammals and 2) not clear on turkeys specifically. My sense is that even relatively well-treated chickens have been bred in a way that’s pretty welfare-destroying, but that this hasn’t yet happened to ducks; turkeys are subject to Thanksgiving pressure in the US, tho, which I’m sure has had some effect. The various food impact things that I’ve seen (like foodimpacts.org) don’t seem to address turkeys (or use estimates from ‘similar’ creatures, which feels like too much of a stretch).
I think the counterfactual to roasting a turkey is either smoking the same weight of bison brisket or my housemates cooking themselves the same weight of chicken.
Request for advice from animal suffering EAs (and, to a lesser extent, climate EAs?): is there an easy win over getting turkeys from Mary’s Turkeys? (Also, how much should I care about getting the heritage variety?)
Background: I routinely cook for myself and my housemates (all of whom are omnivores), and am on a diet that requires animal products for health reasons. Nevertheless, I’d rather impose fewer costs than more costs on others; I stopped eating chicken and chicken eggs in response to this post and recently switched from consuming lots of grass-finished beef to consuming lots of bison.
I have a general sense that “bigger animals have better lives”, and so it’s better to roast turkeys than roast ducks, for example, but am 1) not clear on the relative impacts of birds and mammals and 2) not clear on turkeys specifically. My sense is that even relatively well-treated chickens have been bred in a way that’s pretty welfare-destroying, but that this hasn’t yet happened to ducks; turkeys are subject to Thanksgiving pressure in the US, tho, which I’m sure has had some effect. The various food impact things that I’ve seen (like foodimpacts.org) don’t seem to address turkeys (or use estimates from ‘similar’ creatures, which feels like too much of a stretch).
I think the counterfactual to roasting a turkey is either smoking the same weight of bison brisket or my housemates cooking themselves the same weight of chicken.