Hey, I see that you mentioned me in the OP. Slight hair splitting clarification: I wouldnt say that I have a chicken farm, so much as we have a homestead and that includes right now a flock of twenty chickens. I dint want people to think i have ten thousand chickens crammed into a hangar.

Their space is an area fenced in with four foot page wire field fencing. If I had to estimate, the whole area is maybe seventy by one hundred feet? It has grass, wildflowers, and trees growing in it, and they have a nice wood coop that itself has a small "indoor/outdoor" run portion.

They regularly perch on the fence and can cross to the other side, but usually when they do they just run back and forth trying to find their way back in.

If someone from the ALF were to raid a chicken CAFO and free twenty chickens, they would likely take them to a place like mine where they could have a chicken sanctuary.

This is all to say, they have a pretty sweet life. The vegans get on me about whether or not ill let them live until they die of old age. That, to me, is an absurd guarantee. No one gets that guarantee. And as they are free to fornicate and sit on their eggs, eventually, we would have too high of a chicken population. I have no qualms with eating a bird as they get older. Usually its a rooster, because the rooster to hen ration needs to be about one per ten, or else they oversex the hens and hurt them. Too many roosters also leads to fighting and injuries.

So thats all that.

I personally was a vegetarian and then vegan for a combined ten years. As i started transitioning to a homestead lifestyle and was learning backwoods skills, are started eating eggs from my own birds, and meat that i had some hand in killing and preparing. I personally wanted to move away from dependence upon industrial society and the commodification of the living earth.

Being a vegan in a modern sense means eating a lot of legumes and grains (which i dont think are that good for people, outside of providing raw calories) which are farmed by massive agricultural giants using huge amounts of fossil fuels. The regions farmed were once forests, prairies, and wetlands, and the destruction of those ecosystems is doom to the wild life that lives there, as well as doom for the climate as those places are no longer sequestering carbon.

Of course, most modern meat eaters are eating fast food and feedlot beef. That shit is awful and needs to go. But it is possible to hunt, fish, dumpster dive meat, eat roadkill, or raise animals yourself and thus eat meat without supporting the industry.

Consumer choices are not the way to alter the realities of civilization. I never fly on a plane, and airlines are still up and running. I dont buy Nikes, but the sweatshops still operate. Direct, organized action is the way to make changes. Consumer choices are a way to feel at peace with oneself int he meantime.