As Ven rightly points out, the more varied the farm, the better the habitat for all forms of life - wild or not!
As to the ethics of the amount of food need to produce meat and the ethics involved too - the real burden of conscious then lies with you the consumer. If consumers were prepared to pay a fair price for milk and meat, then farmers wouldn't be forced to cut corners.
I thoroughly agree we need to be more restrictive in the amount and quality of the meat we eat. And more selective. If you want to end cruel farming methods, then don't buy poultry or eggs that are factory farmed, don't buy imported meats of any kind, ensure that the British meat you do buy is traceable and produced by a FABBL member (Farm Assured British Beef and Lamb) - as these farms are regularly inspected and have to conform to good farming practices and standards.
Not sure if Tom's referring to me or not with his last sentence but my laptop is currently languising in a data recovery shop in London, having suddenly decided to have a catastrophic failure last Monday. I am currently awaiting the news as to whether or not they can recover my data. As I am Month 11 of Payroll and month 10 of our financial year, plus I have several year's worth of data on Word, Excel, Outlook etc etc, you can imagine that I haven't exactly had a lot of time on here.... Yes, I do have a back up to four weeks ago for Sage Financial but not the other stuff.... Too used to, when working in our head office, to dumping everything on the main servers and since working from home for past two years, have not had that luxury.... Stupid, basically!
