Using Flash for Good instead of Evil: animal cruelty edition

Via Ezra Klein, a striking Flash movie that illustrates just how many animals are slaughtered in the United States--per second. They are some fairly nauseating numbers, and the animal rights folks were wise to convert them into visceral (read: human-understandable) form.

Incidentally, I think a lot of good would result if we passed some serious animal cruelty laws. Besides adhering to a moral imperative, such regulations would likely have the effect of reducing the efficiency of slaughtering animals, thus raising their cost. And this would cause people to eat less meat, which would make them far more healthy, and reduce healthcare costs.

Next we could eliminate farm subsidies, which would further increase the cost of meat because cattle feed would no longer be subsidized. It would also improve the quality of meat, because currently cattle are fed a significant amount of corn (because it is subsidy-cheap) which makes cattle sick, but which is still fed to them because the cost of pumping them full of antibiotics is still less than the cost of not feeding them cheap corn. So we'd be getting our meat from healthier animals.

Oh, and also, there would be a significant ecological benefit if there were less demand for cattle, because raising cattle results in a whole lot of deforestation and consumes lots of resources in terms of all the grain that has to be grown to feed them (not to mention the whole cow-farts global warming thing).

So really, it would be a win-win-win-win-win-win policy.

(Disclaimer: despite my grandstanding, I have yet to put my morals where my mouth is and reduce or eliminate my consumption of meat in a principled way. I do, though, have various rules that result in the reduction of meat consumption (esp. beef), and a strict prohibition on fast food beef.)