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Well the dog farmers hang, burn, and beat the shit out of the dogs before they kill them because they believe the fear and adrenaline improves the taste and makes them more tender....so yes I'd say it's worse.

In general, predators like dogs are a very inefficient way to get calories. Cattle, for example, have the benefit of turning stuff like grass that we can't eat into something that we can (meat,) dogs on the other hand, largely tend to eat the same sorts of foods we would, so often we could just eat those foods and cut out the middleman

Now dogs are not totally obligate carnivores, theoretically they can be fed on a vegetarian diet, though it requires some careful planning to ensure they're getting the right nutrients, you can't just turn them loose in a field to eat grass and expect to get much out of it, by and large they're going to need to eat the same sorts of food we'd eat- a variety of fruits and vegetables. They can also possibly fed byproducts, scraps, offal, overripe or damaged produce, etc. that is unfit or less desirable for human consumption, but that still adds a lot of complexity to managing their diet, and if animal products are part of the feed it potentially means you need to worry about spreading disease between animal populations, don't want to be feeding your meat dogs on mad cow brains or avian flu chicken bits.

And as you move up the food chain you can have issues with bioaccumulation of toxins like heavy metals. Say from birth to slaughter a cow absorbs 1oz (pulling that number out of my ass) of lead and mercury and such that ends up in its various tissues. Cows are big, you have to eat a lot of cow to absorb that much lead and mercury from eating them. Now let's say a dog during it's lifetime eats the equivalent of one whole cow (again, pulled out of my ass) during it's lifetime. That dog now has that same 1oz of lead and mercury, and dogs are much smaller so it's at a higher concentration in their meat, you don't have to eat nearly as much dog as you do cow to get the same amount of heavy metals.

I saw an ad on the subway once with a cute cow and a cute dog that said "you wouldn't eat one, so why eat the other?" I ended up having a constructive discussion with a vegan on the train cause I was like "well, we don't eat dogs because they're our pets, but it it came to it, we would". Throughout history, when shit hits the fan, famine, sieges, etc. The dogs are the first to go and be made food.

We've just kind of agreed to kill this one group of animals as opposed to killing all of them. It's horrible but you're never gonna stop humans from eating meat. We just gotta encourage a more humane way to get meat. I'm a vegetarian now, but I know humans are just meat eaters and we can't change that.

I mean, arguably one could make a standard based on animal intelligence. Like, dogs are fairly smart, so one could argue that raising them for meat in farm conditions isn't very ethical, and similarly, farming something like, say, a dolphin, might be even worse if someone was to do that, but then that farming much more simple minded creatures like shrimp, bees, mealworms etc would be much more acceptable. A standard like that still wouldn't reflect well on most animal agriculture though given that most meat animals are mammals and birds, which can be reasonably intelligent, especially pigs to my understanding. Though I suppose the conditions of the farm matter too, like, sheep kept on adequate grazing land for their wool probably don't have too bad a life as far as farm animals go, and it's probably possible if more expensive and less land efficient to get milk and eggs from cows/goats and chickens in a reasonably humane way too, since those products don't inherently require raising the animal just to kill it.

Yes

Because

• it is a predator and thus a huge waste of calories
• It is smart and social
• People generally like dogs

People make a distinction between pets and cattle.