I had to stop (though I may resume later) at "People who buy less meat don't really spend less money on food overall, they mainly just spend more money on other non-meat food" -- it made me go "are you fucking kidding me" and wonder whether he has ever been to a supermarket. See also this -- differences in retail prices aren't quite that extreme, but that's because governments subsidize meat production, so even though not all of the money comes out of meat eaters' pockets, it still comes out of somewhere. EDIT: I finished reading it, and... if I didn't know who Hanson was and he had posted somewhere that allowed readers to comment, I would definitely conclude he was trolling. Along with things that others have already pointed out, “per land area, farms are more efficient at producing "higher" animals like pigs and cows” -- where the hell did he take that from? Pretty much everyone I've ever read about this topic agrees that growing food for N people on a mostly vegetarian diet requires way less land, energy, and water than growing food for N people on a largely meat-based diet, and there's a thermodynamic argument that makes that pretty much obvious. (I do agree that “meat eaters kill animals” isn't a terribly good argument because if it wasn't for meat eaters those animals wouldn't have lived in the first place (but that doesn't apply to hunting and fishing); but that's nowhere near one of the main reasons why I limit my consumption of meat.)

I think that would be true, assuming you have no additional reasons for opposing cannibalism. Personally, I have no moral opposition to the idea of eating babies, but I suspect that baby farming would cause much more distress to the general population than the food it would produce would justify. I don't agree with Hanson's position in that essay though. To take an excerpt: [...] How does he claim to know that? It's not as if he can extrapolate from the fact that they don't kill themselves. Factory farmed animals are in no position to commit suicide, regardless of whether they want to or not. And even if a farm animal's life is pure misery, it probably doesn't have the abstract reasoning abilities to realize that ending its own life, thereby ending the suffering, is a possible thing. He compares the life of a farmed animal to a worker who has to fight traffic to spend their time working in a cubicle, but an office worker has leisure time, probably a family to spend time with, and enough money to make them willing to work at the job in the first place. I think the abused child in Omelas is a better basis for comparison.