Calm down, I wasn't disagreeing with you lol it takes a long time for cultural change you are aiming for to happen, I was just saying it has already started to have an effect, the work people have been doing over the past few decades has shaped opinions, to the point where it is reflected on supermarket shelves, where farmers are thinking about the welfare of the animals over profit. It isn't perfect, it isn't the big win but you can't change the world overnight. It is change, and a step in the right direction. I didn't mean to upset you, I wasn't meaning all the goals have been met, just that you can see the effects already, there is a lot more to come. Shopping anywhere that sells meat is supporting the trade, and in the past few years, we have got a vegan shop in town, there is finally the demand there. Slowly but surely, the tide is turning. We are a long way from your plant based world still but it isn't the distant reality it once was. I am not totally vegan yet, but I won't go into that, although I am by no means uninformed on the topic having seen most things in person - it does seriously impact my choices, I eat a lot of vegan meat alternatives, I don't eat anything from the ocean, avoid dairy as much as I can and always try to buy locally sourced produce or grow my own.

I have no intention of killing or getting rid of my pet chickens when they stop laying. The fact they lay eggs has nothing to do with them being pets or not, they are more ornamental breeds, so they don't lay all the time anyway. I do sell the eggs, but the money just goes on extra chicken treats. We take them to the vet, and pay the huge bills, we wouldn't disown them for not laying! The farm we got these four from also sold the males to people as pets, they are garden breeds, the lady who had the farm didn't sell eggs commercially, she just enjoyed having chickens around. I spent weeks looking into local places that sold chickens to find somewhere that wasn't breeding and selling for profit.

In terms of being able to live entirely off the land in the UK, where you can't grow the same crops as you can worldwide, eating chicken eggs has protein based benefits. Chickens can genuinely have a better life as pets than they could in the wild, they rarely do but that doesn't make it impossible. Long term, we hope to be able to build our own eco off grid homestead, where we can grow most of our food and produce our own electricity, reducing our carbon emissions as much as possible. We have talked about the possibility of other animals, we already have a rabbit, and again, she can more space, a better diet and a very happy life roaming around the house and garden. I do agree to some extent on the 'human purposes' - it is hard to know where to draw the line on it, I find it hard to have the heart to turn my back on so many species, they survived in the wild before us, but we have taken their wild. I am pro humanity, but I can't deny the good that there being a lot less of us would do nature.