Aliens arrive on Earth tomorrow and announce “Your treatment and consumption of your planet’s animal species is unacceptable - you have one of your primitive Earth ‘years’ to stop this mistreatment, or we will intervene and disintegrate all humans. This is not negotiable. Stand by for detailed stipulation of the requirements.”
It turns out they’re want the end of all commercial farming, hunting, fishing etc. Small-scale (i.e. subsistence) hunting/fishing and self-sufficiency style smallholding won’t trip the alarms, as long as it doesn’t rise significantly above current levels.
Let’s say they give us sufficient reason to believe that they are indeed extraterrestrials and that they are sincere in their demand. We don’t know a lot of detail about them or their technology, including their weapons or defences, but the fact that they can cross interstellar space implies technologies advanced beyond ours in at least some ways.
So… what happens next? Do we cut to the chase and interpret this as nothing less than a declaration of war? Do we make some kind of attempt at compliance? Could we even do that, if we wanted to? Do we try, but fail because individuals decide it will be OK for them to take up hunting/fishing, or because of a black market in illicit bacon? Do we just give up the idea as hopeless? Do we just defy them because we were taught to stand up to bullies?
I think an aweful lot of people could keep pet chickens and still come in under the commercial number of chickens in the world. Pretty certain you could do the same with pigs, and perhaps cows [although commercial chicken egging and dairy production theoretically would be ok, as you said vegetarian not vegan]
Frankly, I think we point out that their plan to KILL ALL HUMANS is somewhat in opposition to the idea of treating animal species kindly, and than many species we farm could not and do not exist in the wild. Cows and Chickens are pretty much going to go extinct. Then we try to negotiate from that standpoint. We’ll end commercial ocean fishing, we’ll end certain kinds of farming practices. We’ll negotiate for more time, etc.
This means we return to being a hunter-gatherer society? Getting people in developed nations to work 40 acres and live in poverty while doing so is going to be a challenge, as well as being horribly inefficient
I think the scenario is a bit implausible, but if it did come up, sure, we could switch over. Some societies wouldn’t be sustainable without meat, and we’d have to pay to ship food to them from better vegetable-growing regions, but if the alternative is the destruction of humanity, then it’s a cost we could certainly afford. Which is not, of course, to say that we’d enjoy it: I don’t eat much meat anyway, but no more bacon, ever? That’s a bit harsh.
There was a short story along these lines. Asimov? Clarke? Anyway, the aliens demanded that we give up eating meat before we could join the Galatic Federation. The humans thought about it for a while and told the aliens to get lost.
