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I've argued both angles before, and I think reality is somewhere in the middle. Companies produce things because people want those things. But that doesn't mean companies are producing them in the most sustainable way possible. Electricity from coal has a significant difference in emissions if you scrub the flue gas vs if you don't change it at all. We can force companies to be more sustainable while providing their product.

Tyson foods is not what we would consider a " local farmer ". There are many hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of local farmers around the world who do grow and raise animals for market.

Since the guy you responded to mentioned a local farmer, one would assume that he is buying from a smaller probably family farm who are raising animals on a much smaller scale than the feed lots that the big agribusinesses run.

Here are some quotes for you. From holocaust survivors and their relatives.

“I totally embrace the comparison to the Holocaust. I feel that violence and suffering of innocents are unjust. I believe that the abuse of humans and animals and the earth come from the same need to dominate others. I feel that I could not save my family, my people, but each time I talk about cruelty to animals and being vegetarian I might be saving another life. After knowing what I know about the Holocaust and about animal exploitation I cannot be anything else but an animal rights advocate.

-Susan Kalev, who lost her father and her sister in the Holocaust

“I believe in what Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, ‘In their behavior towards creatures, all men are Nazis.’ Human beings see their own oppression vividly when they are the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.” [tweet this]

-“Hacker,” Animal Liberation Front member & Holocaust survivor

“What do they know—all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them [the animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.” [tweet this]

-Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish author, Nobel Laureate, & Holocaust survivor

“I spent my childhood years in the Warsaw Ghetto where almost my entire family was murdered along with about 350,000 other Polish Jews. People sometimes will ask me whether that experience had anything to do with my work for animals. It didn’t have a little to do with my work for animals, it had everything to do with my work for animals.”

-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor

“When I see cages crammed with chickens from battery farms thrown on trucks like bundles of trash, I see, with the eyes of my soul, the Umschlagplatz (where Jews were forced onto trains leaving for the death camps). When I go to a restaurant and see people devouring meat, I feel sick. I see a holocaust on their plates.” [tweet this]

-Georges Metanomski, a Holocaust survivor who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

“I dedicate my mother’s grave to geese. My mother doesn’t have a grave, but if she did I would dedicate it to the geese. I was a goose too.”

-Marc Berkowitz, Animal activist & survivor of Josef Mengele’s “twin experiments”

“In 1975, after I immigrated to the United States, I happened to visit a slaughterhouse, where I saw terrified animals subjected to horrendous crowding conditions while awaiting their deaths. Just as my family members were in the notorious Treblinka death camp. I saw the same efficient and emotionless killing routine as in Treblinka, I saw the neat piles of hearts, hooves, and other body parts. So reminiscent of the piles of Jewish hair, glasses and shoes in Treblinka.”

-Alex Hershaft, Farm Animal Rights Movement founder & Holocaust Survivor

"Jews have been, while animals still are, treated like nothing, as if their lives don’t matter. You can also compare the two holocausts this way. [...] Go to the nearest cow or pig slaughterhouse and remove the animals and replace them with humans. You have now re-created Birkenau."

-Gary Yourosky

The problem is agribusiness. They treat animals with no respect in a terrible a terrible manner, unlike most small-scale farms where the farmers often have a personal relationship with their livestock.

Factory farms whether it be chicken, hog or cattle often end up putting the animals on a feedlot or in a high density chicken farm with literally millions of birds under one roof. This leads to a slaughterhouse that is a horror show. It was a book written a hundred years ago called The jungle, look it up. It's been an issue for a long time and it is inhumane.

It's not to say that killing animals is pretty, but it can be done in a more humane fashion starting by respecting the lives of the animals while they are alive.

The flip side is that if we were to actually close down all of the farms and raise no livestock for me, there's a good chance that these species will functionally go extinct.

I don't care about arguing about veganism. Just stop bringing up stuff like this. Also, do you think calling something a "modern holocaust" is not a comparison in terms of scale of harm? As opposed to every other time those words are used?

Edit: If you want to argue for veganism, stop bringing up Shoah. It's disgusting, downplaying the severity of the genocide, and earns you no favors with the general population. It has negative convincing power.