First of all, I do not want to help the meat industry in any ways to increase their sales. However, I'm convinced that they work very hard to influence people to use more animal products, and not to trust info from vegan or vegetarian sources -in hidden ways.
The leaders of the tobacco industry tried to make us believe that they didn't consider nicotine addictive. The sugar industry is working hard against WHO/UN an others to fight the increasing negativity against sugar.
The meat industry is a special case. It's more brutal. Their profits come from killing animals, not selling plants (as the sugar and tobacco indutry does). Yet, we see rather few direct attempts from the meat industry to fight the veggie movement. They might understand that it wouldn't help much if they would, as represents for the killing industry, recommend people to eat more meat instead of increasing their intake of plants, as most other health experts recommend.
If they can't indluence, in the open, they must do it indirectly.
If I were to "save" the meat industry, I would think the best way to do so in the long run, was to try to do it in two parallel steps:
1) Influence the vegetarian and vegan movement in various ways not to be so concerned about the ethics of killing, but rather focus on how animals are treated, with focus on the worst cases.
2) Simultanously, I'd cooperate with or fund reform organisations that want to improve the factory farm industry, promote "humane" slaughtering, and make them look like support networks for animal farms.
If the factory farmers understand that the way they treat animals will get more and more negative attention, even from the meat eating Average Joe, they just have to improve anyway. If you can't fight them, why not join them?
If the meat industry will manage to change the focus in the vegan movement away from respect for life and respect for animals, towards certain ways of treating/killing animals, along with factory farm reforms, they would be able to reduce the growth of the veggie movement a lot.
If they, in 10-15 years from now could tell you anout all improvements factory farming has gone through, and at the same time managed to convert the veggie movement into a followers of some twisted kind of ethics which accepts killing but not harming, they'd still make a lot of money.
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