I was directly responding to the previous commenter saying that it's natural to hunt and eat. Our current system of industrial farming of animals is inhumane for both animals and farmers. Nature might be unforgiving and metal, but we have brought the unnecessary torture of sentient animals to unholy levels.

That's what I meant with my comment.

What is natural?

There are certain ecological balances that develop over time, as species fill individual niches and create symbiotic bonds. The capacity for the given biome to support life is predicated on a certain cyclical exchange. And when that cycle is broken, you typically see a die-off caused by the imbalances.

This notion that nature isn’t cruel and unforgiving is just a fairytale.

The question isn't of cruelty but sustainability. The mouse eats the corn. The snake eats the mouse. The bird eats the snake. The parasite eats the bird. The corn eats the corpses.

But if you go through with a weed wacker and kill all the snakes, you get population spikes on one end of the food chain and collapses on others, in a way that ultimately reduces the amount of life the area can support.

We saw this across the American Great Plains with the extermination of buffaloes and passenger pigeons. What was once lush and bountiful became barren and inhospitable, as industrial scale destruction of natural resources rendered territory uninhabitable. Reckless industrial development produces waste faster than the natural ecological conditions can process it. And this same development siphons off the natural bounty faster than it can be replaced.

Our food production needs to do better and be better but it will only do so because of us, not because we “listen to nature”

If we do not understand why certain natural cycles exist or how certain minerals and molecules are naturally derived and regenerated or what energy sources are available and at what rates, we risk exhausting the existing biological landscape and destroying the capacity for a particular piece of territory to sustain new life in future generations.

This is as simple as looking at the Great Lakes or the Ogallala Aquifer or the Mississippi River and asking "Is there going to be enough water in these places in another 100 years to maintain our productive rate of agricultural development?" And at the current rate we're exhausting these resources, the answer is no.

If we hadn't brought in so many thirsty commercial scale animal and plant species or attempted to generate such large surpluses that we could export them overseas at enormous profits or raised the temperature of the Earth such that we evaporated off too much surface water, we would not be in this situation.

trying to sound enlightened

You don't need to be a guru to look at the Earth and look at Mars, then say to yourself "Maybe we keep the Earth-style ecology going a little longer".

Unnatural doesn't mean supernatural. Words have meanings. Do you also go around saying synthetic materials are aktshually natural?

Tigers eat meat. Its part of nature.

But people don't like being eaten. So they complain about tigers and try to get rid of them.

This logic checks out, however I do wonder if that's actually how it happens in practice. As in, what percentage of their feed is grown somewhere that we absolutely can't grow human food.

Please don't present this as the norm for animal agriculture, as it's disingenuous at best. The rare instances where this occurs are far outweighed by the habitable land use that animal agriculture accounts for globally. And even in the countries you call out, such as New Zealand, factory farming is on the rise, and pigs are almost exclusively factory farmed.

Thanks, but I believed you that he said it, I was asking for any sort of source to back it up. The argument he makes in that interview is terrible and should in no way inform your opinion unless you have actual evidence to back it up.