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Once in awhile I experience such thoughts because I am aware that animal cruelty exists in the world. I prefer to purchase meats and other animal products produced in a humane manner, and doing so helps relieve any guilt pangs I might be feeling.
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Would I be able to kill and animal for dinner? Yes absolutely - I have done it. I don’t enjoy it, I try to be as quick and humane as possible, but it’s not a pleasant job. Butchering is also a nasty, bloody, tedious chore that I do not enjoy. Those two facts have a lot to do with why I’m happy to purchase meat and other animal products already processed as needed and packaged, but it’s a convenience, not a necessity.
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Due to my food allergies, including to some common legumes as well as several vegetables, eating an adequate diet even as a loosely defined vegetarian would be difficult, I’m not sure it’s possible for me to be vegan AND healthy on a long-term basis. I’m not going to kill myself over making an ethical point with my diet. That doesn’t mean I eat meat every day - I don’t - but getting sufficient protein on a plant-based diet with most legumes off limits would be pretty hard to do. So I continue to consume moderate (meaning, less frequently than daily) amounts of meat. I might be able to go ovo-lacto vegetarian long term, but that still leaves me dependent on animal-derived foods.
He’s not wrong. And you should think about why you find his comments upsetting. You can be an omnivore at the top of the food chain and still experience some internal conflict in killing (or contributing to industrialized slaughter) of animals.
Well, no, not for this omnivore.
For example, I can’t support eating endangered species, or species that could easily become endangered if they’re frequent menu items. That’s the reason I stopped eating shark. I can’t support eating turtles, either, given how long it takes for them to mature to eating size. I certainly support limits on bluefin tuna consumption. So on and so forth.
I don’t have an issue with eating species that have become overpopulated to the point of being a pest. If locusts are eating your crops then as far as I’m concerned eating locusts in turn is acceptable. If there are too many deer (usually due to past elimination of their predators) in an area I support culling them, as it’s more kind than a slow death from starvation or overcrowding disease, and in that case we might as well eat them, too.
If we are going to raise animals for food they need to be raised, housed, and slaughtered with as little cruelty, pain, fear, and distress as possible. This will, of course, raise the cost of such food items but that’s not all bad - on average the world’s omnivores eat more meat than they probably should be eating. Meat consumption should be moderate (that is, less than once a day) and the human diet mostly plant-based. If meat became more of an infrequent, special-occasion food item the average human might be healthier in the long run.
I don’t think the way animals are raised and slaughtered is all that cruel. Certainly there are occasional abuses/mistakes/people who should know better, but it isn’t at all common AFAICT.
Harold the Clever Sheep isn’t a real thing. Yes, their life consists of standing around for a couple of months, and then bein’ et. In the wild, their life would consist of running away from predators, probably not for much longer overall, and then starving/dying of disease/bein’ et by predators anyway. It’s a quick death, and I doubt that a cow or a chicken or a pig or a turkey spends its life yearning for higher things.
The “point” of evolution, to the extent there is one, is to reproduce the species. Cows and chickens and pigs and so forth are, by that measure, highly successful. Not by choice - they have been domesticated, which means they have been bred/forced into a semi-symbiotic, semi-parasitical relationship with another highly successful species. It’s not to their benefit, but that is besides the point of evolution.
Should we be better than the animals? We already are, for the most part. We eat what we kill, and we are generally careful not to cause un-necessary suffering.
Guy buys a parrot, because it can speak eleven languages. He takes the parrot home and puts it in a cage, and goes off to work.
When he gets back home, he finds his wife has killed, plucked, and roasted the parrot.
“What the heck did you do? That parrot could speak eleven languages!”
“Well”, says his wife, “why didn’t it say something?”
Same thing. If they don’t want me to eat them, speak now or forever hold your peace.
Regards,
Shodan
I think that, if food animals are being treated inhumanely, the proper response isn’t for me to personally boycott the animal-abusers. I can’t track everything I eat through every stage of production, and I certainly can’t expect everyone to. The proper response is to tighten up the animal cruelty laws.
And I expect that I probably could kill animals myself to eat them, but I choose not to. There are a lot of things that I could choose to do myself but don’t. I have no more qualms about paying someone else to do my butchery for me than I do about paying someone else to do vehicle maintenance for me.
Not the same thing at all. Nothing dies when you pay someone to change your oil.
Oh, god. I have butchered every manner of wild edible (not to me) beastie in the forest and waters around here. Mr.Wrekker is a successful hunter.
I have raised beasties to be a food source on this farm.
And I have killed many for my dinner.
Do I feel bad about it? Nope.
I’d still rather my protein come from the grocery store with a nice USDA purple stamp on it.
I, as a human, am on the top of the food chain. I have no guilt about that fact.
curious what led you to assume I found the comments “upsetting.”
If the question were me eating meat vs. me not eating meat, that would be relevant. But that’s not the question I was addressing there. The question I was addressing there was me killing my own meat vs. eating meat that someone else had killed. In either of those two scenarios, the number of animals dying is the same.
“Proselytizing”, is rarely a complementary way to describe someone’s opinion. But if you did not mean it in a negative way, I apologize for the mis-characterization.
I’m guessing that if people had to kill and process animals themselves, the overall consumption of meat would be dramatically reduced. Having someone else do it for us makes us much less aware of the real impact. But I digress and stand corrected on your overall point.
Characterizing vegans as objectionable or annoying is a common way of dealing with one’s cognitive dissonance.
I don’t think it’s ethically wrong, per se, to kill another living being for food. Every animal exists in an environment where there are things that can, and eventually will, kill it; none, not even a human, is guaranteed to only die from ripe old age. From an animal’s point of view, we’re part of the dangers of its environment, and that’s not inherently bad or good.
Furthermore, any diet you’re on is going to reduce resources for other living beings, and hence, lead to some manner of suffering. Arable land resources are probably close to maxed out, at least the easily accessible ones; going further would require either conversion of land resources, risking displacement and loss of habitat to species inhabiting that land, or exploiting existing resources more efficiently, through utilization of genetic engineering and modern farming practices. Mice are killed by farm equipment, and the nitrogen needed to fertilize soil comes, for organic farming, often from manure—i. e., is an animal byproduct.
On the other hand, grass-fed beef essentially extracts nutrients from land that might not be usable for farming, thus increasing the sustainable population; you can get perhaps 200 kg of usable meat from a well-fed cow, and even the average US carnivore only eats about 125 kg, so you’d hardly need to kill a single animal per year to support your meat habit, while on the rough half acre of farmland needed to feed a single person, somewhere between three and 20 rodents are killed.
To a Jain, a vegan eating a potato is willingly risking harm to all kinds of small organisms living in the soil, and hence, committing an atrocity. Me, I’m much more troubled by the fact that the cobalt in the battery of my cell phone was mined under essentially slavery-like conditions, often by children.
These hastily-googled numbers and factoids don’t finally establish anything. But that’s the point: there’s no simple right or wrong answer to whether eating meat is right or wrong. We each draw a line between what we think is OK to eat and what’s not, to the best of our ability; but there isn’t really any hard-and-fast objective criterion to decide where that line ought to be, and anybody who claims there is is either kidding themselves or simply mistaken.
Living an ethical life is a complex optimization problem, and which of your (limited) resources to expend where a question that’s not answered by some simple, slogan-like principle. Me, I’ve recently severely cut back on meat—albeit mostly for climate-related reasons. Am I doing the right thing with that? I can’t pretend to know; I arrived at this decision by collating the available information on the topic to the best of my abilities, but any full and exhaustive review far exceeds my time and capabilities. I know that this won’t win me any moral high ground, but if there is a golden path leading to a moral standing such that I can preach the right life to my fellow humans, I haven’t found it yet.
I don’t know it would make all that much difference. It does not seem to me that farmers and packing house workers are more likely to be vegetarians than anyone else. I suspect one would just get used to it. I assisted my father the veterinarian in euthanizing animals, and it didn’t bother me after a rather short while. Granted we didn’t eat the dead dog.
Of course, specialization is efficient. I would rather pay $5 a pound for meat and leave the slaughter and processing to somebody else, instead of spending twenty minutes a day on average doing it myself. Not because I am squeamish - it’s just easier. And more efficient, due to comparative advantage. It’s more efficient for me to spend my time working in IT and outsource the slaughter to someone else. Because then society in general gets the benefit of my IT work, even if I could my own butchering. Because I am more productive doing IT, overall.
Regards,
Shodan
Could be. Or, you know, sometimes people are actually just annoying, be it about dietary habits or politics or religion or workout routines or their great new MLM opportunity or whatever. Can’t all be “cognitive dissonance”.
Meh. There certainly are some vegans who obsessively talk about their diet, and use it as a way to place themselves above those around them. But that’s a vanishingly small number of vegans IME. Most vegans maintain their diet quietly.
For myself, I definitely acknowledge that my meat-eating is unethical. But I lack the willpower to return to vegetarianism, and the times I’ve gone vegan–including one time where I really tried to watch my diet–did not turn out well at all.
I can live with being a sinner.
Well said, this is exactly my take on it also. I count myself lucky to live in an area and era where informed choice becomes easier. In many cases, I can now weigh my own resources (time, money, ethics) against the impacts of my choices. I am personally able to steer myself away from imported mass-factory ethically dubious production into locally sourced and ethically raised meat and dairy. Otherwise, I’m not going to spend hours of my time researching which distribution stream, farm, and conditions each separate object in my shopping cart may have come from prior to purchasing.
That’s really dependent on the definition of ‘their benefit’. In terms of surviving and propagating the species, domestication is a GREAT benefit- look at dogs, for example. Millions more dogs than there would be otherwise, with humans ensuring their survival and continuance. Same for cattle, with the exception that we deliberately kill a large percentage of them for food. But the fact remains that there are more cattle and that we’re actively sustaining and propagating the species. The same goes for plant species too- how much wild barley would there be vs. the domesticated kind?
I doubt it, except for the increase inefficiency. I’ve never killed anything to eat it. Well, I take that back, I’ve killed fish and insects to eat them, but not mammals. But I had a job where I had to kill mice and rats, and I’ve dissected whole animals (rabbits, that sort of thing) and while killing is extremely unpleasant, so are lots of things that I have much less moral qualms about. For instance, getting my kids vaccinated, and having their blood tested for lead were extremely unpleasant. And I sort of enjoy butchering and dissecting animals, I have no problem with that end of it.
If we had to chop down our own trees and make our own chairs, a lot more of us would be sitting on the floor – but not out of compassion for the trees.