Comment by pjerem

People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them.

Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.

It didn't stop me and my family. (Chicken katsu is still one of my favorites dishes.) To be sure, we did not eat our own chickens (just their eggs). Somehow we were able to still mentally distance ourselves from ours and "the others".

I was living in San Jose in a dense suburban neighborhood. It became legal to have backyard chickens so I jumped at getting three chickens. (We had three young daughters, see.)

One mysteriously died. Of the remaining two, the bossy one decided she was a rooster and started crowing, of a sort, in the morning hours.

So we had one asshole neighbor complain and I was obliged to send them off to live with a friend who had some property in the Santa Cruz mountains. Sad. And afterward, neighbors strolling by said they missed the chicken sounds in the neighborhood.

I'll spare you the unfortunate ends for the two. I'll say the Santa Cruz mountains represent more predators and require someone with a little more responsibility than my friend showed. (I don't blame him. It was really my fault — having more or less dumped them on him.)

I have grown up with chickens through out my childhood and I strongly disagree with that take. If anything, it makes it more reasonable to eat chicken given that backyard hens are more sustainable and more natural than processed food bought in the store. Chickens reproduce at a very fast pace, and it is not like one is going to eat the oldest and nicest ones.

It does however makes factory farmed animals much less fun to eat, both in term of taste and the knowledge of how much better backyard hens has it. It is like buying clothes manufactured from countries with less-than-stellar working environment.

Some people get used to it. We did some work to prepare our barn for chickens but never quite 'pulled the trigger' because between our tenants and other friends we are swimming in eggs. (It was funny as hell that some of our chicken-keeping friends had a fox family living in a stump in front of their house. Their chicken house was solid but they'd catch the mama fox on the game camera every night bringing home a chicken from somebody else's flock every night.)

Our favorite meat lately has been roadkill deer. Two days ago a friend was traveling to a job site up route 89 on the side of the lake when they hit a deer. He called us on his cell but we didn't want to drive that far that day. The next day my wife was planning to drive out in that direction to help a friend, the friend welched out but she went to see if the deer was still there, it was, so she loaded it into the back of our Honda Fit and I was told, when she picked me up at the bus stop, to stash all my stuff with me in the passenger seat.

Turned out the intestines didn't splatter, it was cold, and there wasn't serious tissue damage from the crash so we're going to get a huge amount of meat out of it. Between roadkill deer and deer my son hunts and deer other people hunt on our land we might need to get a bigger freezer.

My aunt names all her chickens. She will also grab one and twist its head of with her bare hands while carrying on a casual conversation with you.

I’m from a rural area. I have formative memories of raising caring for and slaughtering animals. Hunting and fishing, literally put food on the table. I don’t remember anyone complaining that the chicken in the gumbo came from the yard.

I told the kids not to name the roosters, but we eat them regardless. Once again, humans excel at holding contradictory thoughts.

The only reason we don't eat dogs or cats is because they don't taste good. Predators don't make for good eating. They have to work too hard physically for their food. It makes their meat tough.

That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.

I don’t know, farmers always had dogs on the farm but they didn’t eat them and continued to eat the chickens. Chicken is really great and succulent. Hard to resist frying one of them up and sucking the meat off the bone. Absolutely no desire to do that with a dog.

> More people will start to find...

...that roosters are total assholes.

There's room for exactly one in the flock, and I have no emotional difficulty turning the rest into stew. The "chickens are cute" narrative only works in a carefully curated frame.

> More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.

Why do you think that people abjuring consumption of emotionally observable animals is more likely that the opposite: growing an acceptance of eating other sentient beings as part of the cycle of life?

Have chickens and they are dumber than fish. Have no qualms about eating them.

Considering the bizarro world we're now living it, I wouldn't put it beyond us for it to go the other way.

If people realise they are still comfortable eating intelligent emotional animals like chickens, the dogs and cats of this world should watch their backs!

Given people grew animals for eating for centuries and generally were more cruel to them then we are , I doubt.

Wait until we find out how intelligent broccoli is.

I don't eat sunflower-seeds, as sunflowers murder one another by throwing shade.

My understanding is that birds are about as intelligent as mammals.

Funny I know some people who grew up with chickens who think they are nasty, aggressive and disagreeable. Like little dragons.