Comment by crazygringo 2 days ago
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.
I grew up buying meat and never seeing farms. About 7 years ago, I helped my sister/BIL raise a flock from hatchling to food. We did everything.
Having actually slaughtered and butchered chickens I raised, I'd rather raise my own. I know the chickens I raised had a better life and death than factory farmed chickens.
Put another way: If 99% of the animals you see on a day to day basis are pets and not livestock, it's hard to not think of all animals as potential pets instead of resources.
Very true. Just like when slaves were commonplace, it was 'normalised' and many people just turned a blind eye.
Everything biological is going to be eaten. Your dog or cat would eat you if you were dead and they were hungry enough. I am not saying we shouldn't evolve past eating meat, it would be great for the environment. But to say that one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical is an indictment of nature.
I think the problem with this argument is the assumption that nature is inherently good. Nature is cruel and uncaring. Moving beyond it is a good thing imo. We’re just lucky that as a species by the roll of the dice we were given the power by nature to usurp it.
I agree with you but think you miss that the common concern is with the farming process. The fact to eat another animal usually comes as
- a shortcut : “I don’t eat animals” instead of “I avoid encouraging the farming process by consuming the product of those farms: […]”
- and/or a following philosophic stance, that seems logical (debatable) when someone avoid encouraging the farming process.
Few are the vegans that claims that an animal eating another animal is not natural, or that they cats wouldn’t eat them in the condition you describe (which to be honest, rarely happens).
There are plenty of great moral arguments for why animals (or humans) shouldn't be eaten unless they died of purely natural causes. Factory farming is just the strongest to argue against and the main source of both suffering and death, so it's what people focus on. If factory farming were abolished overnight, vegans and vegetarians would (rightly) immediately move onto hunting and small farms.
(I personally think there's nothing wrong with home/farm egg laying as long as the animals are taken care of well and the male ones aren't killed. That's why I'm vegetarian rather than vegan.)
This seems like a category error. We don't typically assign moral agency to animals the same way we do to humans. No one is saying "one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical." Some people are saying it is unethical for humans, who we typically do believe have moral agency, to eat other animals. Just as no one would say it is unethical for a snake to kill someone with its venom, but we would say it is unethical for a human inject someone with snake venom in order to kill them.
What's wrong with indicting nature? Male animals regularly rape female animals. We shouldn't hold animals morally culpable, as they aren't moral agents, but humans are moral agents. There is no human act in this world for which "this is commonplace in nature" is a moral defense.
Nature can be harsh and cruel indeed.
I think we agree the term “natural” should almost always be questioned and unpacked. It often serves as a rhetorical device instead of a nugget of wisdom.
Dismissing an idea solely for being “unnatural” is premature. Or vice versa.
At the same time, there is wisdom in being curious about weirdness that seems nonsensical. Some weird things have a backstory and even rationale that is non-obvious. Or maybe their benefit is subtle or hidden to those who only look narrowly. (Chesterton’s Fence)
Slight topic shift, but conceptually related: I hope the slash and burn “reformers” we’re seeing have the humility to recognize that institutional knowledge is diffused in ways they do not understand as outsiders. It doesn’t grow back quickly. Just because Chaos Monkey works at Netflix doesn’t mean it works for Congressionally-authorized government agencies. Rapid destruction can be far worse than measured reprioritization.
I get it though — as a programmer I sometimes prefer to throw out a previous code base and start a-fresh, and this can help with clearing out technical debt. Such a rewrite is risky though, as is well known. Besides, technical abstractions are often orthogonal to domain knowledge and expertise.
The people who think meat comes from a magic meat factory are blind.
Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life. The constant meat eater trolling about how its natural to eat meat and animals do it, ignore the fact that its not natural to keep animals in pens where they cant turn around for their entire life that is basically pure torture from birth to death.
If all meat was produced the way it was farmed 100 years ago, youd see way less vegans.
Peter Singer makes this argument in Animal Liberation, one of the seminal works on modern animal ethics. One of Singer's points is that it's ethical to eat animals so long as they are raised and killed in a way to minimize suffering.
IMO everyone should read it, regardless of your stance on eating animals.
I mean, it can be both.
Factory farming has been around for more than 100 years. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906.
The meat industry has done a pretty good job keeping the horrors of slaughter houses out of the public eye, especially in the days before almost everyone was walking around with a video recorder in their pocket.
I'm sure exposure to what's really involved in modern meat production has increased the popularity of veganism, but veganism has been around for at least a thousand years.
Were that the case, you’d see vegans advocating for eating classically-husbanded animals. But I for one have never seen such a thing. And when I’ve spoken with vegans about this very topic, they’ve insisted that no animal can possibly be raised/slaughtered humanely – the belief seems almost axiomatic to them.
This conflates animal rights with animal welfare. The vegans who are motivated by the latter might do as you suggest. But a strict interpretation of animal rights means respecting the right to live. This underpins religious vegetarianism too.
Still other vegans are motivated by concerns about the environment. For them too, "classical husbandry" will not be a winning argument. If anything the opposite, since it requires more land.
As I read their message, the point is that non-meat eaters have more problems with the unethical ways to farms than the killing itself or the process to eat another animal. Those two last points may be used in punchlines but if you discuss with the speaker you’ll ear way more about the raising condition that the instant they animal is killed.
> Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life.
But definitionally a vegetarian is someone who abstain from eating meat period, regardless of the source. Someone can avoid eating unethically sourced meat but still eat ethically sourced meat and thus definitionally not be a vegetarian. So it's fair to assume that ethical vegetarians (those who practice it for ethical reasons) believe that all meat consumption is unethical. Otherwise they wouldn't be vegetarians.
I acknowledge there is probably a caveat of people who practice vegetarianism because they don't believe they can find ethically sourced meat and thus forgo meat consumption entirely. I find that strange though as cage free meat is pretty widely sold, at least in the USA per my experience.
You're a reasonable / pragmatic vegan. Vegans that won't eat meat because of the kill are ideological / dogmatic vegans.
There's even a small amount of vegans that consider lab meat to be something immoral (how they loop their head around that one, I do not know).
I'm currently dating a girl that's vegan and is super chill about it, but when I was 16 I dated a vegan girl also. My mother made two separate dishes for her, one specifically with esoteric stuff she would like (Christmas being special and all that). Then my mother made the mistake of quickly flipping some burning food with some meat in it, then using the same spatula to muddle the vegan dish. That girlfriend immediately said she would not eat that dish.
I nearly decided to break up with her at that moment.
I'm never quite sure it it's anecdata, but it always feels like there are much more obnoxiously stringent vegans than there are obnoxious meat eaters.
On the other hand, I've seen firsthand how vegans have to consistently defend their lifestyle choice, because by making that choice they reveal the "default" was never really that. Same with those who chose to be sober.
These dogmatic vegans aren't born that way - they're created by a completely unethical farming environment and detachment from farm life as /u/partition mentioned.
As I grow up I am beginning to realize just how many "bad personalities" and "horrible life choices" are really just driven by a poor environment - and that speaks more of our society and governance than the individuals.
part of Western society ethos is our quick action within any sort of realm to "pick X; be a dick about it"
I absolutely love this characterization of modern discourse.
> Vegans that won't eat meat because of the kill are ideological / dogmatic vegans
I've never met any other kind of vegan person. If they were concerned only about the living conditions of the animals, then they would eat free-range ethically-raised meat. They don't. Even if it's really free-range and not what the government allows to be called "free-range."
Eh, not sure I buy that interpretation. Ensuring that the meat you eat only comes from ethical sources is hard, especially if you eat at restaurants, or if you eat food that other people have cooked. (Do you really want to be that person who goes to someone's house for dinner and on-the-spot refuses to eat because their host isn't sure of the provenance of the meat?) It can also be significantly more expensive. It would be entirely reasonable to decide to give up meat rather than deal with all that, if it matters to you.
And on top of that it does make a statement about one's values. Even if someone was ok with doing all that homework, they might want to give up meat as a form of protest against all the factory animal farming out there.
Best course of action imo is watch yourself in that moment, understand that people are going above and beyond for you even though they don't fully understand you, they are trying to accept you. I'd go to the bathroom, try to reason with myself that no animals are being killed specifically for you, the accidental touch won't give any flavour to your dish and it's all in your head. There's no ethical issues whatsoever in that situation.
If after that you still can't make yourself eat it then you should apologize, explain it to them, tell them you tried to make yourself but couldn't and I bet you'd get a LOT more sympathy.
Surely this is more a case that it used to be much harder to be vegetarian and almost impossible to be vegan! Now we actually have a clear choice given the development and availability of so many other foods and supplements. Hence for me to value my enjoyment of foods above the life of another animal seems pretty harsh at best.
Even chicken eggs really are not cruelty free - if you truly love animals, you would stop eating all animal products imo. Otherwise you are simply lying to yourself.
Converse opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k
> it used to be much harder to be vegetarian
Millions of Indian people have been vegetarian for hundreds (if not thousands) of years now. I guess there are manufactured meat replacements now, but I prefer to just eat things like legumes over factory made vegan food.
I assume GP meant "... in the West". I grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s, and I can't imagine being a vegan, or even a vegetarian then. Certainly it would be doable if you always cooked your own food, but restaurants would mostly not accommodate you (unless you'd be fine with just a boring, flavorless salad), and if you went over to anyone's house for a meal, they'd think it was weird that you didn't eat meat.
Thousands of nations, billions of people. If only they knew the gnostic truth you hold in your breath...
To be fair, food was very difficult to come upon historically. Killing an animal and not eating it was equivalent to burning money for fun.
Vegetarianism (voluntary) didn't become more than an edge case until food was heavily commoditized and readily available.
This rings more true for me. Food simply used to be a lot more expensive.
"Between 1960 and 2000, the average share of Americans’ disposable personal income (DPI) spent on food fell from 17.0 percent to 9.9 percent." [1]
I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
> I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools.
You are correct that it used to be even higher. The US BLS estimates around 40% of DPI was spent on food at the turn of the century (1901). [1]
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....
When you’re hungry, you tend to care less about deep ethical questions and more about being fed. There’s the old trope about wealth and food:
Poor people ask if you got enough to eat. Middle class people ask if it tasted good. Wealthy people ask if it looked good.
Which correspond to points on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I think we can use that framework to understand where vegetarianism and veganism fit in. You might say that they are either related to personal feelings of being ethical or status symbols, or both.
But unless you were nobility, meat wasn't available at every meal, or even every day. It cost too much. Meat for most people was a special occasion kind of thing.
Ever notice how the English words for animals have Germanic roots but the words for their meats have French roots?
Chicken -> poultry
Cow -> beef
Pig -> pork
That's because the peasantry, the ones raising the animals, spoke Old English, and the nobility, the ones eating the meat, spoke French.
> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms
As did dental care and cars. Correlation is not causation.
It makes sense to me. If you grow up seeing animals slaughtered on the regular you probably won't think much of it, especially when the adults around you treat it as completely normal. You grow up in an environment where you might think meat comes from the magic meat factory, when you see an animal slaughtered for the first time it's likely to be shocking enough to turn a lot of people away.