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0 pointseightails5y ago0 comments

I agree with a lot of the points you made, though:

> Ethically: there's no arguing meat eating is better. None. However well you treat animals you're still ultimately going to kill them.

Ultimately every animal is going to die. If the moral hangup for you is the certainty of death, then wouldn't you consider any form of reproduction immoral? 'However good and rewarding their life may be, children are still going to die eventually, ergo noone should reproduce'.

Unless it's the act of killing with the intention to consume that's the issue?

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dmje5y ago

I think there's a reductionist angle to your point which just doesn't chime with me. It's a bit like people arguing for anti-natalism. It's interesting, but morally redundant, somehow?

The hangup for me isn't the certainty of death ("relax, you're going to die" is a credo I try hard to live by - even though I fail much of the time and worry about death as much as the next person...). It's just something about breeding a thing to kill it.

There is also something in there about the distance and hypocrisy of many meat eaters when it comes to facing up to what they are putting in their mouths. The thing you see at a supermarket is a million miles away from a hanging carcass; I know a whole bunch of people who don't even tell their young children that the thing they have on their plate is that thing walking around in the field over there - and that seems to me to also be quite disingenuous.

I'm failing to make a good point. But the broader thing for me is as I said - I'm genuinely not a rabid vegetarian (I used to get drunk at uni and sometimes end the night eating kebab along with everyone else...) - is that I'm interested in the combination of reasons which for me have built up into a fairly compelling case over the years. I should say as well - I actually do quite like the taste of meat even though it's been a long, long time - but I have no intention of going back, which is what interests me.

eightailsOP5y ago

> The hangup for me isn't the certainty of death... It's just something about breeding a thing to kill it.

Fair enough. I don't necessarily fully agree with that specific argument but I can certainly understand where you're coming from. It's one of those head vs heart things: the cold hard logic that all other things being equal, a life followed by death is equivalent to any other, vs the vague moral sense that life should have purpose, and the discomfort when that purpose is 'to be foodstuff'.

That said, I wasn't really arguing for meat consumption generally, I was more just pointing out -- nitpicking might be another word -- a flaw in OPs justification.

I'm in the process of reducing my meat consumption considerably (to 'a couple of times a week') and restricting it to be local and free range. Maybe in a year I'll be full vego, who knows.

Interesting point you raise about a willing blindness of some carnivores. I'm not sure I've really encountered the level of denial that you mention myself, possibly because of the semi-rural area I grew up in, but I don't doubt that it exists. Humans are highly skilled at avoiding the uncomfortable and maintaining delusions.

rewq43215y ago

If you could grow and kill with a small fraction of the suffering that farmed animals endure today, then eating meat would be mostly fine (other than environmental issues, perhaps). Unfortunately that's impossible for all but a very small minority of people - those who can raise and kill animals themselves or have someone they trust very well to do it for them.[0][1]

Well over 95% of meat is factory farmed[2], and animals that are raised in factory farms do not live pleasant lives, to put it lightly.[3] This is coming from someone who grew up on a farm, and whose parents are still farmers.

[0] People think that buying from their local butcher or local farm must make their meat ethical. In fact, small abbatoirs often have very shoddy killing protocols compared to the large ones. You end up with farmers clubbing animals to death, or putting 5 bullets into a pig's head before it dies: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-14/tasmanian-abattoir-ac...

[1] Hunting isn't an ethical source of meat. Even professional hunters (e.g. those who kill kangaroos for farmers in AU) will let ~1 in 20 get away with a bullet in them. That could mean suffering for hours or even days if it clots but then dies due to internal bleeding or infection. I used to hunt and I would go to sleep thinking about the animals that got away wounded that day. Still, it took me far too long to realise that there is no need to eat animals.

[2] https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko

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