[erellsworth]

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.

[tmerc]

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.

[munificent]

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.

[partitioned]

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.

[driverdan]

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.

[erellsworth]

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.

[animal-husband]

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.

[GJim]

> its not natural

Neither is using fire to cook food.

Your point? (Or are you recommending a raw food diet?)

[Reasoning]

> 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.

[jorvi]

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.

[deepvibrations]

Very true. Just like when slaves were commonplace, it was 'normalised' and many people just turned a blind eye.

[georgeecollins]

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.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

The people who think meat comes from a magic meat factory are blind.