I spent a lot of time around cows as a kid and while it's never stopped me from enjoying a steak, I do think about it whenever this topic comes up. They're basically just big puppy dogs anyway.
It's been happening that way for thousands of years. It's only recently as people have gotten so disconnected from obtaining their food that they've begun to question the ethics of eating.
In china there was this old sentiment about how animals are just animals, beneath us humans. Hence its okay to eat them
I remember i saw videos where children were crying because their grandparents or someone killed and cooked the chicken they raised, and the family laughing about how the child will "get over it" once he tastes how delicious the chicken was. It makes me sick that thats how it was, but it also made me thankful that the situation has improved and it's now a thing of the past.
This sentiment is quickly dying out now with how well china has developed and food security is no longer an issue. But for the older generation, this was reality for a lot of them. China just decades ago was suffering from famine and communist rationalization. Food was scarce, and being able to eat your fill was basically a luxury. Hence food that fills you up was considered much more valuable than "emotional bonds". If you ever have the chance to talk to some conservative chinese elders, they'd likely still consider dogs and other animals as "just animals"
Its the luxury of food stability that makes us consider the morality of eating animals now. If there was a famine, and famines were very common just a hundred years ago, no one would care
Only recently has it been the case that we no longer need to farm animals to survive as well.
We have more than enough options to meet all of our nutritional needs today. The only reason we (in more industrially developed nations) kill these animals is so that we can eat meat instead of plant based options for the sake of preference alone.
The difference isn't even that big, often times the flavor of plant based dishes is just as good or only marginally different, but people don't bother trying them.
More people have recognized the lack of need and the marginal differences meat provides and have begun questioning if we should really be treating the lives of other sentient beings with so much disregard.
Meat is much easier to make taste good by doing almost nothing to it compared to plant based options that require special seasoning or preparation. Laziness and ease play factors too
Depends on what you buy and what you're eating. The vast majority of plant based dishes taste good just by following a recipe that is near identical to one with meat.
You point stands if you're only eating a steak or something where the meat is nearly on its own. You can still get great tasting foods for those by spending more for specialty products or doing extra work as you say, but nothing forces us to stick to just those dishes.
That said, if more people became plant based, it would quickly become cheaper and easier to do all the same kinds of dishes. We're currently living in a world where plant based foods have been an afterthought for the vast majority of companies.
I'm totally down to drop hamburger for Impossible types of plant based substitutes. It's so close to the real thing, but it HAS to be cheaper or it has little chance of taking over short of some catastrophic event
Grains and nuts alone are allergy risks for millions yet routinely recommended as methods of obtain appropriate calories, B-12, D levels and protein, as opposed to just eating some meat.
I'm sure you could try to figure out something more specialized but the fact is the more food science required to overcome basic nutritional requirements, the less practical that is as a diet for everyone.
Grains and nuts alone are allergy risks for millions
Those same people already have to look out regardless. We shouldn't pretend like they aren't recommended outside of just veganism.
B12 is the only thing you actually have to watch out for and is mitigated by taking a single supplement a day, the horror. The same supplementation is given to livestock to ensure it is in the meat.
~42% of Americans are already vitiman D deficienct and should be taking a supplement for that despite eating meat.
Protein is also massively overblown. It's not hard to get protein on a vegan diet. Point and laugh at the idiots who become plant based and do nothing but eat salads rather than looking into new protein sources. I'll join you.
more food science required to overcome basic nutritional requirements
This is just false. All the major dietetic associations around the world have already acknowledged that people can be perfectly healthy on a vegan diet at all stages of life. Take a B12 supplement and you're good to go.
I would probably feel the same way about it as I already do about most livestock? I wouldn't object to it on principle but I'd feel a certain way about how the animals were treated before they became food.
The only "difference" with cows is that they're already commonly raised for slaughter and I don't really have the power to enact widespread change to animal welfare practices. I try to buy ethically-sourced meat and I'd be a thousand percent okay with lab-grown meat replacing the industry entirely if comparable taste and texture were there, but I'm not morally opposed on principle alone to eating meat in a general sense.
tl;dr idk man there's nuance to this question and I feel like asking it at all in this specific situation is just setting me up to make a lot of people really angry.
Big, exceptionally dumb, herd puppies. Had the occasional qualm about beef until some family needed a hand on their farm turning their bulls to steer.
Any animal that can get it's scrote slit and balls removed with the only anesthetic required is pressing the animal sideways between two gates AND it doesn't even flinch, so perfectly fine that it wanders out the white to graze at the feed still moments later... that is an animal whose only purpose is to convert grass into meat, fertilizer, and (until their equipment was removed) more cows.
Same shit for domesticated turkey. Great grandfather ran a turkey farm, they had a sudden rainstorm and the turkeys rolled their breaks skyward and fucking drowned on the rain.
Not in the water, there was no flood, no feet of water in a pool to drown in. Their beaks simply went skyward and open, the rain came down, the turkeys tried to breathe the rain drops, failed, and drowned in place. He said his family ate turkey for so long he insisted on ham for Thanksgiving ever afterwards.
When anyone brought up his aversion to turkey he always muttered something like "it can't be good for people to eat something that dumb."
It's crazy really, people just don't understand how much intelligence and emotions cows and pigs have. Some cows are way more emotional than others, some will have emotions just like a pet dog that you raised since birth. But most people don't have reoccuring daily meetings with the same farm animals.
Welcome to human culture I guess lol. Some of the distinctions make more sense than others within their contexts, but I think most food stuff just comes down to familiarity. A lot of folks are just squicked out by anything they didn't eat in their first 5-10 years of life, and don't have any desire to branch out from that. I know many grown-ass adults who subsist entirely on pizza and chicken nuggets, and it's sad to me how much they're missing out on.
That being said, I consider myself reasonably adventurous for a midwesterner, but there are still some things that I know are fine to eat but I'd still balk at due to cultural programming/bias. Like, I'd have to be roaring drunk and wicked hungry to eat a whole fried sparrow (bones and all) or a tarantula, but both of those things are totally normal tasty snacks to people in other cultures.
I've had crickets in various forms though and they're not half bad!
It's started to have an effect on me the last decade, though. I don't actually enjoy the taste of meat as much anymore. I think I have grown fonder of the mammals around me. Unfortunately for fish, they are the one animal that troubles me the least.
As far as vegan chicken and beef, it has been a great substitute. I think with continued work with meat substitutes, there will be fewer animal deaths. I like the idea of lab grown meat, if it can be perfected. Animals would only need to supply some cells to culture, so no requirements to end a life.
I just don't have the vegan beliefs, I still eat chicken eggs and honey. I think products made from animal labor is still considered bad to them. But I consider it a trade, by providing care and safety to them. They feed me, and I'm their big, hairless ape protector and provider.
If I had to eat animals to survive, I will of course do so. But while I don't have to, I try to live in harmony with them.
While I get your thoughts in principle, the egg industry is most definitely not "big hairless protector" but rather "big hairless torturer/murderer/slaver". Just wanted to throw that out there, not a personal attack against you.
Before anyone jumps in with the argument "but I raise my own chickens", we are talking about how 99% of eggs are produced/consumed. And that is not from small scale, 10 chicken backyard farms. Sorry.
Before anyone jumps in with the argument "but I raise my own chickens", we are talking about how 99% of eggs are produced/consumed. And that is not from small scale, 10 chicken backyard farms.
But I wasn't talking about how the 99% of eggs are produced/consumed. I was talking about how I do it, personally, on my own. I raise my own intentionally, because the same problems that exist in factory farming, exist in chicken production as well.
You brought the entire egg industry into the conversation, when it had nothing to do with me. Of course, I do not see what you said as a personal attack, because I don't see them related. I'm just more confused, than anything, on why you brought it up.
What did my personal, principled act have anything to do with the overall system of the egg industry? I don't really have the power to tell them how to run things.
Emotional connections are such a weird thing. Its why people tell you to not give animals a name. Because once you give them a name you've basically "bonded" with that animal. You'll feel happy when it's happy and you'll feel sad in its misery.
I think rabbit meat tastes perfectly good, its got its own texture and cooking method but it can be delicious. I also think rabbits are cute. I think if i ever get a rabbit pet I wouldn't be okay with the idea of eating rabbit meat anymore, because the emotional attachments you have to the animal will make you feel horrible.
Its why dog meat is so frowned upon almost everywhere. Because dogs are widely recognized in basically everywhere as companions and pets.
Cows, chickens, pigs, rabbits, dogs.. there is functionally no difference between them except we are more likely to keep them as pets the further right we go, and hence more likely feel bad if they are killed or eaten.
Sure but they aren't the "traditional" ones, and that's not a knock on the rest of the pets, I love snakes too but they aren't traditional either. It's just that by nature of being traditional, they're the most popular and therefore it's more abhorrent (to society at large) to eat those than the others
But that doesn’t mean that everyone has the same emotional connection to every animal. Cows have always been used as workers and lifestock for food, dogs haven’t.
Now. That doesn’t change the fact that it has been changed over time, but it’s still why there’s such a big difference on how we have connections to these different animals.
This is kind of naive. Dogs and humans developed a co-dependent relationship tens of thousands of years ago. They were companions and vital for survival for thousands of years before even commonly seen as pets. The human-dog bond is something studied by scientists, it’s an observed phenomenon that we experience the same chemical reactions to our dogs as we would for a young child. Now western countries certainly took to keeping them as pets once we started to industrialize 250~ years ago, but there’s clear evidence dogs are more to humans than just a pet rabbit or snake.
103
u/Emotional-Ad9114 Aug 11 '26
I have a rabbit as a pet and people still eat rabbit regularly.
there’s also people who have chickens and pigs as pets.
all of us have emotional connections to those animals.