[WanderPanda]

This is interesting! So you‘re extrapolating the reduction of babaricness that humanity expresses historically into the future and that the threshold will be so low that killing animals for food will be seen as one of the most babaric thing humans do by then. I think for this to happen we would need to shield us quite well from the inherent babaricness of nature. „Why should I not eat animals, if lions are doing it everyday?!“ on the other hand we also got better in shielding us from reality in form of video games, netflix etc. On the flipside these virtual worlds are often excessively babaric, e.g. horror movies or shooter games. So in the end it is not so obvious to me that we will see eating animals as babaric. Maybe we will rather view it as very inefficient and primitive instead?

[yesenadam]

> the threshold will be so low

To take one "small" example, 7 billion male[0] chicks a year are put into a "macerator", aka "chick grinding machine". 7 billion. I don't think it takes a very "low threshold" to find this barbaric, just look at it and think about it. If that's not "barbaric" (whatever that means exactly), I'm not sure what would be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

> So in the end it is not so obvious to me that we will see eating animals as babaric

Many people already do, and have for many years.

[0] "the males of egg-laying chickens are killed as soon as possible after hatching and sexing to reduce financial losses incurred by the breeder."

[marcosdumay]

As soon as we learn how to cultivate some good quality meat in-vitro, we will stop killing animals and start to pretend to be different from the barbaric previous generations.

That's what people do in every ethical aspect, we circumvent it and pretend it's easy to solve, and then criticize the people that can't circumvent it due to some environmental issue. When that people is on the past, there isn't even a problem with this.

[hutzlibu]

"As soon as we learn how to cultivate some good quality meat in-vitro, we will stop killing animals and start to pretend to be different from the barbaric previous generations."

In the very long term maybe. But even if cheap, good quality artifixial meat becomes avaiable by tomorrow - killing animals for meat simply out of tradition - will go on a long time.

[InitialLastName]

Sure, but that's the case with all traditions. Plenty of things that westerners see as barbaric (slavery, ritual genital mutilation, institutionalized torture) are still common in the developed world (and often openly endorsed by western governments).

Edit to add: The bigger picture is that for a set of practices, even if they still occur on a smaller scale than in the past, that's probably strictly an improvement.

[NegativeLatency]

As a circumcised male who is disappointed that Guantanamo bay is still holding prisoners I’d suggest that the west still does many of the things you mentioned.