A lot more people would be veggie if they had to kill the animals themselves. You just wouldn't do it unless you were really hungry, which I doubt anyone on this forum has experienced even once.
Not even 3 generations ago, it was incredibly common for people to slaughter their own farm animals. My grandmother was an old farm woman, raised in the time before refrigeration. She'd slaughter and pluck her own chickens without a second thought. It's entirely a modern phenomenon of global distribution and modern conditioning that lead you to that conclusion. Some animals evolved to be prey, and that is why they have an excessive number of offspring. Fowls are among those species. They lay eggs sometimes once a day so their numbers can increase incredibly rapidly. That is an adaptation to high predation. In the absence of that predation, they can overwhelm ecosystems.
You are a descendent of millions of years of hunters. I know many hunters and have been hunting myself. I know many who like to fish and have been fishing myself, and cooked my own catch. It's quite a satisfying experience actually.
> Some animals evolved to be prey, and that is why they have an excessive number of offspring. Fowls are among those species. They lay eggs sometimes once a day so their numbers can increase incredibly rapidly. That is an adaptation to high predation. In the absence of that predation, they can overwhelm ecosystems.
Red junglefowl, the ancestors to domesticated chickens, only lay a few clutches annually for a total of less than 20 eggs per year. Modern chickens that lay hundreds of eggs a year are a product of selective breeding, not some natural adaptation.
I didn't mean that "artificial" is an artificial distinction. I meant that the evolutionary fittest chicken long-term might be the modern farmed chicken. It's a weird tradeoff their specie is managing to make.
You could justify any man-made breeding horror with that if it held any ethical weight, but it does not. Breeding a worse life into a sentient being isn't a victory for that being. Neither the being nor its genes should be propagated at all.
I fall under the idea that yes, everything is natural, we are not special no matter what secrets of the universe we uncover and wield . Even our robot descendants , if they ever come to be, are natural too. Just because we have the ability to acknowledge material selection does not mean we are except from it
That's a gross misuse of language that makes words utterly meaningless. When people say "artificial selection" they don't mean a supernatural deity is doing it.
It's like going "haha gotcha! tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables!", completely missing the difference between the use of the word in a culinary versus botanical context. It's not insightful or useful in any way, it's just equivocation.
Not the case in many South Asian cultures. Lots of South Asians have been vegetarian for a really long time. Jain and Hindu foundational texts advocate for vegetarianism and Buddhism, also originally from the region, also treats vegetarianism as a foundational concept. These all derive from the concept of ahimsa, the principle of nonviolence. People have been horrified at killing for a very long time, in times much materially poorer than our own now. Even now a third of India is vegetarian.
> You are a descendent of millions of years of hunters. I know many hunters and have been hunting myself. I know many who like to fish and have been fishing myself, and cooked my own catch. It's quite a satisfying experience actually.
When I see posts like this I chuckle a bit at how steeped in their culture they are.
Not all Buddhists are vegetarian. It would be really hard to live in the Tibetan plateau or in Mongolia and be vegetarian, just because the land supports grazing and not much farming beyond that. Yet those areas are heavily Buddhist, even if even the monks eat meat.
Definitely and despite ~ 70-80% of India being Hindu only a third of India is vegetarian, so there are more non-veg than veg Hindus. But those cultures often frown on relishing meat (much in the way Protestants "frown" on promiscuity or Muslims "frown" on showing skin even though in practice it absolutely happens) or eating meat and only meat. In a lot of Buddhist Asia you can ask for the "monk's menu" and you'll get something that is veg and can be flavorful (but not always as keeping food underspiced is part of being Buddhist.) You also find lots of households where meat is eaten sparingly or combined with other protein dense foods like tofu or seitan to make a complete meal.
I contrast this with Western cultures where meat is often the centerpiece of the dish and many times your food is just meat with accompanying carbs and veggies. The kind of rhetoric the GP had about relishing hunting is a lot more absent from these cultures just because there's a general understanding that eating meat is unethical but something we all do because we aren't perfect.
All that to say that culture creates a powerful framing. Obviously in places like the steppes it's very hard to live without eating meat, but in places rich with agriculture attitudes toward meat are more about the culture you're steeped in than any material nutritional issues.
I’ve spent time on the Tibetan plateau and suffered from meat overload. We only had meat to eat each night, and my gums began to feel really uncomfortable. I guess at high altitudes, veggies really are a luxury.
India has a lot of carb veggies as well, which I found really interesting. I found it hard to get leafy greens of some sort (the vegetables you need to eat to stay healthy, cooked or otherwise) when I visited Delhi and Jaipur. But that could have just been me picking the wrong places to eat. China has much more leafy greens in my opinion, but again I’m limited in experience when it comes to South Asia. They definitely take the cake in making tofu taste like meat, but I’m not really into that.
You're totally right, South Asian diets tend to be poor in leafy greens and tend to stick with protein and carb heavy veggies like rice, grains, cauliflower, lentils, and beans. I've encountered and was raised with a small cultural disdain for leafy greans ("we aren't cows why should we eat like them" is how I've heard it joked about), but this is changing with new nutritional science and greater popularization of Western food fads like salads. Chinese diets definitely have more leafy greens.
I also find Japanese food to be shockingly short on veggies but same thing, it's hard to grow veggies there so a lot is imported, which makes veggies a bit of a luxury. Fruits are ridiculously hard/expensive to get there. Japanese food is a good example of a diet that historically was pretty meat poor and fish rich, though is changing with meat imports and modern processed fast foods like fried chicken ("chikin") and chicken nanban.
I read parent's comments more as a counter argument to the suggestion more people would be vegetarian if they had to kill their own animals for food, not a moral justification based on "people used to do it".
I read it as both, especially given the "I'm a hunter and hunting is great" bit. It is moral psychology. There is an implicit notion of what it means to be a human, and what is ethically sound is tied up with it, because it is universal, beyond time and place, and thus normal and good.
In this particular ethical issue it is an eternal tug-of-war between humans as essentially vegans by nature, corrupted by cloaking animal suffering in neat, pre-slaughtered packages (if we would only see...), and the other side presenting humans as one of the animals eating other animals. We are made out to be part of a natural order as hunter and butcher, which is both normal and good. Modern sensibilities around animal suffering is seen as a whimsy aberration of normality, artificial and unnatural. It is both descriptive and normative, and the what-is functions as a tool for the what-should.
This does lead to pretty bad 'science' (on both sides, really) and conversations that are very loaded around basic facts. I would agree if you would say the what-is does not depend on the what-should-be and vice versa, free will and all, but this is often not how ethical conversations (and rhetoric) works.
No, it was not. It was common to spank your children, out of care and love, when they did things dangerous to themselves or others, and sometimes a strap or switch when something truly horrific was done.
We now view this as wrong, but that wasn't beating them.
Yes, some idiots did beat their children, or hit their children out of anger. That doesn't mean it was common.
From what I observe, although spanking is described as basically harmless, not everyone who lived through it see it as something that improved their lives. Even if it was administered by well-meaning, loving parents.
To be clear, as this is often required on HN, I was speaking of a subset of spanking:
out of care and love, when they did things dangerous to themselves or others, and sometimes a strap or switch when something truly horrific was done.
In other words, never because fed up / angry. Never because of minor situations, and so on. For example, swearing isn't "dangerous to themselves or others". Spanking employed when the life of the child or others is involved, is a short-cut to locking an intense memory into long-term recall.
This sort of event is rare.
And to be frank? "Improved their lives" isn't necessarily important. Note how I state "dangerous to themselves or others"? Siblings and other children have to be taken into account.
Lastly, and take this from someone with grey hair, it wasn't until my 30s that I started to appreciate some of the discipline I disagreed with as a child. Disagreeing, doesn't mean it was wrong.
Okay, I believe my argument is not hurt by replacing the word „beat“ with „spank“. Adding that physical punishment was done out of love strengthens my argument, I think.
The change is spanking is not because spanking is harmful but because the world doesn't need it. The environment people are in is much more gentle, so it's not necessary to raise children that can handle large amounts of adversity.
We also don't teach our kids to defend themselves against sword attacks, for the same reason - it's no longer necessary.
Your argument implies that the past behavior was bad and we should change it, but that's incorrect. The past behavior was correct for its time. If someone would have raised a child without spanking 100 years ago they would end up with a weak person who could not live in the real world, this would be a bad thing.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable about early child development but I believe the science we have today says that spanking is in fact harmful and spanking your children does not „toughen them up“.
It would not benefit at all. Zero. It would harm the environment because all the food waste outweighs the energy cost of refrigerators by several orders of magnitude.
Feed food waste to chickens, fish, rabbits, and worms. Feed poop to worms and bacteria, feed bacteria and worm waste to plants, which convert that dastardly CO2 to sweet wholesome Oxygen. I was always taught that recycling was good, while pumping oil out of the ground and creating new CO2 is bad, but I'm no expert.
Plants do eat bacteria waste (see aquaponics), rabbits can eat some kitchen plant waste, but should of course not solely be fed that, (same with chickens), rabbit poop can be fed to fish and chickens (rabbits themselves eat it like 3x because poor digestive tract)… There are obviously a few steps I left unmentioned, as I am keeping my comments simplistic for the format.
You seem to have selective comprehension issues.
Recycling is more than just throwing trash into different coloured bins and burning oil to process it; Specifically, recycling in my comment refers to the process of water and air turning into food, and back into water and air, as has been customary for terran life for a few years now.
It is quite simply a natural cycle using no oil for centuries, vs. an industrial cycle using millions of tons of oil per year.
Yeah, I used to perform similar mental gymnastics too. Interestingly, it's very similar to the behaviour of addicts. Unfortunately, the way poor people lived 3 generations ago has absolutely nothing to do with how fat, rich people live today. What's next? No vaccines? No pasteurisation? This line of reasoning is a very slippery slope.
Hunting is different for a couple of reasons. First, you're almost certainly talking about killing from a distance with a gun. But it's also quite different to hunt a wild animal rather than raise a domestic animal just to kill it. But also some "hunting" is basically a simulation using released domestic animals (see pheasant shooting in the UK). And some is just downright cruel (see fox hunting in the UK or shooting of birds in Malta). Nobody is doing the slaughter for fun, though. It's always guns or dogs doing the dirty work. Funny that.
> Nobody is doing the slaughter for fun, though. It's always guns or dogs doing the dirty work. Funny that.
But also to provide. The estate near us has shoots every season and the fowl which is killed is given to the local residents. Lots of local poorer people really look forward to shoot season because they can pack their freezer with lots of free meat. I speak to lots of older folks in the area and they say this is the way it has been done for hundreds of years.
The sibling comments to this are truthful, we wouldn't be vegetarians but I think we would be eating more vegetables. When I was vegetarian in my youth I visited my grandparents in the country and asked them about killing animals themselves. They did have relationships with their animals and didn't enjoy doing it but its what they did. I think if you ask modern animal farmers today they would say they do not enjoy killing their animals. My ancestors did say that they ate more preserved (salted) meat and vegetables more but they had more meat in later times. The animals they raised were for occasional or special times not daily consumption.
This is reflected by a thousand years or so for most of the West with significant parts the calendar where there was abstinence from meat which for many now people would consider impossible. At most we would be periodic vegetarians, omnivores with the balance towards the vegetarian.
I think you are closer to the mark. People don't seem to realise they didn't eat meat as much back then. Like not even 10% what people eat now. To sustain the amount of meat consumption today they would have been killing every single day! In fact, it was common for families to have one pig which they'd kill around Christmas time. The pig was fed waste food (leftovers, vegetable peelings etc). They ate the entire pig, including the blood. Not a scrap would be wasted.
But I think you are also forgetting that agriculture has improved since and people aren't hungry any more. We don't need to keep a pig and feed it swill. There's so much to go around that many people are fat. It's 100% a choice to eat meat today and if that choice involved doing the killing I don't think many would make it.
I'm curious what the old timey protein options looked like.
I know that modern vegans have a more challenging time sourcing protein.
Old time diets didn't have the same limitations that modern vegan diets do, so they could for example lean on eggs and similar options.
But if you subtract 90% of protein sources from a modern diet, they had to have been eating something to make up that deficit and I'm always in the market for possible ideas to improve my own diet. :)
> I know that modern vegans have a more challenging time sourcing protein.
I'm having trouble understanding your post, maybe because you got this backwards.
Modern vegans have a trivial time sourcing protein. Tofu, wheat gluten (seitan), TVP, tempeh, and all the infinite vegetable options available year round instead of just seasonally.
I will say it's not that easy to find seitan and tempeh in a lot of the West. Tofu and TVP these days seem to be everywhere. If you have an easy source for these (and don't have to make your own like seitan) be thankful. Though if you're vegan thanks for fighting the good fight :) (signed not a vegan but someone who grew up with a cultural disdain for eating meat)
>This is reflected by a thousand years or so for most of the West with significant parts the calendar where there was abstinence from meat which for many now people would consider impossible. At most we would be periodic vegetarians, omnivores with the balance towards the vegetarian.
It's important to note that in the Christian traditional at least, fish and other aquatic animals weren't considered "meat" and were fine for eating on meatless days -- which survives to this day in the tradition of Friday being a common day to eat fish (Fridays were traditionally "meatless").
> The animals they raised were for occasional or special times not daily consumption
My mother was one of 14 kids growing up on a small farm in the West of Ireland in the mid-20th century. They ate meat (mostly bacon, home-killed and salted) cooked on an open fire 6 days a week, except during Lent
We processed and butchered our first two pigs earlier this year. Its not for the feint of heart, but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
We raised them from a few months old (we took them from a farm that was having to close) and did the entire processing and butchering process ourselves. The meat is night and day better than what you can buy in a store, the bacon is delicious, and we know the animal lived an excellent life and had a near instant end.
"Processed". Did you personally see their "near instant end"?
There is a very humane way to kill mammals actually: inert gas asphyxiation. A pig will happily enter a chamber full of nitrogen and die peacefully. If you arranged that then it's commendable. Personally meat is nowhere near important enough to me to go to such lengths, though.
By processed I mean the act of skinning, gutting, and cleaning.
As far as the near instant end I mentioned, yes I did see it. I pulled the trigger myself, each pig dropped instantly. I wouldn't begin to claim that there is a humane way to kill anything. Taking a life is no small thing, though its a part of life it shouldn't be taken lightly and demands respect.
I had a bad experience with attempting to use gas asphyxiation to put down a baby chick that was suffering. It didn't go well unfortunately, and though I'm sure with just the right setup it would work really well, I don't have such a setup.
While we're on this subject, though very out of place for HN, I've never personally agreed with the idea that death can be humane. It seems to be a relative comparison if suffering from a third party's perspective. We never really know what one experiences when they die, we only know what we see and what appears to be suffering. We similarly assume that plants don't suffer when killed, frankly I just don't buy it. There's plenty of research showing communication between plants, why couldn't they feel pain or loss? Do plants truly not feel anything, or are they just so different from us that we don't recognize any signs if pain or suffering?
Sorry to break your bubble, but this is how people normally live on countrysides / small villages, at least in my country. Killing livestock animals is everyday thing and no one bats an eye.
Hell, even killing new born kittens / puppies is considered by some normal thing, if they breed uncontrolled (even if they could just... castrate / neuter them [not sure which is the right word for it, I'm not native]).
After all how is it different from a full grown chicken, other than the fact you don't normally eat cats/dogs?
Yep fully agree. I live in a small village near a country estate and lots of the people here kill and pluck their own foul, including myself. The ones that dont, have no issue with it.
When there is a shoot on the estate we request some of the birds and then through the season we regularly come home from work to find braces of dead pheasants hanging on our front door. We pluck them and then roast or make stews out of them and they are delicious.
It is common to walk through the village after a shoot and see dead birds hanging from most of the doors. Nobody complains or thinks it is strange, in fact everybody looks forward to the free meat!
Because there are plenty of people who don't kill/eat certain animals but do slaughter other animals. This person in the thread described their new love for chickens, but I have a good feeling that they probably still eat beef or pork. But the "solution" to the vegan problem cannot be to surround everyone with farm animals, because when that was true for most people (100+ years ago), everyone ate meat that they killed themselves.
I think any good person can understand and empathize with the modern day practices of factory farming and meat production, but the solutions coming from vegans are also untenable in the face of human history. We can move away from unethical farming practices without removing meat from our diets and ignoring the absolutely huge benefits of eating meat as humans.
Because killing farm animals is considered a norm in almost all places who had done that since generations.
If you would be surrounded by chickens, livestock and other farm animals and watching them getting butchered was your daily bread as a child, why would you reconsider when you would grow up? It literally put food on your table, and besides home grown farm animals taste A LOT better (speaking from experience, but never grown them myself, any meat product I buy from the Walmart alikes tastes much worse).
Its only when you never witnessed death of any kind that you become so sensitive to it. Once it becomes normal (of course, I talk about farm animals here only) it's really hard to see advocates for vegetarianism as some sort of zealots.
And personally? What's the difference if they die of natural causes vs. just butchering them when the time is right? If you raised them ethically and they were generally happy, then for these animals its just... How it would end anyway? If you compare that to industrial farming, and if it was the only way to get meat sure I would consider being vege instead, its horrible how they are kept and treated. But for my own raised animals? Its a cycle of life.
People keep saying it's normal etc but then you'll notice everywhere it's always the poor people who end up doing the slaughtering while rich people get to pretend it doesn't happen.
I'm not sure that being desensitised is a good argument. People can become desensitised to a lot of things, like slavery or other abuse. That doesn't make it ok.
The difference is factory farming really. I don't think eating meat is wrong, per se. (But I do think a lot of people wouldn't miss meat if they tried it, especially the only eats chicken breast type). But factory farming is disgusting.
Fully agreed on factory farming. Not only is it cruel and unethical, but the quality is also much worse making vegetables actually a pretty good alternative.
On that note, let me tell you how home grown vegetables are also a lot better than... ;)
Well, from a philosophical point of view, vegetarian movement is unfair for the plants
Plants that are responsible of lots and lots of human well-being and as life beings deserve to be treated with a similar respect that we use with other organisms.
Incidentally is also bad for human health
Yes, it is. Those articles that claim that you can live on a strict vegetarian diet without any bad consequences for your health are either lying, incomplete or based in pseudoscience. Is basically a religious movement.
I have grown up on a purely vegetarian diet since I was born and I don't have any health problems from that. I know anecdotal evidence is usually not great and I will admit it is harder to maintain a healthy diet whilst vegetarian (but not too much), in this case it surely cannot be true that you can't live on a vegetarian diet without any bad consequences if I have done that?
I've been in such communities and they do bat an eye actually. If people enjoyed it then rich western people would be doing it for fun. Funny that I don't see the "kill your own goat" experience being sold in tourist packages.
No, but I'm well aware disgusting people exist. People abuse other people, but we generally agree this isn't a good thing. Also, pulling a trigger from afar isn't the same thing. I also wonder how many of those "real men" lose sleep after the experience. Emperor's new clothes comes to mind.
You seem incredibly closed to the fact that lots of very normal and kind people are fine with killing animals for food without issue. I assure you, there are many millions of them around the world.
I think there is a shade of grey between enjoying it and never doing because animals are another living being that don't deserve it.
If you are doing it as part of putting a good tasting food on the table, I would say no, no one bats an eye, but I suppose they don't enjoy the process too - it's messy process and requiers some safety considerations too like making sure your meat doesn't have any parasites.
I see you're making wild assumptions about peoples' backgrounds, including hunger, income status, and whether they've ever been fishing or not. Check your privilege.
You are a descendent of millions of years of hunters. I know many hunters and have been hunting myself. I know many who like to fish and have been fishing myself, and cooked my own catch. It's quite a satisfying experience actually.