[EnigmaFlare]

That's not the vegan reason at all. If it was, it would permit eating free-range chickens as you say, and cows. Meat cows have a great life. They're given plenty of food, protection from predators, and when they are killed, it's much less of a torture than dying naturally from disease, predation, or starvation. Wild animals are more often the ones living in what we humans would see as torture. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.

Even humans have lifted ourselves out of our natural environment and created civilization so we're not in a constant daily struggle to not die from violence or starvation. It's a double standard to want that for humans but not for animals.

[6510]

> Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.

The thing I cant figure out is why [we] humans are so upset by completely normal things.

Then we turn around and kill things for pleasure and are highly disrespectful to the life forms that feed us.

If you search the web for broccoli you find pictures with the bottom cut off, entirely chopped up or growing for consumption. I couldn't tell you where or how it grows naturally.

When you say broccoli people don't picture the plant, they think of a freshly killed one.

This is wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broccoli#/media/File:Broccoli_...

I wouldn't want to be depicted like that. That the broccoli doesn't know doesn't mean I don't know.

It's the rock star vegetable - in a league of its own. We should be building statues to honor it. We should have a world broccoli day where we not eat it but talk about its greatness.

[EnigmaFlare]

If you go that far into respecting things, why stop at life? We treat molecules pretty poorly, ripping them apart, discarding their unwanted body parts, etc.

So it's a bit silly to base morals on anthropomorphism. Instead, these long-lived rules about eating humans, pork, cows, etc. are probably based on practicalities. I don't quite know what they are but you can imagine that allowing cannibalism would be a step closer to farming people to eat which has to be a very tantalizing prospect since the livestock can also run the farm, making it completely free food! Or maybe it's to do with disease transmission. Pork is easy to get food poisoning from if you don't cook it properly. Maybe cows are worth more for milk than meat during a famine, and people might worsen their long term situation trying to survive in the short term by killing their cows.

I agree broccoli's great. It the main vegetable I eat.

[6510]

That's it, they should have murdered everyone except the slaves. The livestock can run the farm themselves without management.

What still bothers me about the story is that they ate the steak and that it was served at all. Why would you bother to hide the slaves and cook a slice for the people not suppose to see them? Would they really be that naive?

A bit like vegetarians and vegans forgetting that in order to grow the fruits and vegetables everything previously living there was killed or displaced.