>> Did we ask the animals too? Maybe the pig consensus is different
> Most mammals react to painful stimuli
Which didn't really address the parent's point.
Since we can't ask the animals we can't know, so perhaps the pig consensus is:
"Yeah, look, we know you're killing us and eating us, but we really don't care. In fact, we like it, prefer. Put it this way, if we were our there in the wild we'd have to fend for ourselves, and either get eaten by our predators, or die of disease or old age. At least you kill us quickly. You don't even extend that dignity to your own kind, nope, you let each other, sometimes even force each other, to suffer till the very last breath and extract as much economic value out of each other as you can via the 'health care system' and 'palliative care', and then you don't even have the dignity to eat, or otherwise recycle, the carcass, no you just bury it in cemeteries where you don't grow food, or worse yet burn them, whereby the worms can't even eat them, and worsen your carbon pollution problem."
And there ya go, absurd isn't it. I certainly think so.
I live near pasture, we walk the dogs through it, the cows that hang out there are protective of their young, and definitely appear to have something going on between their eyes, they're quite adorable, both the young and old, and recently they're no longer there. Perhaps they got moved, perhaps we've eaten them. They could very well have ended up on my plate and I wouldn't know. But at least their lives had meaning and purpose, which is more than I can say for my life at times. The only reason I won't eat my dogs is through some quirt of culture that causes me think doing so is weird.
> Or, because you're right and you know it, ignore the entirety of this post.
Absolutely. If all we have is opinion, let's go with mine, because I guarantee it's stronger than yours. I'm even willing to go to war over it. Well, not me personally, I prefer baths and hot cups of tea, but we do seem quite eager to send each others children off to war.
I'm trying to be facetious here, because I don't really understand why people bother to keep having these arguments over differences of opinion. It generally doesn't work, unless someone is almost already there but hasn't quite accepted that they agree with you.
As Amezarak suggest in the last paragraph, perhaps the best way to go about changing culture is to attempt to gradually shift the Overton window[1], because right now the idea of Vegetarian or Vegan as policy or law is very much in the 'Unthinkable' stage.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window