61–70 of 120 posts
"Animal equality" is not a great brand. Sure, maybe you can get most people to agree that they should be treated more humanely. Equal is not the right word. If it came down to me or a chicken - I sincerely hope society would prioritize me.
Uncomfortable thoughts: Let's say first world countries in the West get on board with not eating meat anymore. How do you exactly go about telling impoverished countries/peoples to stop eating meat? Would we ban meat and force them to eat some substitutes? But food is an important part of culture and we would be erasing their culture if we did that wouldn't we? Should we give some cultural groups the right to eat mea…
Exporting cultural strictures rarely ends well (many historical examples, both distant and recent), so I'd say, if you can get a large number of people in the West to not eat meat, then you've reduced the suffering of animals by a tremendous amount. That alone is a perfectly fine goal. Let non-coercive cultural influence do the rest of the work, while never forcing a populace to do something against its interests or…
Except for the westerners who disagree with this. They can be subjugated.
Uncomfortable thoughts: Let's say first world countries in the West get on board with not eating meat anymore. How do you exactly go about telling impoverished countries/peoples to stop eating meat? Would we ban meat and force them to eat some substitutes? But food is an important part of culture and we would be erasing their culture if we did that wouldn't we? Should we give some cultural groups the right to eat mea…
Most of impoverished countries already eat mostly veg. We wouldn't need to ban them
The only exception I'm aware of is India and since that's religious it seems difficult to scale. Islam has animal slaughter as one of its few obligate rituals.
These types of pages and articles always draw out a bunch of weirdly sociopathic comments saying things like "mm, delicious" or "now I'm hungry", etc. Why is that? It's possible to materially enjoy the taste of meat while simultaneously being horrified by the scope of man's destruction and industrialized cruelty. It's entirely another thing to revel in your own ignorance and disinterest of the issue. Really revolting…
We don't even have to think what we're doing isn't bad. It's enough if we think it's not as bad as it's being made out to be.
Also, just about everyone in the English-speaking world is sick of PETA's sanctimonious shenanigans. It's a bad look which rubs off on any group whose tactics rhyme with PETA's.
Uncomfortable thoughts: Let's say first world countries in the West get on board with not eating meat anymore. How do you exactly go about telling impoverished countries/peoples to stop eating meat? Would we ban meat and force them to eat some substitutes? But food is an important part of culture and we would be erasing their culture if we did that wouldn't we? Should we give some cultural groups the right to eat mea…
I personally don't feel shame in eating animals bread to be eaten. Having had grandparents practicing subsistence farming, also being born in Eastern Europe during communism and thus suffering from food shortages, from a young age I've seen chickens, pigs and lambs being slaughtered. Not a big deal, and in an environment in which food is in short supply, killing an animal for food is a reason for celebration.
People say that we've been desensitized due to being disconnected from our food source. But I think that's backwards. You rarely see vegans among subsistence farmers. Even when meat is a luxury, eggs and dairy are staple foods.
Unless there's a massive economic incentive for stopping meat production, no country will ever get "on board" with not eating meat.
The CO2 emissions story is the only argument that has any legs. But if you think about it, it's an argument for efficiency and for taxing CO2 emissions, with plenty of low hanging fruits, e.g. we should waste less food, prefer chickens and pigs over ruminants, etc.
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Note I'm actually a vegan 3 days per week out of 7 and I prefer to go through all periods of religious fasting, which is basically hard core veganism (no traces of animal products are acceptable) before the big holidays, e.g. Lent (I'm not religious, I just like the practice).
Meat is the most efficient protein source, per calorie, with a complete profile and unfortunately there's no equivalent unless you start taking protein extracts.
Otherwise a vegan diet is a diet in which you have to eat a lot of legumes every day (lentils, kidney beans, soy) for getting 60-80 grams of protein, an inadequate level if you're looking to maintain or build muscle and going over that is hard for me without being in a caloric surplus. Also, during vegan fasting periods I take B12, Calcium supplements and I strive to eat a varied diet.
My point is, from first hand experience, a healthy diet is pretty challenging and expensive, with or without meat and for poorer populations life is hard enough as it is.
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Or thoughts dying in an empty brain. That would be something.
I"m assuming you're being sarcastic, but I would love a similar style page showing how many trees are burned and how many fish are harvested vs. how many fish are repopulated. Thinking about memes as living organisms (infomorphic beings?) would be an interesting way to frame cultural decay.
Yes, humans eat animals. "Top of the food chain" means something. It means lunch. Delicious lunch. Oh man, now I want a chicken sandwich with bacon on it.
maybe with a little bit of parmesan cheese in it also, yummmm
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Makes sense to me. At a minimum people should know how reality looks.
Strikes me as a great way to harden opposition. Meat eaters are going to want the nasty images taken off of packaging, and the cheaper option is to lobby to remove them, not pay substantially more for an idyllic, pasture-raised, humane future. Congratulations, you now have a pro-factory-farming lobbying group with actual grassroots support. Might also have more people on your side; might not. Worth considering the ad…
There will of course be people who don't care, and people who revel in the pictures, and people that lobby to have them removed, but overall I think those groups would be in the minority. Many people would slowly (and unconsciously) improve their consumption habits, in the same way that people didn't really notice that the tides turned on issues like gay marriage and marijuana consumption.
Part of the knee-jerk antagonism by people who eat meat to posts like this one is that most vocal vegetarians/animal activists are absolutists: eg there is no desirable path forward for most Animal Liberationists where a greater percentage of animals are raised humanely but people keep eating meat. As is often the case, everyone could benefit from agreeing to a compromise where we improve animal farming conditions but don't vilify people who choose to continue eating meat.
Another element here is that eating meat is integral to many cuisines and is extremely culturally important to most people - stating that your goal is to remove it wholesale feels like a direct attack. Claiming that people who enjoy eating meat are your adversaries seems like exactly the wrong thing to do. It's as unhelpful as saying that everyone who owns a car is contributing to climate change is therefore the enemy of environmentalism.
This page doesn't count animals killed by other (non-human) animals. Mother nature is also cruel. I don't think that humans are the biggest animal killers. A single humpback whale likely kills millions of krill every day. One could even argue that eating whale meat is ethical because it saves millions of lives. Also it should be noted that most of these farm animals would never have been alive if humans did not breed…
Because it's a silly vegan propaganda page by wealthy privileged virtue signaling crowd without any grasp on reality.
Countless quadrillions of animals are killed every year in nature. Countless billions of animals are killed every year to clear land and protect vegetation from insects, worms, rodents, etc. Countless billions of animals are killed to build homes that these privileged people live in.
Not to mention the countless billions of animals killed by pet cats and countless billions of animals killed to feed our pets ( cats, dogs, snakes, etc ).