The struggle of being a meat eater

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Mid

That one harlot
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So guys...I'm starting to become subconscious of what I'm eating and possibly a little uncomfortable with my liking chicken. Why do I think about the what kind of life this animal could have had? I feel BAD. Am I only in this? Wondering what kind of life choice to take? Eat less meat? Eat more veggies? Ugh...so frustrating!
 
Sadly, one person not eating it isn't going to suddenly stop the process. So in away, you stopping is just gonna make their suffery be in vain.

There's really two way I can think of that will fix that
1. Become an extremist and use force on those places.

Or the more civil way of dealing with the issue
2. If a large number of people get together then quit buying meat at the same time, that will make their sales chart fall dramatically. Money speaks. If a company sees a extremely sudden dip in profit, they'll jump to please the people by changing their ways. If they don't, then they'll run out of money and/or won't be pleased with the new profits.
 
Hmm...

For animals raised en masse in cages, who have to sustain suffering all their lives? I understand. I don't want to eat animals that suffer in those conditions and I attempt to consciously evade purchasing meat made under such conditions.

Then again, there are instances where the consumption of meat is simply not allowing a resource to go to waste. Take hunting, like deer hunting. If we stopped hunting deer, they would overrun the environment and devastate it. We're part of the food chain there, so it only makes sense to eat what we kill rather than just letting it rot. Also, in the cases of some animals (ex: chickens, cows) not eating them would result in their mass slaughter anyway, and potential extinction. Corporations and farmers wouldn't want to maintain animals that don't return a profit in some manner. Even thinking on chickens and cows being able to give other products (eggs, dairy) they'd still suffer severe abuse. After all, lines and lines of cages producing dozens of eggs are cheaper than raising them free-range anyway.

Not eating meat, therefore, isn't going to stop en masse for profit animal abuse. Going full vegan will just result in cows and chickens--now dependent on humans for survival because of how we've bred them over thousands of years--being mass slaughtered and then going extinct because they're no longer profitable. Unless people go out of their way to preserve those species, in which case, they'll become a drain on the economy by having to constantly provide for them. They would also be a doomed project: They'll never survive in the wild now, unlike other near-extinct animals that can be brought back and sent out again. Like black-footed ferrets.

In the end, I still eat meat. If I could, I'd eat more fish, but it's not cheap to buy it out here. The solution isn't to stop buying meat, because it'll be produced either way. We (as consumers) need to be more aware of the other methods for raising meat out there. Chickens who live happy lives before being slaughtered for food is about the best we can give them now, because we've essentially raised them to be a slave species for our needs. Not eating them now isn't going to somehow magically fix thousands of years of selective breeding.

Basically: Try to educate yourself and buy meat raised on free ranges if you can. Advocate for and petition to try and get more free range. Tell other people to buy free range. It's more expensive, but the animals have much better lives as a result.

Unfortunately, though, I doubt people will do it or care. I mean, there are tens of thousands of people in India and China who are essentially barely paid slave labour in abhorrent conditions to produce clothing and most everybody turns a blind eye to it because it means they can buy cheaper sneakers and jeans at Walmart. If we can't convince people to care about other humans, how the fuck are we going to convince them to care about stupid chickens and fat cows?

This is a point where I don't think we're going to see improvement anytime soon. No matter what we do.
 
I was going to type something long winded.

Instead I answer with my own question.
Should my tomato plant be happy with it's short life before I rip it's swollen ripe buds off?
An unfair argument to some, but consider the quality of the product can typically reflect it's living conditions. That said, we can do better, but we've certainly done worse.
 
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Plants also feel pain and fear, not in the same way as us or animals, but they do.

There's really two way I can think of that will fix that
1. Become an extremist and use force on those places.

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The type of life the animal could have had was living on the farm with the same basic monotonous life until it died of old age instead of being sent off to be killed and processed for meat products. They were bred purposely for the sake of food, they wouldn't have even existed if not for the many generations of food stock farming that came before it, so it's not like they were suddenly stripped from some happy woodland critter life. They were born to be made into food, so there's really nothing to feel bad about, in my opinion. They've achieved their destiny, and I honor them by partaking of their deliciousness.

However, since you apparently don't have that same point of view, you could always go vegetarian or vegan if you have some moral qualms with eating meat.
 
The type of life the animal could have had was living on the farm with the same basic monotonous life until it died of old age instead of being sent off to be killed and processed for meat products. They were bred purposely for the sake of food, they wouldn't have even existed if not for the many generations of food stock farming that came before it, so it's not like they were suddenly stripped from some happy woodland critter life. They were born to be made into food, so there's really nothing to feel bad about, in my opinion. They've achieved their destiny, and I honor them by partaking of their deliciousness.

However, since you apparently don't have that same point of view, you could always go vegetarian or vegan if you have some moral qualms with eating meat.

Pretty much this, and to expand on it a bit more,

That's the fun part of domesticating animals. We kind of enslaved them and selectively bred them so they have all the traits we want and none we don't.

Plus, it's not like you could just release something like chickens into the wild. They tend to have abysmal survival instincts, as evidenced by the massacres that happen any time a fox or coyote breaks into their coops.

Edit: I thought about the topic some more and decided getting rid of livestock entirely would be disastrous.

Know how poaching is a big problem all across the world? Imagine how much more it would rise if you eliminated the easy, controlled supply of livestock. Humans are omnivores, we need to eat meat. Tell people they can't buy meat from the store anymore, and suddenly you've created a black market demand, and those capable of hunting could very well say fuck the regulations and risk poaching to feed family, friends, or even sell it. Given that we're a species prone to hunting animals to extinction, and our current population and technological capacity requires a huge demand of resources and the ability to harvest those resources quickly and efficiently, we would very likely be looking at an ecological catastrophe.
 
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However, since you apparently don't have that same point of view, you could always go vegetarian or vegan if you have some moral qualms with eating meat.
If its because he has a problem with eating something that has some sort of conciousness of itself, then perhaps
plants aren't the way to go. Supposedly, plants can hear themselves being eaten. LOL.

Plants Can Hear Themselves Being Eaten
 
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If its because he has a problem with eating something that has some sort of conciousness of itself, then perhaps
plants aren't the way to go. Supposedly, plants can hear themselves being eaten. LOL.

Plants Can Hear Themselves Being Eaten

I heard grass apparently does the equivalent of screaming when you're cutting your lawn.

Remember, kids; just because it doesn't react like an animal would doesn't mean it's not a living organism that very much so wants to stay alive.
 
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I heard grass apparently does the equivalent of screaming when you're cutting your lawn.
I wonder if it does the same thing when you answer natures call.
 
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Plants also feel pain and fear, not in the same way as us or animals, but they do.
When did our scientists discover human emotions in tomatos and potatos? Like for real, why not just say our dinner tables can talk. What drugs are you on?
 
When did our scientists discover human emotions in tomatos and potatos? Like for real, why not just say our dinner tables can talk. What drugs are you on?
Wow... much scorn, very tough, wow.

Read the two posts above you. Think before you act tough, keyboard warrior.
 
Eating meat is a natural part of life!

Your food dying in a horrible terrible way is also a part of nature! Do lions feel bad about chasing down their dinner until it's exhausted and then eating it alive? Ripping it to shreds while it's family watches in horror from a distance? D: No, no it doesn't.

We're not any better than lions. We gotta have meat in our diets too.

...it doesn't stop me from feeling bad though when I think about it. ;_; So I would be less guilty and heartbroken if our food animals had a good quality of life before they get mercilessly slaughtered and come home to be my tasty dinner.
 
...it doesn't stop me from feeling bad though when I think about it. ;_; So I would be less guilty and heartbroken if our food animals had a good quality of life before they get mercilessly slaughtered and come home to be my tasty dinner.
I feel like it's worse if you know they had a decent life. That means they were torn away from a nice life to be killed and have their flesh devoured. At least for the ones in shitty factory farms you know that they weren't losing much when they got turned into steaks, y'know? :P
 
Eating meat is a natural part of life!

Your food dying in a horrible terrible way is also a part of nature! Do lions feel bad about chasing down their dinner until it's exhausted and then eating it alive? Ripping it to shreds while it's family watches in horror from a distance? D: No, no it doesn't.

We're not any better than lions. We gotta have meat in our diets too.

...it doesn't stop me from feeling bad though when I think about it. ;_; So I would be less guilty and heartbroken if our food animals had a good quality of life before they get mercilessly slaughtered and come home to be my tasty dinner.

If it helps, just pretend the reason lions are lazy sacks of shit 90% of the time because they're remorseful and mopey about mauling zebras for dinner and they can't take it out over Tumblr.
 
When did our scientists discover human emotions in tomatos and potatos? Like for real, why not just say our dinner tables can talk. What drugs are you on?
Actually I think it's fantastic that we're growing to understand that plants have self-defense mechanisms and the like, which are triggered to their own version of pain. Life is struggle, torment, and death. We literally consume the living to survive. If this were a storybook, we'd be the vampires who feast off of everything with a pulse. Every single day, we consume something which once lived. We often mix these shredded organic bits in frying pans just to have a variety for our meals. We've raised entire sets of living things (plants and animals) into slave-species, who exist only because we wished them to exist. Corn, cabbages, bananas, sheep, cattle, chicken, and so on. We'll eat them raw or fry them, freeze pack them and sell them en masse. We have entire stores dedicated exclusively to distributing dead bodies, who take in trucks to refill their stock by the tens of thousands every week.

Our entire existence is dependent on a constant slaughter of all other living things. That is four billion years of nature at work: We're the apex predators because we can eat anything and know how to manipulate the environment to service our needs and desires. The fact that plants "feel" things in a crude sense is not at all surprising, and should be welcomed. It's alien from our point of view, but it's alive. The only reason we tend to feel an empathetic response to animals at all is because some of them reflect certain features that we find ideal in children. It's why a lot of people are terrified of spiders but love dogs or cats.

If you only eat veggies because you think you're sparing some animals suffering by doing so, you're exercising a form of delusion. Pretending that one form of mass slaughter is acceptable to another because animals are more human-like. When the reality is far more cruel and cold.

We kill to survive, and there is no other way, because we have to consume the living to process them into nutrients so we can grow stronger and more efficient, so we can do it even more. That is the crutch of our existence. We live to kill. :ferret:
 
Just so nobody becomes Nihilistic because every bite of food is murder, let's not forget fruit/ vegetable bearing plants evolved to purposely have their seed bearing organs harvested and consumed because as it turns out, having animals spread your seeds around is a great way to propagate your species. It's kind of like how crabs, being fucking metal, will rip off a damaged limb without hesitation like Piccalo because it'll regrow after a few molting periods.

Nature is awesome. And delicious.
 
<_<...well that took an extreme left lol.

My question was simply do you think about what you eat? Are you aware of it or is it just blah, it's what I've always done, who cares?

I found out a few days ago I'm allergic to mugwort (common seasonings we use in food) and now I have to be MORE aware of what I consume. Like I prefer cage free meat over what we normally eat however my family don't care. Meat is meat to them and we're all gonna die eventually. I like fish and veggies with my food, them? Not so much.

Are you involved with how you eat?

Being straight up vegan or vegetation is not the ideal solution but opting out from time to time doesn't seem like a bad idea for me.

I would also never force anyone to eat how I eat. Extremists are...crazy and like to blow shit up. I pass <_< But it's more about awareness.

Also, The Happening is a great movie about plants taking revenge on people out of pain/anger.
 
This marks the only time in history "The Happening" and "great movie" have appeared together in a sentence.

And what exactly is mugwort, exactly? It's tempting to pretend it's an ingredient in potions class.
 
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