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United States24813 Posts
Many people don't like the way we humans raise animals to be slaughtered for food. This is probably one of the most common reasons for becoming a vegetarian. Personally, I don't mind that we harvest animals but wish for the process of raising and killing the animals to be as painless as possible. I thought I had a pretty reasonable view on this topic, and perhaps I do, but something made me realize I'm still actually pretty confused.
A few weeks ago there was a big Tornado in the US that stuck, among other things, a large chicken farm. It destroyed the buildings that chickens were being raised in. The photos posted on the web showed the ground littered with dead chickens (you could barely see the ground) with a headline that something like 500,000 chickens were killed by the damage. When I saw this headline and looked at the pictures, I felt awful. Awful the same way you feel when you read a school bus full of children from your hometown lost control and careened off a cliff (except not as much obviously)...
I have intentionally not included the relevant article for the purposes of keeping the reader objective, but after you read feel free to do a quick search for it if you want to.
Is it reasonable for me to so emotionally react to this article? These chickens were being prepared for slaughter. I don't think the 'suffering' they experienced due to death by tornado was much more than whatever is associated with being slaughtered in a major chicken farm. I also noticed that the few chickens that managed to survive the tornado were found walking around in between all the chicken carcasses eating little bits of seed on the ground like nothing had happened. There didn't seem to be any emotional trauma whatsoever for these chickens (that's not to say the same would be true for other animals... I can't say).
It seems like I try to have it both ways... I can write off the slaughter of animals as a necessary expense in order for humans to benefit, but when the animals die some other way suddenly I feel really bad for them, even though the end result for the animals is the same.
 
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I think the sadder thing are the conditions under which those chickens must have been kept if a roof collapsing can kill half a million of them.
Your emotional reaction would probably be the same for both "ways to die" for the chicken if you actually saw them being slaughtered for food. If we had an image (much like the pictures on cigarette packages) of a killed animal or the questionable living conditions of factory farming in front of us every time we buy/ eat meat, most of us would probably become vegetarians.
edit: not a vegetarian myself, though I've cut down heavily on eating meat because I've always liked vegetables anyways. ezpzyo
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I never thought of myself as an animal lover, and really still never think of myself as one. But i read an article a few years ago about a mother bear killing her cub because of the pain both her and her cub were feeling. They were in China or some place and the farmers there were extracting bile from her and the cub because the bile is used as some kind of medicine in China. Needless to say, this is an extremely painful process and it disturbed me quite a bit that an animal would kill their own offspring, something that goes completely against nature. Animals shouldn't be treated like that
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it is reasonable to be emotionally about the article.
Id recommend some texts on animal rights (most popular are probably singer and regan) to get a different perspective on this topic.
There is no meat from happy animals, but only from dead ones.
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Norway28929 Posts
I largely think that the degree to which you care about animals is a good indicator of how good of a person you are.
so be happy with yourself.
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On May 17 2014 23:13 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I largely think that the degree to which you care about animals is a good indicator of how good of a person you are.
so be happy with yourself.
It shows empathy. It's an ability to be nice to other beings that have no intention to harm you, or at least no intention to do it out of malice; this is especially true when you can easily harm them out of malice.
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TLADT24920 Posts
hmm I think part of it might be because you saw the end result of the Tornado first hand. I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling emotional when you see that many chickens dead but when it comes to slaughter, you only ever hear about that but never saw it happen directly. Maybe if you did, you would have a better idea of what you want and might feel just as if not more emotional.
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My girlfriend is a vegetarian for this very reason. She hates the way animal farms treat and degrade animals and don't even give them an inch of space to call their own before they are slaughtered. She still eats fish, but wants to one day cut it out due to overstocked fisheries and fear of mercury poisoning.
I have stopped eating any meat that is not organic, grass-fed or grazed. Though package labeling of these things may not always be honest, unfortunately. And it's also expensive as all hell.
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It's weird that you bring this up because I recently had a similar reaction. I've always been more concerned with the suffering of other humans, particularly children, than I have of animals.
But recently I went chicken catching. There were a whole mess of chickens that needed to be inoculated with something so we would wade out into the throng, grab a chicken, stick it with a needle, and then literally throw it over this fence that separated the two sides. It was pitch black in there, and at the end of the shift when the lights came back on, it painted a pretty gruesome spectacle.
There was zero room for the chickens to move around. They were incredible smooshed together, and just sort of jolted amongst each other. Plus, when the lights came back on they went berserk and started scrambling over each other in a mad panic. A ton of birds died in this process. Some guy was striding through the birds dumping the dead ones into a large sack he carried. It made me want to vomit.
I guess there's no real point to this story other than to say that I'm right there along with you. It never really bothered me that much when I heard the living condition of some animals. But seeing that stuff up close really depressed me.
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Hong Kong9183 Posts
be glad you live in such a place with such a surplus that you can have such feelings
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Netherlands6192 Posts
When I was about 9, I attended a farm function in which a bunch of farmers trained a couple of piglets to race, and then held bets on them on the night of the function. At the time it was pretty difficult economically in the country, so they were fund raising. At the end of the night they auctioned off the piglets. My father was pretty drunk by this point and agreed to let me bid for a piglet.
It arrived two days later on the back of a truck and lived in my suburban backyard for about 8 or 9 months. In this time I named it (Grunter), bonded with him, fed him, played with him etc until he got really big and fat. At this point my father announced it was time he got sent to live on a real farm and have piglets of his own. Naturally this upset me, but I didn't have a say. And so my pig was shipped off to some 'farm'.
A few years ago I asked my parents what farm Grunter had been sent to, out of curiosity. My parents looked at each other and then admitted that he had been sent to the abattoir and we had eaten him...
About 5 years ago whilst I was away at uni my sister decided to adopt 50 day old chicks to raise (again) in our backyard. Naturally, a lot of them died due to cold, lack of professional conditions for raising tiny babies etc, but at least 25 of them grew to full adult size. My family never killed a single one to eat, and we sold several to other breeders. (Off point but we had one specific hen that the others used to bully, so we took her out of the enclosure, and we would often find her sleeping with the dogs, or following them around the garden. We named her Meg.) But yeah, not a single chicken was eaten by my family.
My parents are always going on about how awful it is that people eat dogs. But they sense no hypocrisy in eating my pet pig. They wouldn't eat the chickens they raised, but they will still buy store bought chicken and eat it. Why is it that people will eat other creatures that eat plants, but not ones that eat meat? Just the other day I was talking to a hunter - he takes people out on safari and they shoot a zebra or eland, and then they eat it. But then they catch a leopard they skin it and throw away the meat. Why do people do this? I really hate how desensitized people have become to the death of animals. Sure they're not as smart as people, but it doesn't mean they don't have feelings or emotions. A zebra runs from a lion because it WANTS to live. It is a struggle for life, it is scared of dying, just like us.
Meh. People have reached the stage where technology is advanced enough that we don't have to have meat to survive, so personally I go without meat where I can because I choose to.
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Norway28929 Posts
On May 18 2014 01:15 itsjustatank wrote:
be glad you live in such a place with such a surplus that you can have such feelings
erm? Okay China is notoriously horrible but it's my impression that Indians treat animals with much more respect than westerners do. There's no real connection between wealth of country and treatment of animals - if anything this connection would be the opposite of what you seem to indicate.
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People always associate such negativity with death, and in the case of humans the emotional suffering of loved ones is quite grave, but for animals, especially farm-raised chickens? Not so much.
Maybe I just don't "fear" death in a purely academic sense (I would not be at all afraid to die if I didn't have family), but honestly death for animals is such a natural thing especially when you think about what is really important in the lives of animals.
A chicken isn't going to be intellectually deprived or seek higher forms of joy, for them maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain (in constraint to their natural instincts and behavior) is all that matters. I would say chickens were relatively "happy" before the mass adoption of modern chicken farms, raised naturally outdoors with ample space to exercise and with natural chicken feed.
Nowadays, chicken farms are fucking disgusting hellholes that would definitely qualify as a place of animal cruelty, and conditions for chickens are still rapidly deteriorating. Just a few years ago, chicken farms were at least still open-air with iron mesh on the sides of the barn. Currently, most chicken farms are completely sealed, and these chickens live in enormously overcrowded barns with either separate levels or tiny little separate cages, and they literally sit on top of their feces all day, eat a ton of GMO feed laced with all kinds of antibiotics and growth hormones, live among death birds that don't get removed for days or even weeks, and never ever get to see sunlight in their entire lives.
So yah... I really don't think you're becoming a vegetarian for the right reasons.
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poor birds.
Is it reasonable for me to so emotionally react to this article? yes. There might be a more profound reason, or you may be very much more aware person than you think. The way animals are being grown and breeded for our tables is outrageous. Not only to the animals, but towards humans as well. What good can come from eating food that is treated like an object. I agree with you on the meat eating, i prefer a farmers chicken than the supermarket chicken. I mean, i don' t eat birds, and i try to eat as little red meat as possible, not on any moral grounds, but i have hard time digesting that stuff. Love fish do. Even there, horrors above horrors. They started 20 years ago to box fish that lives some 2000 meters under sea level, that is to say creatures that have never seen the light of day and serving them to us in cans under "exotic" species.
And tuna, don' t get me even started i don' t eat tuna. Again no moral grounds, just hard to digest and it has a very high tolerance to pollution.
To get back to the point, the killing of an innocent for no good reason makes some of us feel an emotional upheaven. There is nothing wrong with that. After all, these birds where grown for slaughter, and instead now they are all dead.
Oh and people, if you can afford it economically grow your own stuff or have a farmer slaughter the animal and sell it to you. Its much more tasty.
Oh and a vegetarian does not eat fish . I find vegetarian and vegan extremly stupid definitions. can' t you just say i don' t eat meat or fish or derived products?
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Similar things happen to people. We are fine with sweatshop labor in deplorable conditions as long as we get our cheap products.
No one thinks about these things much until they see them first hand. Industrial livestock producers know this. That's why they are doing everything in their power to keep their livestock handling practices hidden from the public eye.
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Hong Kong9183 Posts
On May 18 2014 01:28 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On May 18 2014 01:15 itsjustatank wrote:
be glad you live in such a place with such a surplus that you can have such feelings erm? Okay China is notoriously horrible but it's my impression that Indians treat animals with much more respect than westerners do. There's no real connection between wealth of country and treatment of animals - if anything this connection would be the opposite of what you seem to indicate.
the dislocation of an animal domesticated for food from 'food source' to 'thing that has feelings' is an indicator that surplus exists. in the united states we can look down upon mass production of food because the majority of people dont have to worry about their next meal here; the people in the places we export that food to do not have that luxury.
the existence of ideologies that privilege animal life above human life is the logical extreme of this luxury.
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Netherlands6192 Posts
On May 18 2014 01:31 pebble444 wrote:
Oh and a vegetarian does not eat fish . I find vegetarian and vegan extremly stupid definitions. can' t you just say i don' t eat meat or fish or derived products?
Someone who only eats fish is called a Pescetarian.
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On May 18 2014 01:17 dravernor wrote:
Meh. People have reached the stage where technology is advanced enough that we don't have to have meat to survive, so personally I go without meat where I can because I choose to.
i am wondering what "where I can" means exactly. i cant think of a realistic situation where you couldnt
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Netherlands6192 Posts
On May 18 2014 01:49 Paljas wrote:Show nested quote +On May 18 2014 01:17 dravernor wrote:
Meh. People have reached the stage where technology is advanced enough that we don't have to have meat to survive, so personally I go without meat where I can because I choose to. i am wondering what "where I can" means exactly. i cant think of a realistic situation where you couldnt
I became a vegetarian as soon as I lived on my own and didn't have to share meals with people. I was a vegetarian for several years and during that time I was frequently ill because I didn't have the student budget to properly supplement my diet. When I moved back home after uni my parents requested that I experiment with my diet by eating at least one meal a month that includes fish. I was extremely reluctant, but I went along with it and to my surprise it made a noticeable difference.
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On May 18 2014 01:28 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On May 18 2014 01:15 itsjustatank wrote:
be glad you live in such a place with such a surplus that you can have such feelings erm? Okay China is notoriously horrible but it's my impression that Indians treat animals with much more respect than westerners do. There's no real connection between wealth of country and treatment of animals - if anything this connection would be the opposite of what you seem to indicate.
Have you been to India sir?
Like yes there is wealth but the areas that aren't directly wealthy?
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EPT
