As one who does not care if the food i eat has meat in it, maybe i can clarify why people react like this. It’s simple: you make me feel like i’m some sort of a heartless, evil person for eating meat, i will make you feel bad as well. Eating chicken is murder ? We humans are omnivores, we eat anything. Meat is less efficient land wise, but is more efficient to digest. Morals have nothing to do with it, as we have long evolved to be that way.
If you want people to eat more plants; my advice is to make it a better option. I often make myself a 100% plant pasta sauce, but that takes 3x longer to do and doesn’t cost much less then just grilling a piece of meat and cutting a tomato or two. Make cheap tasty vegetarian fast food stalls, cheap mini markets, etc. Calling people murderers will make some of them hate you.
PS I have a vegetarian friend, for over a decade i didn’t know he was. Respect his decision, has nothing to do with me.
May I request that you watch Dominion, a 2018 documentary about the farming industry. https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko
If, after watching it, you still don’t care about consuming animal products or not then fair enough.
People seem so sure they already know how animals are farmed so they don’t need to learn about it or watch this kinda thing, but I feel many people would be shocked to actually see with their own eyes that it’s not ‘happy cows living it up in green fields all day’ like the farming industry would like us all to continue believing.
Many people who work in factory farms end up with all kinds of mental illnesses. Even those who are desensitised to the suffering of animals end up with PTSD and severe depression from contributing to this man-made animal hell.
My grandparents had pigs, chicken, goats, etc. And my father has farm animals. I’v also seen larger scale farming in my country. It’s not so bad as what you are thinking of, here is not the usa. I know of what you want to show me. Maybe go watch Clarksons Farm for a different view ? Do what you want either way.
So have you seen Dominion already? I just find it hard to believe anyone can watch Dominion from start to finish and not be done with animal products forever, unless they lack any form of empathy.
I don’t see how your family having farm animals has much relevance unless they keep them as part of an animal sanctuary where the animals can live out their lives in peace and safety, plenty of room to roam and live as they would like to live their lives?
Were any of the animals’ lives cut short so that they could be eaten? Were any of them ever forced to do something they didn’t want to do? Did any of the animals that were slaughtered actually want to die?
When you say you’ve seen large scale farming in your country, was that in the slaughterhouses? All of the animals were treated with courtesy and respect? Never mistreated? Imagine for a moment that instead of animals being farmed, it was your family members being farmed… would you feel that they were all being treated fairly and justly then? Being herded around and murdered in the prime of their lives so someone can enjoy a sandwich?
Animals have feelings and emotions just like human animals… the way they feel things will be very similar to how we feel things, both pain and happiness amongst all the other types of feelings and emotions.
Imagine again your family being stunned before being murdered, does that make the murder ok because they didn’t suffer at the moment of death?
Or perhaps you live in a country where you don’t even need to stun the animal before killing, you can just hang them upside down and skirt their throat while they slowly die in agony.
I’ve seen a clip of Clarksons farm, it was something to do with him always feeling dread when it was time for his animals to be slaughtered. I’m assuming because even a complete buffoon like Clarkson knows deep down, it’s wrong to kill animals.
Unpopular take: Good people doing bad things does not make the bad things not bad. Yes, purchasing and consuming animal products is a morally bad thing to do. It is not morally neutral.
So yes, by consuming animal products, you are a worse person than you would be if you were not.
Your choice is to purchase the bodies of the dead and “respect” the fact they at they were killed by turning them into sewage. Your choice is to financially reward those who bring them into existence for the sole purpose of killing them for your pleasure and the killers’ profit. This is not a morally neutral thing. This is a morally bad thing.
Personal choice stops being personal when there’s a victim. The victim is the one whose corpse is being ground up in your mouth.
Look, I agree that eating meat is morally bad, I accept that. What most extremist vegetarians need to accept is that there’s people that simple don’t care about animals as much as them, I don’t really care about it just like I don’t really care about some bad things happening in the world, I know that it’s morally wrong, and I’ll push for more options for the people that do care, but I won’t restrict my diet or personally try to fix those things, because I don’t care enough.
And this sounds quite rude and I look like an ass, I know, but the reality is that there’s a lot of people that think exactly like this. Hell there’s tons of people that thinks like this about actual humans. You won’t convince those people because in the end, it’s their decision and as bad as eating red meat etc is for the body and global warming etc, so are tons of other stuff that people do.
I really advocate for more vegetarian stuff, I actually enjoy seitan/tofu and dishes with them, but the fact is that I’ll keep consuming meat once in a while, and when you start trying to make every meat consumer your enemy, you also make people from my group, people that actually push for more progress, your enemy, and that’s honestly a bad way to make progress.
This is going to be a generational progress, there’s way more vegetarian teenagers than 40+ people, and every friend group I frequent on my age range 25-35 has at least someone vegetarian, and businesses naturally will offer more options because if they won’t they’ll lose business.
Try not making society your enemy, because if you do you will become the enemy of society.
Your opinion isn’t unpopular and you are not oppressed if the media supports you.
The problem is when the animal suffers. Animals eat other animals all the time and you’re not a killer if you want to eat meat and be healthy.
If killing animals to eat them is immoral and sadistic even if the animal doesn’t suffer then why you kill fucking plants to eat them? I value animals’ lives and plants’ lives more than human lives but I won’t stop eating just because of that neither will force people or say they’re killers cause they’re eating something that was previously alive.
Animals eat other animals out of necessity to survive. Humans don’t need to consume animal products at all to be healthy.
If you pay someone to kill and/or torture an animal, mortality wise that is the same as doing it yourself.
Is this a super hypothetical animal not suffering? Every animal that is any of the following: subjugated, imprisoned, artificially inseminated, branded, murdered, factory farmed, either taken from his/her mother or their offspring taken from them, neglected etc. Suffers.
I don’t know how much you know about the farming industry, but the vast majority of farmed animals will suffer horrendously and be killed unkindly, unjustly and will before their natural lifespan.
Their lives and murder are a real-life hell.
Knocking the animals out before slitting their throats doesn’t always work. Many, many animals end up taking ages to die while being conscious.
Many animals are boiled alive because they didn’t get knocked out.
But that is just at the point of being murdered… almost all farm animals up to that point will have suffered varying degrees of mental and physical torture.
I don’t know if you are joking about comparing eating plants being the same as eating animals. A lot of meat eaters do seem to make that argument as if it is genuine, so I’ll respond to it by pasting a part of a book I read recently about it;
"Firstly and most obviously, it’s important to address the science behind this. A plant
lacks a central nervous system, pain receptors and a brain which means that
anatomically they don’t have the ability to feel pain.
If we also consider that the primary reason human and non-human animals feel pain
is to alert us that we are in danger or are being hurt and that we need to escape the
situation that we are in, a plant cannot move and thus any pain would be
inescapable, making life torturous for any plant. Which begs the question, why would
plants ever evolve such a horribly debilitating and destructive characteristic, as it goes
against the fundamental purpose of evolution?
If we now view the “plants feel pain argument” from a creationist point of view, why
would a benevolent and compassionate God give such a horrible curse to plants?
Why would he allow them to suffer so terribly, if it served no purpose for their
survival?
I think part of where the confusion regarding plants and pain comes from is that it is
true that they are alive and they conduct various activities at a cellular level, such as
tilting to face the sunlight. In fact, plants are capable of doing some truly amazing
things, but they do not conduct any activities at a conscious or cognitive level, in
essence meaning that plants are not sentient.
I think a really good way of highlighting this to people is to point out that plants react
but they don’t respond. A venus fly trap shuts itself on to a fly, not because it is
consciously aware that a fly has landed onto it, but because it reacts to the pressure
stimuli caused when the fly lands onto it. This is why the venus flytrap will close
around anything that triggers this response, including cigarette butts. A cow on the
other hand, won’t eat cigarette butts just because someone puts them in their mouth
because a cow consciously responds.
If we move past the science of whether or not plants feel pain and concentrate on the
ethics of the excuse, I am doubtful that anyone truly believes that dropping a
cauliflower into boiling water and boiling chickens alive (something that often
happens in the chicken slaughtering process) is the same thing. Nobody thinks that
slicing the neck of a cow is similar to cutting the stems off a broccoli, or castrating a
pig is similar to peeling a potato.
But say the person you are talking to is determined that plants feel pain like animals
do - it takes up to 16 kilograms of plants to create 1 kilogram of animal flesh,
meaning vastly more plants are killed in the production of animal products than they
are vegan products.
On top of this it’s important to note that up to 91% of Amazon
rainforest destruction is due to animal agriculture, meaning that millions of trees have
been and continues to be destroyed because of our consumption of animal products.
So if the person you are speaking to truly believes that plants feel pain and are
sentient, then remind them that by consuming non-vegan products they are not only
causing the suffering of animals but also causing the alleged suffering of huge
amounts of plants as well.
To be honest, if this excuse comes up I often avoid talking about the science of
whether or not plants have the ability to feel pain as sometimes people will say, “but
science has only gone so far” and they get stuck with that point. Instead, I often just
go straight into talking about the amount of crops killed for animal products, so
perhaps try asking:
“For the sake of discussion, let’s say plants do feel pain, are you aware that it can
take up to 16 kilograms of plants to create 1 kilogram of animal flesh, so vastly more
plants are murdered for animal products than they are vegan products?”
You could also ask, “If you were driving down the road and a dog jumped out in front
of your car, would you swerve onto a bed of flowers to avoid hitting the dog?” - this
reinforces in people’s minds that there is morally a difference between non-human
animals and plants, as in that situation we would always choose to avoid the dog
and instead hit the plants"
Plants can feel pain and it’s not a creationist standpoint, they just can’t make a visible reaction but they do transmit very small electric charges in reaction to pain. Plants also can react to other things like sounds and it is sometimes used to make them grow better. Also, they can’t scream but they’re still alive so you’re still murdering them.
Animals aren’t tortured cause of the simple fact stress makes their meat bad (and it would be a crime and stupid to torture an animal just cause you can) and sometimes nearly not edible and, if you couldn’t notice, people don’t eat bad meat.
“Lie for youself if you want but not to me.” You can pretend your unhealthy is helping someone but you can’t say to people it is healthy. Vegans face many health issues and are, almost always, very underweight; humans are omnivores and not herbivores. Destroy your body if want but don’t lie to other people and encourage them to do the same.
As one who does not care if the food i eat has meat in it, maybe i can clarify why people react like this. It’s simple: you make me feel like i’m some sort of a heartless, evil person for eating meat, i will make you feel bad as well. Eating chicken is murder ? We humans are omnivores, we eat anything. Meat is less efficient land wise, but is more efficient to digest. Morals have nothing to do with it, as we have long evolved to be that way.
If you want people to eat more plants; my advice is to make it a better option. I often make myself a 100% plant pasta sauce, but that takes 3x longer to do and doesn’t cost much less then just grilling a piece of meat and cutting a tomato or two. Make cheap tasty vegetarian fast food stalls, cheap mini markets, etc. Calling people murderers will make some of them hate you.
PS I have a vegetarian friend, for over a decade i didn’t know he was. Respect his decision, has nothing to do with me.
murderer.
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD SAUSAGE
Based.
May I request that you watch Dominion, a 2018 documentary about the farming industry. https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko
If, after watching it, you still don’t care about consuming animal products or not then fair enough. People seem so sure they already know how animals are farmed so they don’t need to learn about it or watch this kinda thing, but I feel many people would be shocked to actually see with their own eyes that it’s not ‘happy cows living it up in green fields all day’ like the farming industry would like us all to continue believing.
Many people who work in factory farms end up with all kinds of mental illnesses. Even those who are desensitised to the suffering of animals end up with PTSD and severe depression from contributing to this man-made animal hell.
My grandparents had pigs, chicken, goats, etc. And my father has farm animals. I’v also seen larger scale farming in my country. It’s not so bad as what you are thinking of, here is not the usa. I know of what you want to show me. Maybe go watch Clarksons Farm for a different view ? Do what you want either way.
So have you seen Dominion already? I just find it hard to believe anyone can watch Dominion from start to finish and not be done with animal products forever, unless they lack any form of empathy.
I don’t see how your family having farm animals has much relevance unless they keep them as part of an animal sanctuary where the animals can live out their lives in peace and safety, plenty of room to roam and live as they would like to live their lives? Were any of the animals’ lives cut short so that they could be eaten? Were any of them ever forced to do something they didn’t want to do? Did any of the animals that were slaughtered actually want to die?
When you say you’ve seen large scale farming in your country, was that in the slaughterhouses? All of the animals were treated with courtesy and respect? Never mistreated? Imagine for a moment that instead of animals being farmed, it was your family members being farmed… would you feel that they were all being treated fairly and justly then? Being herded around and murdered in the prime of their lives so someone can enjoy a sandwich?
Animals have feelings and emotions just like human animals… the way they feel things will be very similar to how we feel things, both pain and happiness amongst all the other types of feelings and emotions. Imagine again your family being stunned before being murdered, does that make the murder ok because they didn’t suffer at the moment of death? Or perhaps you live in a country where you don’t even need to stun the animal before killing, you can just hang them upside down and skirt their throat while they slowly die in agony.
I’ve seen a clip of Clarksons farm, it was something to do with him always feeling dread when it was time for his animals to be slaughtered. I’m assuming because even a complete buffoon like Clarkson knows deep down, it’s wrong to kill animals.
Yea, one sided conversations usually don’t go far. Have fun in your life.
I suspect you don’t understand what a one sided conversation is, but ok, good luck and have fun with your life too.
Unpopular take: Good people doing bad things does not make the bad things not bad. Yes, purchasing and consuming animal products is a morally bad thing to do. It is not morally neutral.
So yes, by consuming animal products, you are a worse person than you would be if you were not.
Your choice is to purchase the bodies of the dead and “respect” the fact they at they were killed by turning them into sewage. Your choice is to financially reward those who bring them into existence for the sole purpose of killing them for your pleasure and the killers’ profit. This is not a morally neutral thing. This is a morally bad thing.
Personal choice stops being personal when there’s a victim. The victim is the one whose corpse is being ground up in your mouth.
Look, I agree that eating meat is morally bad, I accept that. What most extremist vegetarians need to accept is that there’s people that simple don’t care about animals as much as them, I don’t really care about it just like I don’t really care about some bad things happening in the world, I know that it’s morally wrong, and I’ll push for more options for the people that do care, but I won’t restrict my diet or personally try to fix those things, because I don’t care enough.
And this sounds quite rude and I look like an ass, I know, but the reality is that there’s a lot of people that think exactly like this. Hell there’s tons of people that thinks like this about actual humans. You won’t convince those people because in the end, it’s their decision and as bad as eating red meat etc is for the body and global warming etc, so are tons of other stuff that people do.
I really advocate for more vegetarian stuff, I actually enjoy seitan/tofu and dishes with them, but the fact is that I’ll keep consuming meat once in a while, and when you start trying to make every meat consumer your enemy, you also make people from my group, people that actually push for more progress, your enemy, and that’s honestly a bad way to make progress.
This is going to be a generational progress, there’s way more vegetarian teenagers than 40+ people, and every friend group I frequent on my age range 25-35 has at least someone vegetarian, and businesses naturally will offer more options because if they won’t they’ll lose business.
Try not making society your enemy, because if you do you will become the enemy of society.
Your opinion isn’t unpopular and you are not oppressed if the media supports you.
The problem is when the animal suffers. Animals eat other animals all the time and you’re not a killer if you want to eat meat and be healthy.
If killing animals to eat them is immoral and sadistic even if the animal doesn’t suffer then why you kill fucking plants to eat them? I value animals’ lives and plants’ lives more than human lives but I won’t stop eating just because of that neither will force people or say they’re killers cause they’re eating something that was previously alive.
Animals eat other animals out of necessity to survive. Humans don’t need to consume animal products at all to be healthy.
If you pay someone to kill and/or torture an animal, mortality wise that is the same as doing it yourself.
Is this a super hypothetical animal not suffering? Every animal that is any of the following: subjugated, imprisoned, artificially inseminated, branded, murdered, factory farmed, either taken from his/her mother or their offspring taken from them, neglected etc. Suffers. I don’t know how much you know about the farming industry, but the vast majority of farmed animals will suffer horrendously and be killed unkindly, unjustly and will before their natural lifespan. Their lives and murder are a real-life hell. Knocking the animals out before slitting their throats doesn’t always work. Many, many animals end up taking ages to die while being conscious. Many animals are boiled alive because they didn’t get knocked out. But that is just at the point of being murdered… almost all farm animals up to that point will have suffered varying degrees of mental and physical torture.
I don’t know if you are joking about comparing eating plants being the same as eating animals. A lot of meat eaters do seem to make that argument as if it is genuine, so I’ll respond to it by pasting a part of a book I read recently about it;
"Firstly and most obviously, it’s important to address the science behind this. A plant lacks a central nervous system, pain receptors and a brain which means that anatomically they don’t have the ability to feel pain.
If we also consider that the primary reason human and non-human animals feel pain is to alert us that we are in danger or are being hurt and that we need to escape the situation that we are in, a plant cannot move and thus any pain would be inescapable, making life torturous for any plant. Which begs the question, why would plants ever evolve such a horribly debilitating and destructive characteristic, as it goes against the fundamental purpose of evolution?
If we now view the “plants feel pain argument” from a creationist point of view, why would a benevolent and compassionate God give such a horrible curse to plants? Why would he allow them to suffer so terribly, if it served no purpose for their survival?
I think part of where the confusion regarding plants and pain comes from is that it is true that they are alive and they conduct various activities at a cellular level, such as tilting to face the sunlight. In fact, plants are capable of doing some truly amazing things, but they do not conduct any activities at a conscious or cognitive level, in essence meaning that plants are not sentient.
I think a really good way of highlighting this to people is to point out that plants react but they don’t respond. A venus fly trap shuts itself on to a fly, not because it is consciously aware that a fly has landed onto it, but because it reacts to the pressure stimuli caused when the fly lands onto it. This is why the venus flytrap will close around anything that triggers this response, including cigarette butts. A cow on the other hand, won’t eat cigarette butts just because someone puts them in their mouth because a cow consciously responds.
If we move past the science of whether or not plants feel pain and concentrate on the ethics of the excuse, I am doubtful that anyone truly believes that dropping a cauliflower into boiling water and boiling chickens alive (something that often happens in the chicken slaughtering process) is the same thing. Nobody thinks that slicing the neck of a cow is similar to cutting the stems off a broccoli, or castrating a pig is similar to peeling a potato. But say the person you are talking to is determined that plants feel pain like animals do - it takes up to 16 kilograms of plants to create 1 kilogram of animal flesh, meaning vastly more plants are killed in the production of animal products than they are vegan products. On top of this it’s important to note that up to 91% of Amazon rainforest destruction is due to animal agriculture, meaning that millions of trees have been and continues to be destroyed because of our consumption of animal products.
So if the person you are speaking to truly believes that plants feel pain and are sentient, then remind them that by consuming non-vegan products they are not only causing the suffering of animals but also causing the alleged suffering of huge amounts of plants as well. To be honest, if this excuse comes up I often avoid talking about the science of whether or not plants have the ability to feel pain as sometimes people will say, “but science has only gone so far” and they get stuck with that point. Instead, I often just go straight into talking about the amount of crops killed for animal products, so perhaps try asking: “For the sake of discussion, let’s say plants do feel pain, are you aware that it can take up to 16 kilograms of plants to create 1 kilogram of animal flesh, so vastly more plants are murdered for animal products than they are vegan products?” You could also ask, “If you were driving down the road and a dog jumped out in front of your car, would you swerve onto a bed of flowers to avoid hitting the dog?” - this reinforces in people’s minds that there is morally a difference between non-human animals and plants, as in that situation we would always choose to avoid the dog and instead hit the plants"
Plants can feel pain and it’s not a creationist standpoint, they just can’t make a visible reaction but they do transmit very small electric charges in reaction to pain. Plants also can react to other things like sounds and it is sometimes used to make them grow better. Also, they can’t scream but they’re still alive so you’re still murdering them.
Animals aren’t tortured cause of the simple fact stress makes their meat bad (and it would be a crime and stupid to torture an animal just cause you can) and sometimes nearly not edible and, if you couldn’t notice, people don’t eat bad meat.
“Lie for youself if you want but not to me.” You can pretend your unhealthy is helping someone but you can’t say to people it is healthy. Vegans face many health issues and are, almost always, very underweight; humans are omnivores and not herbivores. Destroy your body if want but don’t lie to other people and encourage them to do the same.