> Their farm is open for visitors and you can see pigs and chickens that actually look happy. The pigs even run over to you when they smell you and you can see their cute little tails wigglin'.

That reminded me of a childhood memory. We didn't have a farm, but we had few animals (sheeps, chickens, rabbits). One year my father decided to buy a piglet from a spring fair. Me and my brothers were thrilled, it was playfull and curious (not like sheep, who were rather booring), kinda like a dog. My father also really liked to take care of it. I remember that he even applied some soothing cream on it after a rather bad sunburn. But in the end it was still bought and raised for meat. My father had always been a guy that slaughtered animals for other people in the neighborhoud, pigs also. But this one really got under his skin. He did still slaughter it, but sweared to never raise and kill a pig himself. It reportedly was kinda like killing a puppy.

Yes, my family raised pigs and it became unbearable. They were smarter than any dog I had met at the time. They were kind and curious animals. They loved to play and had favourite foods.

After a few years we had a bad slaughter day in which one pig survived a bullet to the head and started making some of the most horrifying movements and screams I’ve ever heard.

We were all aware that we’d killed a sentient creature that we cared for. Not much unlike killing our dogs. We talked about it several times over days and weeks, here and there over months, then not much from then on. We never got pigs again.

Somehow it took me another 15 years to stop eating animals. It blows my mind that I was able to keep it up after that day – it was so gory and brutal, and simultaneously entirely unnecessary. We ate those pigs because we liked it, not because we needed it.

> Order vegetarian when eating out

I've been pretty successful with the opposite, only getting meat when I eat out / special occasion and not stocking it in the house.

The other upside to this(at least here in UK) is that it's easy to find a restaurant that serves local meat and produce, but it's extremely hard to find local meat in stores - even "butchers"(I put that in quotes, since I firmly believe that 90% of British "butchers" are basically cosplaying as such and are nothing more than stores that sell factory-prepared meat in a store meant to look like a traditional butcher store) are not that keen to tell you where the meat is actually from - when pushed you might find out that your local "butcher" is actually selling meat raised and slaughtered in Denmark or Poland.

There is a vegan activist from the UK named Ed Winters who has some damning content about abattoirs and animal agriculture in general in the country. He’s very eloquent and diligent about sourcing good data, and it seems as though your suspicions about butchers selling questionable meat is astute.

Where I live it’s not better. The average piece of meat comes from a slice of hell in some feedlot or crowded enclosure, labelling laws make it look okay, and people carry on and eat it. Butchers selling nicer meat have variable suppliers and, when I was eating meat, I’d notice over time that supplier quality was gradually decreasing and never increasing. Like they started with these great ideals and eventually had to give in and be able to reliably get a product and a decent margin off of it. Meat is a major casualty of the race to the bottom.

One advantage to US "exurban? not-quite-rural? not sure what to call it but 30-50 miles from a big city" living is you can actually find smallish farms that do everything on-site and buy from them.

If you're willing to use freezers you can even stock up for quite a long time (some places will even let you pick the cow and process it for you and give you all the meat).

Buying local and small batch generates more carbon dioxide and is less sustainable. https://worksinprogress.substack.com/p/notes-on-progress-an-...

I'm curious about this but the article doesn't really go into any depth summarizing things.

For example:

> Grass-fed beef seems like the environmentally-friendly option. Hormone-free chickens do too. Yet intensive livestock farming in feedlots often has a lower environmental cost, despite a higher price when it comes to animal welfare.

I'm not an expert in this space, but I do know that terms like "organic", "grass fed", "free range", and others can have wildly different meanings depending on the farm and how they're regulated. For example, "free range" doesn't necessarily mean that chickens are able to walk around a farm; it just means that there is "access" to an outdoor space. The links I clicked on in that article didn't seem to really account for any of this and set up a comparison. The one about feed seems to compare the environmental impact of mass feeding with "organic" feed compared to industrial feed. But that's not applicable to my situation.

Ethical/morally it is probably way better. Less so than plant-based.

>* Only buy meat + eggs from a local farm that effectively does things "small batch". Their farm is open for visitors and you can see pigs and chickens that actually look happy. The pigs even run over to you when they smell you and you can see their cute little tails wigglin'.

I understand this as an ethical argument, but are you assuming any "small batch" operation is more sustainable?

I can't imagine it not being sustainable, no. Farms that grow all kinds of crops and raise many different kinds animals are sophisticated systems, and humans have learned over centuries how to best utilize them in ways that don't pollute rivers or emit incredible amounts of methane. The reason why they don't work in much of the modern world is because they don't optimize their output for maximum pounds of beef that gets ultimately sold to McDonald's, for example.

I was doing something like this last year when it hit me how bizarre it was that I wanted to see happy animals at farms when the intent was to kill them for the sole purpose of eating them. Like, what do I care if they’re happy if I’m content to take that all away from them? Why is it logical to prefer they’re happy up until the moment they’re killed – do I think their experience matters? If so, why would I kill them? If not, why does it matter if they’re happy?

If I care about their experience it seems really bizarre to kill them unless I absolutely need to. So far I’ve found no evidence that I do need to, and I’ve actually come to enjoy not eating them. I’ve become far better at cooking and it’s way easier to afford high quality ingredients.

I genuinely believe it’s great that you prefer to source food from places that at least make an effort to provide better experiences to the animals. That alone is a huge step forward for animals as well as people. I hope more and more people make the same effort.

I'm not sure I understand the logic. Everybody die, is it a reason to not seek happiness during the time we're aliveN

Everybody does die, but the animals we farm die on a schedule predetermined from the moment they're bred to be killed. That's not equivalent to the way humans tend to die, in accordance with our intent to have agency and opportunity and so on before fate befalls us. So, humans do die and that's inevitable, but we generally live without a knife on our throats many years before we'd naturally die. Animals on the other hand are farmed to their prime and killed, or used for milk or eggs until their production slows. Then they are killed, again, without any agency or opportunity to live in accordance with their own nature. They live by our desires, die by our desires, and generally suffer immensely along the way. That doesn't sit well with me.

As for our happiness, why does eating meat bring anyone happiness? If it's simple, fleeting pleasure at the cost of a sentient creature's life, it doesn't seem worth it. Pleasure is nice too, but there are better things and better ways to find pleasure than through consumption. Really, the world is filled with countless ways to enjoy myself that don't require the suffering or killing of sentient creatures.

Eating all kinds of foods brings me happiness. They also nourish me better than meat, so meat isn't even necessary. Meat is one small group of foods, and everything else is this massive world of other foods to enjoy. They almost all come at a smaller cost than meat does, financially, environmentally, and psychologically speaking.

That's the gist of it. I get a lot of pleasure from caring for animals. I take time out on my morning walk to pet cats, watch the birds, so on. I dive in the ocean to see what the marine life is doing, record footage to share with people. These things bring me far more joy than a pork chop or a steak. So why choose the steak? If I'm to do that, I have to pretend that it doesn't carry the environmental and external costs of suffering and death. I have to tell myself that I wouldn't rather care for that cow. That's not true of any animal. I'd rather it had a chance to live and thrive, just like I want to.

Some people believe animals don't have the capacity to suffer and that they're lower beings than humans. I see no evidence to support that, other than the very weak "we can't possibly know" or "they aren't as intelligent". These are irrelevant to me. They are more like us than they are different in the vast majority of ways. Hell, we can live with pig lungs in our bodies. An octopus can solve puzzles, as can a raven. Cows mourn when their calfs are taken away. Dogs develop rich relationship with their families, human or otherwise.

You can say no, none of this is evidence that animals are like humans, or that they're sentient. But again, I don't see much evidence suggesting they aren't.

So, the logic is that animals suffering and dying to get on my plate doesn't make me happy. It brings me a lot of sadness. I enjoy other foods just as much, so that then is the logical path forward for me.

I don't criticize others for eating animals. I did for a long time. I raised animals, I hunted them, I fished for them, all of that. It took me almost 40 years to arrive here. If you eat meat and you don't care if animals live or die, suffer or otherwise, that's your call and I'm not for a moment condemning anyone's choices or beliefs.