I think more people would be pushing for animal welfare and proper slaughtering/raising conditions if this was done, even if they still ate meat.
And GP's example shows that seeing the animals being killed doesn't mean people will stop eating meat.
"the more devout muslims practice ceremonial animal sacrifice which often happens on the streets with kids around, so they tend to have different relationship with the animal killing(no, they are cruelty or anything like that, it's just different)"
In the same vein, my grandparents' village was still very rural when I spent my holidays there as a kid, and the other local children would grow up surrounded by cows, sheep, chickens, and other farm animals. They'd see them be slaughtered and cooked. I can't remember a single one of them turning vegetarian. And it should be noted that the adults wouldn't tolerate any kind of cruelty or abuse towards the animals. Hell, you could even get into trouble for being too loud at night next to a barn where cattle were sleeping.
I’m not a vegan or vegetarian but I’m looking forward for lab produced meet where no cows are involved.
Plus, the children used to play with the goats and sheep while they were still small. I'm not very familiar with the cows (my grandparents didn't have any), but I know that goats also tend to be fairly smart, curious and quite playful. As a kid it's fairly easy to develop some attachment to them, especially since there isn't that big of a size difference (a cow can be intimidating to a child because of its size).
Why does animal welfare matter if at the end they will end up as food anyway? Not trolling, I legitimately want to understand.
From my point of view, livestock is just food, that happens to be in a temporary living state, before being ultimately eaten. As an end consumer, I don't see how this would change anything – besides potentially pushing up the price. I just want to pick up the meat at the store for the best possible price.
Nothing temporary ever matters. Human life can only matter if there's something permanent about it. If there isn't, nothing ever matters. None. Nil.
Yes, I'm talking about religion. That pesky thing which folks on HN tend to look down in disgust. The idea of accountability with permanent, eternal consequences. Acts carrying on to another life which won't ever end.
(Not talking about the dumb Christian idea "You are already forgiven no matter what because someone is killed 2 millenia ago!" here.)
Who said so? Your gut feelings?
Even though I'm an atheist, this is quite an ignorant take on Christian beliefs. In Christianity, Jesus' death only cleansed people of Original Sin. That is, people who died before Jesus were already doomed, regardless of how they lived their life, because they were all tainted by their forefather Adam's sin.
Jesus is supposed to have forgiven humanity for this sin, and allowed each person to be judged for their own actions in life, not be condemned a priori because of the actions of their ancestor.
Separately from this singular event, God forgives anyone who commits even the most heinous acts as long as they later come to truly regret those acts and spend the rest of their lives atoning for them. This is obviously a necessary component to any moral system as, without such a belief, the rational thing to do after committing a sin that condemns you to hell would be to continue sinning even more, since nothing worse can happen to you.
Of course, none of these religious inventions are necessary for leading and believing in a moral life. Most people are moral simply because that is the right thing to do, not because they fear some big bad punishing them if they are not.
Two more points of consideration:
> people who died before Jesus were already doomed, regardless of how they lived their life
This is actually not the Christian belief, but only that those who died before Jesus could not enter into heaven until Jesus' death and resurrection (because even they were saved by Jesus sanctifying passion). The term you're unaware of is "The Harrowing Of Hell".
> people are moral ... because that is the right thing to do
That's actually the point of Christian belief too - imperfect contrition (fear of punishment) is a _starting_ point. The goal is perfect contrition, desire to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do (for love of God).
Heavily stressing animal's makes the meat taste worse ends up all gamey.
People need food. If they don’t happen to know where it comes from they would figure it out with a quickness if it ever became necessary for them to learn.
Biologically we are carnivores but factory farming is leaving evidence for modern society to determine whether or not it's okay and it definitely gives me pause. People care. I think maybe you're just not caring.
Why do you write this? I don't control the food policy of the world and I wasn't arguing that people should be vegans.
Why people provide unsolicited arguments for eating meat? Why just don't you order a burger instead so we can stay on topic? I don't care who eats what.
Most modern people knows that meat comes from killed animals.
> Activist are using videos of production lines to promote their agenda.
The reason we don't like to watch that is the same reason we don't want to watch people take a shit, it isn't that we feel shitting is morally wrong its just not something we want to watch because it is gross.
During those thousands of years where humans personally slaughtered animals, they often built complete philosophies around their relationship to those animals. Those philosophies are way, way more complex and personally involved than the modern grocery shopping experience, obviously.
Is this really true? People who kill animals for a living doesn't have any emotions about it, watching them do it is like watching them cut a tomato.
There's a reason big-ag farmers are afraid people will see videos showing their operations. So afraid that they pay off politicians to ban such video recording.
But why would they be more disturbing than watching a person slaughtering and cutting up an animal? You didn't answer the question, you just said that one was disturbing, not why one was more disturbing than the other.
Anyway my theory for the distinction is 1) the scale of suffering is obviously far far greater than family-scale slaughter and 2) the way in which we do factory farming reflects poorly on us as a species.
If people had to see their livestock suffer, they would make a different calculation of how much meat to eat and how to handle that animal while it’s alive. As someone else mentioned, this isn’t some crazy avant garde hypothesis: this is exactly why mass meat producers don’t want people filming their operations.
The prior argument that “people always killed animals!” is irrelevant. They certainly did not kill animals the way we do today and again, this is evidenced in the belief systems that emerged during times where people couldn’t afford to be hundreds of miles removed from the production of their food.
You brought this up, not me.
> 1) the scale of suffering is obviously far far greater than family-scale slaughter
Not if every family has to slaughter their own meat, the scale is the same just distributed so you don't see it.
> 2) the way in which we do factory farming reflects poorly on us as a species
This isn't inherent to factory farming though, just the ways it is done in some places. And this goes for family farming as well, some families would put animals in small cages and not take care of them to save money and because they are lazy. If you filmed them and their animals I don't think people would feel any different.
Uhhh no, the scale certainly wouldn’t be the same. An average American eats more than a hundred animals per year. You can’t seriously think people would be consuming at that rate, or could even afford to consume at that rate, without factory farming.
> some families [abuse their animals]… people wouldn’t feel any different
We literally put people in jail for abusing their animals, so yes, they actually do feel differently about it.
Most of that are chickens. Have you seen a family farm where people eat their chickens? They just take one and behead it, killing it takes no effort and is just a part of preparing the food no different than peeling the vegetables. Killing a chicken a day per family is very little work.
> We literally put people in jail for abusing their animals, so yes, they actually do feel differently about it.
Those laws also applies to factory farms, unless you do worse than them you are fine.
Only the hyper-industrialized meat producers get even close to that.
It is economically not viable for every American family to produce and kill their own 2lb of (currently, on average) consumed meat per day. That is why we have factory farming and why it dominates our food supply: economies of scale.
It has nothing to do with whether it’s physically or psychologically possible to kill x chickens per day.
> "your kids’ reaction"
Maybe this should be "my reaction as a kid", since you don't know that person's kids.
> "The emotions one feels"
Should be "the emotions I feel"
> "If people had to see their livestock suffer, they would make a different calculation"
Should probably be "seeing it changed how I feel".
People are more than the sum of our experiences, two people raised in the same environment with the same kind of experiences can have completely divergent values. Therefore it's wrong to assume that people would share your values if they had your experiences. In the case of meat eating particularly this should be obvious; the reality is that most people exposed to the industry, either for the first time as adults or as kids, don't turn vegetarian.
I’m putting my bet on what those experiments would show, which is people’s consumption patterns would be adversely impacted by more in-depth knowledge of the food supply chain.
This is also where meat producers place their bets and why they fight tooth and nail against transparency within their industry.
Those videos turned my stomach, and almost everyone I know who has watched them admits the same. My friends and I all still eat meat, but no question that might change if we had to watch those videos on how our mass produced cheap meat products are made.
You aren't comparing like for like, most people who kill animals doesn't perform a ritual, they just kill it.
Also you can't compare a video trying to show something in a positive light "ritual killing" vs a video trying to show something in a negative light. If they showed you a video about a slaughter that went wrong, the animal is crying as the slaughterer ends it, blood everywhere, then people would feel very bad as well. Or if they showed you a slaughterer joking about as he was slaughtering animals, you probably would feel more as well. Those things are the reality of traditional killing, I don't see how it is any better than a machine doing it. The end result is the same.
The main difference is that we no longer need to train a lot of people to be killing machines like we did before.
Go look up B.F. Skinner and Operant Conditioning (His book Walden 2 is a semi-fictional work that provides a pretty good approximation to the game that's afoot). I'm sure I'll get shot down for presenting a conspiracy, but once you open your eyes to Operant Conditioning, considering the possibility that power hungry groups haven't been using it is kind of like trying to imagine a world where people chose not to use the internet. The only difference is that applied behavioural psychology is more dangerous and powerful than the internet.
This game is happening quite pervasively and a lot of smart people have been coercively brainwashed into being passive if not active players in this process. There are of course a litany of justifications used by those that do the brainwashing.
It will seem farfetched until it's not.
... of making me have empathy with sentient beings suffering? Joke's on them, I already had that.
Showing people where their meat comes isn’t going to reduce the demand in my opinion. I personally believe people should know where their food comes from as it reduces waste and garners introspection about our role in the planet and ecosystem.
I’m Greek American and lamb on the spit is a cultural tradition on Easter. As a kid, it was very weird for my American friends to pick food directly off of a carcass but so many told me over the years it was an unforgettable experience. My uncle once took me to the farm in Georgia where he got the lamb, handed me a large knife and asked me to slit its throat, I was 13 at the time. I couldn’t do it, I cried and watched him do it. I will never forget that. To this day I have a profound love and appreciation of animals, especially lambs. I still eat them. The two ideas for me are not conflicted to me. The only thing I abhor when it comes to meat is wastefulness.
OP said “more people would be vegan” which I think is strictly true. Everyone? No. Would a lot of people reduce their meat consumption from the currently obscene 150+ animals per year (average American)? Probably.
I probably eat a thousand anchovies a year alone.
But anyway yes, most of the specific individuals animals killed are chickens and water creatures of various types.
Here's a pretty good analysis based on USDA data. Prediction: "Seafood don't count! for handwavehandwave reasons!"
What you are missing is the industrial process we put together in the last 70 years to produce more meat; cheaper and faster.
Those are weird, and inhuman.
Those technics make most people uncomfortable. If not, the amount of antibiotics we have to pump into the animal to keep them healthy will hirk another slice of the public.
A data point here is the % of depression in slaughter house worker. Those are the one that are exposed for real.
Not a wet meat market worker, not a fancy butcher.
I don't think it turned many people off milk and cheese. Actually the grossest field trip we ever went on was to a potato chip factory, the stink of rotten potatoes was overwhelming. They never took us to a pig or chicken farm though, I've been to a few at other times and those would have beat the chip factory easily. A lot of people who grow up around cows say they appreciate the small (I do, to an extent) but I've never heard anybody say that about pigs or chickens.
But showing people factory farms, I think, is less likely to make people become vegans than it is to make people agitate for more humane forms of slaughter.
But I should admit my bias here: I am not a vegetarian (although I don't eat a great deal of meat either) and so I'm not upset that animals are killed for food. But I get very worked up about animals being tortured whether they're ending up as food or not, so I'm ascribing to "most people" what I feel myself, which is always a bit questionable.
Bring your family to the one where they crush the male chick on a conveyor belt next time. ( chick culling, you can find video online and watch it before the omelet dinner )
Or just a good ol’ bunch of pigs understanding very well what’s gonna happen and try to escape. It’s kinda cute.
Or you could discuss why a cow produce milk. That it needs to had deliver a calf recently. And how impregnate the cow ( it’s a “rape rack” device ) and then finish by the cow following the calves in despair over cookie and milk.
— A butcher is not a industrial meat factory.
The latter are the issue.
But.
In those thousand of years, was the meat produced the same way?
What type of antibiotics alternative were our elders using to prevent sickness in large groups of animals? Did they raised them squeezed next to each other without moving for their all life?
Where our forefathers feeding a purée of the dead one to the next generation to boost their immune system?
Did they had to pasteurize the milk, not for enhanced shelf life but mostly because sanitary condition are so poor that other wise you found particles of shit in it?
I could go on. But I think the comment you responding to as a fair point. Real; 2023 technic of meat/eggs/milk production are horrifying. we don’t know how the sausage is made.
I’m not vegetarian. I’ve kill and skinned large mammals ( goats .. not that fancy but well ) but I avoid industrial meat as much as possible.
Those are meat factory with advance industrial processes. I do thing folks would be concern for their own health and kinda disgusted if it was displayed more transparently.
And tadam. You don’t need antibiotics.
It’s the filthy condition we produce our meat into that require that.
And those technics are not mandatory to produce that much meat. This is needed to producing at a certain price, on a schedule.
it’s not really about starving to death anymore. But rather cranking the profit margin a bit higher.
So, before anyone decides we need to implement some “small change” the burden is on them to prove that it won’t kill everyone. The burden is not on me to prove that the thing that’s currently feeding us all is the only conceivable way to do it.
If you think you have a more humane technique that will produce meat just as efficiently, by all means, open a farm and use it. If it really is better and more profitable I’m sure the industry will be happy to adopt it.
Of course the debate over the need for industrial meat farming is ongoing, and it involves complex trade-offs between efficiency, ethics, and environmental sustainability.
The latter is the kicker for me. I do care that we're building horror slaughterhouses for animals. But honestly not that much. I could live with that. What irks me it that it does not seems sustainable on the long run.
On a personal level I don't eat much meat. Like a handful of time a month? Mostly when I'm out. I don't buy meat when grocery shopping. And when I do eat meat I either :
- kill the beat myself and then skin it. That happen less than once a year so it's anecdotal.
- Or it's hippie dippie meat raised close to where I live. You know, "pasture", "grass-fed" and all that shit.
I do use milk that is probably produce in detrimental ways to the cows and the environment. Maybe a gallon/month? To cook. I would love a better plug for milk.
I produce my own eggs, I'm blessed by a large yard and their is no city code. I think I could raise pigs nobody would care?
But that's just me. At least I'm kinda opt-out of industrial meat? Still standing! But agreed: I'm a rich guy in a rich country, with too much time on my hands.
--
To your point:
I can't find any data on the percentage of industrial meat in the US diet, compared to "hippie-dippie" meat. It's probably a staggering 90 to 10%. But I would love to find that data. So, agreed. It looks scary to mess with that.
That being said: I do think the way we were growing meat until ww2 is a decent way to do it. And that having less meat around would be just fine. I get my protein from mostly plants. Yes it takes place to grow that too. But pigs, beef and chicken needs similar plants to be feed as well.
But correct. I can't prove that, it's anecdotal. And I know nothing about those subject for real :)
--
> If you think you have a more humane technique that will produce meat just as efficiently, by all means, open a farm and use it.
Introducing Temple Grandin! She did it so much better than I could ever do. I'm a software guy, I can barely keep up with a food garden :)
Grandin produced lot of work geared toward exactly that,from within the industrial meat complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin She deserve some recognition. She proved that you can be less of a dick to your meat and actually have better yield
Her work is not theoretical, she consulted for Hormel, Cargill and Tyson. Those 3 might represent like, idk, 80% of meat production in the US? They were happy to adopt her recommendation.
--
But the above is animal welfare. Again, I would be OK with immense suffering of tons of animals. ( really) I guess I'm not an emphat!
What I'm not ok in my personal book, is the risk that those concentration bring us. For our health, germ-wise, land-use wise, and all that jazz! It seems wise to tame it down. Eat more lentils, chickpeas and soy. That's all I'm saying.
Says you, and without a hint of rationale to justify a highly questionable claim.
I hope you also aren’t buying consumer electronics because then you are literally putting animals ahead of humans.
Or is that too inconvenient for you and you actually like the cognitive dissonance after all
That's not the point. Or maybe it is, maybe the meat eaters culture war is based on the idea of the virtue of eating meat and they get very angry when someone points out that actual animals are being killed, like cut with a knife then let to bleed out then seperated into pieces and shipped to the consumers in a package that doesn't look like an animal that was minding its own business a few days ago?
I don't go a day without eating meat but I don't get angry at vegans. Can you explain why are you so aggressive towards me? Is it maybe because, as George Carlin says, you don't want to face the reality of eating meat and I annoyed you by mentioning the source of meat?
Why is it so hard to enjoy the pieces of a cow raised and killed(by sticking a knife in its throat, then hung upside down to bleed out) in industrial settings?
Maybe the reason for this is the same as the soft language Carlin criticises?
Maybe the soft language is a great human invention that lets us kill animal for meat, kill people for land and still feel good about it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
It was written way back when, but there is even a short section that deals with, ironically, animal rights, that then progresses to plant rights, and does some extrapolating on outcomes when these tendencies are scaled to the extreme, while being set in an environment that, for the time, takes some really scathing shots at the mores of the day which I can't honestly say haven't resurged back into relevance in my lifetime.
I don't generally like just telling people to go read things, (nowadays it can feel like giving someone a "free puppy"). But something tells me it may speak to you, if you're willing to embark on the journey.
The argument is entirely emotional. Another person can say "I like killing animals for their meat because eating animal meat makes me feel good" and it will be equally valid, because neither are any valid, both arguments are entirely subjective. In fact all the people in all of history were pretty much enjoying killing other living beings with sharp tools, then let them to bleed out, then dice, slice, heat and eat them. Someone can even go on to say "I like the industrial cruel killing methods technological society employs because they allow me to eat meat for cheaper." It is equally valid as saying "Oh poor animals don't kill them!"
I personally believe in Islam and thus believe animals are specifically created for humankind to benefit, thus it's both moral and fulfilling a purpose to kill and eat them. My faith also says that an animal must be killed in the traditional least-cruel way by a human, for it to be halal (permissible) to be eaten.
Also there is no "meat eaters culture war", but vegas sure try to spark a war. Vegas used to try sell the health benefits of vegan life style, but that has been disproven so many times that now they (or you?) only have the moral angle to work with.
You can try to twist this as much as you like, but the fact remains that (so far) no vegan product has been able to compete with meat in taste or texture. I simply do not care where the food comes from. Even if factory farming was outlawed today it would just mean I would pay more for my meat or if I had to slaughter it myself I would need to learn that skill, I am not going to give up on delicious meat products just because you can't sleep at night.
There are so many other greater injustices in the world that caring about factory farming makes you kind of an asshole. But if you can show me a meat substitute that tastes and feels like meat in my mouth then I will switch to vegan in a heartbeat, because then your moral argument actually makes sense.
I agree with the spirit of what you are saying but this is hardly the solution. I don't think people are against killing of animals, we have been doing this since man was born. What we are against is modern industrial animal farming.
It is useful and not limited to Americans, that's why people do it. Much more people would have been vegans or they would be much more indifferent to violence if every pack of meat had a QR code to a video showing the life and processing of that particular animal.
It's also not just softening that's practiced but hardening too. We dehumanise people all the time if we want to suppress them or kill them institutionally.
We humans like to live in an idealised reality, a fiction where we are just and don't practice cruelty, our parent's don't have sex, people have roles(social roles, gender roles, political roles etc) and they always act in a way to honour that.
The reality is much more different of course, we kill animals at scale we call terrorist or another dirty word those who we have institutional violent conflicts with and exterminate them, our parents have sex just like anyone else, mothers/fathers/leaders/police/ceo's are human too and they have human desires and human faults.
Then there's cultural movements trying to bring these things closer to reality or push them into a new virtual reality. The sex revolution in the west that the eastern world never had for example creates huge divide between lifestyle and family structures. The more devout muslims practice ceremonial animal sacrifice which often happens on the streets with kids around, so they tend to have different relationship with the animal killing(no, they are cruelt or anything like that, it's just different).