You're talking about relatively few people -- I too would bet that most people (those of us not working in slaughterhouses) would find videos from factory farms disturbing.

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.

> I too would bet that most people (those of us not working in slaughterhouses) would find videos from factory farms disturbing.

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.

Why is it relevant whether one can put a finger on the difference? The claim was that people use their economic distance from meat production to protect themselves from the negative feelings that would be created if they had to do it themselves, especially in the manner of factory farming.

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.

> Why is it relevant whether one can put a finger on the difference?

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.

No, I pointed out the difference, which is obviously real. The reason for the difference is irrelevant.

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.

> An average American eats more than a hundred animals per year

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.

Yes it is actually hard to kill a chicken per day, which is why societies that have to grow and kill their own food don’t eat a chicken per day.

Only the hyper-industrialized meat producers get even close to that.

Where do you guys come up with this stuff? When I was a teen in Appalachia, I butchered dozens of chickens a day, by hand, during canning season.

I think you lost the thread. The claim was factory farming doesn’t change the volume of meat consumption and production, only the geographic location of it.

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.

I think you've lost track of the difference between other people and yourself. The words you're using seem to talk about how other people feel, but you're actually talking about how you feel and assuming that any difference between the two is rooted in ignorance.

> "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.

Go run the experiments!

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.

I'm sorry -- how expensive do you think chickens are? In fact, if everyone had them, they'd most likely be freely shared. You seem very out of touch with your own species.

Yet just very mysteriously… people don’t all have chickens, nor do they give them away for free… almost as if it’s not worth the time/money/space…

You really don't understand why someone would find seeing a single animal killed and slaughtered less disturbing than seeing a thousand animals pushed through a loud, hot barn that you know reeks of death throughout? You're not just pretending gross ignorance to make some point?

Almost certainly, we’re talking about videos where batches of animals are kept suffering in tiny cages and the slaughter is done by machines. Watching a bunch of live hatchlings get sucked into some grinder is not the same as watching a Halal killing or some tribal hunting ritual.

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.

> Watching a bunch of live hatchlings get sucked into some grinder is not the same as watching a Halal killing or some tribal hunting ritual.

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.

The main difference is the scale of suffering that we are choosing to create because we simply prefer the flavor of meat over other sources of nutrients.