I used to eat meat and love it, then I learned about how animals are treated in the meat industry and stopped. I probably would have been totally okay with looking at this picture about 10 years ago. Now looking at it makes me think of the poor sentient being that probably went through a life that was hell just to get cut up into pieces and be sold in a grocery store and it makes me a bit sick. We should really stop and take a step back and think about whether what we do to animals is right. Imagine someone would raise a dog confined in a tiny space, never letting them see the daylight, then after about 2 years cut them into pieces like that. You wouldn’t like that, would you?
I hope we will. Also because it might mean that as a society we’ll have met human needs enough to have capacity to address animals’ needs as well.
I’m putting a lot of hope into synthetic meat. It would come with all the benefits of real meat but without all the downsides like animal suffering, climate and environmental cost, overuse of antibiotics, harmful hormones etc. I guess if synthetic meat gets cheap enough, it will at some point be the norm, and eating real animal flesh will maybe become a weird delicacy for the rich.
Sorry in advance! The morality of meat really interests me.
It seems almost guaranteed that we will look back on factory farming in this fashion. The current system requires significant help from the legal system (banning documentation of the animals’ conditions, excessively prosecuting people who break the rules, looking the other way when farms hire people who will lose their jobs if they rock the boat) just to keep going.
Whether or not meat consumption in general meets the same societal fate seems less certain to me. We don’t view any other animals killing their prey as immoral, and before the industrial agricultural takeover lots of folks lived on farms and raised livestock for slaughter and treated them far better. Groups that lives successfully and sustainably off the land, like the Polynesians who settled Hawaii, raised livestock and fished a renewable amount. That’s been going on for ages and ages. Is it the act of killing a conscious animal we’ll have issue with? Will that sentiment focus on the smart animals like pigs and cows, and leave chickens and fish as acceptable? Will it rule out all animals even though some of them are so dumb that their form of consciousness is unrelatable? What about insect biomass based food? Will it spread to certain plants or fungi as we learn more about their forms of awareness and how they experience the world? Plants sharing knowledge through pheromones and root systems seems quite similar to the level of communication ants and other colony insects have. Where is the line going to be drawn?
From a knowledge standpoint, I simply don’t know enough about nutrition to understand whether or not humans can be ‘maximally healthy’ on a vegetarian or vegan or pescatarian or w/e diet. If we can, sweet! If not, what’s the next move? Lab grown meat seems like it’s just around the corner but then when you listen to a podcast on where they’re at you realize they can’t mimic any of the complex structures that give meat texture; they’re sometimes only 20, 30% meat with the rest being additives; they suck an undetermined but certainly super high amount of energy from the grid just to perform these relatively rudimentary feats. It does make me wonder if having some cows that wander around eating grass and killing one or two of the herd periodically is really worse from a moral standpoint than covering entire ecosystems in solar panels to run the scaled up meat labs. Not to mention how either option seems like there’s no way it can scale to how many people are living on the planet right now!
I certainly don’t envy the next generations. Which is a weird feeling. I don’t think we’re supposed to feel bad for our descendants. I hope they figure out the things that stumped us.
My family is mostly veggie, still eat dairy and some meat on the weekends. No pork because I’m trying to keep pushing the line further towards a place I feel better about. Pigs are just too dang smart for the hellish conditions they’re raised in on U.S. farms. Drawing that line felt hard, pepperoni might be my favorite use case for meat. But I think my kids will grow up just a little further toward the point of outrage we need to be at to save these animals from the madhouse created to feed us.
I used to eat meat and love it, then I learned about how animals are treated in the meat industry and stopped. I probably would have been totally okay with looking at this picture about 10 years ago. Now looking at it makes me think of the poor sentient being that probably went through a life that was hell just to get cut up into pieces and be sold in a grocery store and it makes me a bit sick. We should really stop and take a step back and think about whether what we do to animals is right. Imagine someone would raise a dog confined in a tiny space, never letting them see the daylight, then after about 2 years cut them into pieces like that. You wouldn’t like that, would you?
For context, I eat meat.
But sometimes I do wonder if one day society will look back at the practice of eating animals and see it as barbaric, just as we do with slavery.
I hope we will. Also because it might mean that as a society we’ll have met human needs enough to have capacity to address animals’ needs as well.
I’m putting a lot of hope into synthetic meat. It would come with all the benefits of real meat but without all the downsides like animal suffering, climate and environmental cost, overuse of antibiotics, harmful hormones etc. I guess if synthetic meat gets cheap enough, it will at some point be the norm, and eating real animal flesh will maybe become a weird delicacy for the rich.
Sorry in advance! The morality of meat really interests me.
It seems almost guaranteed that we will look back on factory farming in this fashion. The current system requires significant help from the legal system (banning documentation of the animals’ conditions, excessively prosecuting people who break the rules, looking the other way when farms hire people who will lose their jobs if they rock the boat) just to keep going.
Whether or not meat consumption in general meets the same societal fate seems less certain to me. We don’t view any other animals killing their prey as immoral, and before the industrial agricultural takeover lots of folks lived on farms and raised livestock for slaughter and treated them far better. Groups that lives successfully and sustainably off the land, like the Polynesians who settled Hawaii, raised livestock and fished a renewable amount. That’s been going on for ages and ages. Is it the act of killing a conscious animal we’ll have issue with? Will that sentiment focus on the smart animals like pigs and cows, and leave chickens and fish as acceptable? Will it rule out all animals even though some of them are so dumb that their form of consciousness is unrelatable? What about insect biomass based food? Will it spread to certain plants or fungi as we learn more about their forms of awareness and how they experience the world? Plants sharing knowledge through pheromones and root systems seems quite similar to the level of communication ants and other colony insects have. Where is the line going to be drawn?
From a knowledge standpoint, I simply don’t know enough about nutrition to understand whether or not humans can be ‘maximally healthy’ on a vegetarian or vegan or pescatarian or w/e diet. If we can, sweet! If not, what’s the next move? Lab grown meat seems like it’s just around the corner but then when you listen to a podcast on where they’re at you realize they can’t mimic any of the complex structures that give meat texture; they’re sometimes only 20, 30% meat with the rest being additives; they suck an undetermined but certainly super high amount of energy from the grid just to perform these relatively rudimentary feats. It does make me wonder if having some cows that wander around eating grass and killing one or two of the herd periodically is really worse from a moral standpoint than covering entire ecosystems in solar panels to run the scaled up meat labs. Not to mention how either option seems like there’s no way it can scale to how many people are living on the planet right now!
I certainly don’t envy the next generations. Which is a weird feeling. I don’t think we’re supposed to feel bad for our descendants. I hope they figure out the things that stumped us.
My family is mostly veggie, still eat dairy and some meat on the weekends. No pork because I’m trying to keep pushing the line further towards a place I feel better about. Pigs are just too dang smart for the hellish conditions they’re raised in on U.S. farms. Drawing that line felt hard, pepperoni might be my favorite use case for meat. But I think my kids will grow up just a little further toward the point of outrage we need to be at to save these animals from the madhouse created to feed us.