Is the consumption of animal prouducts ethical?

[Muddy]

Stuff like this happens because the shareholders and executes that run these companies really get to see all the dirty work that on bottom level that make the company function. Instead they just get stats and reports which don't show the whole picture and usually leads to them making decisions that are focused on improving those statistics, without regards to other factors. Its sort of like how in WW2 the bomber pilots rarely got PTSD or a deep sense of guilt after dropping their load, ever if their actions killed way more people then the soldiers on the ground who were traumatized far more often after killing a person. It the same kind of thing that happens with companies in general. The people who run it from a far aren't as emotionally effected like the people who see it on the ground. The bottom level employees who do see it don't care either because the kind of people who do the menial and dirty stuff tend to be rough, cold, pragmatic types. That is because that kind of job that attracts those kinds of people and no one else. Crying to them about how unethical their work is will just get them to think of you as a puss who needs to grow the fuck up. (I'm not directing that to the OP, that's the mentality of the people who do those jobs).

[Anglas]

I don't care tbh

[wacey]

It is very, very distasteful. .... I kept watching to find the smoking gun...?

Factory slaughter houses are better then they used to be, thanks to Temple Grandin.

I have slaughtered and butchered many different kinds of animals, including: chickens, ducks, turkeys, cows, deer, moose, pigs. It is not pretty with all of them, so you want to do it quickly.

I had an ex who would pick up disabled chickens from disease by its legs and quickly smash it against a tree, or side of a building, to kill it. I couldn't do that.

Death is hard to watch, especially on such a large scale. It is doubly troubling to see workers behave so callously. All the animals are suffering, in order to be working around them a person would need to be conditioned to not notice. Is it ignorant of them to behave that way? Probably. Is it unethical to kill them in this way? Well, most of what humanity does to the natural world is unethical. Just because its unethical does not make it wrong. People demand meat. This is the way that the industry has chosen to harvest meat as quickly and as economically as possible. The rights of the pig do not factor in. It is genuinely understood that the pigs cannot comprehend what is going on to them, so this is justification to kill them in this way.

I always felt that when you kill an animal you should do it with a single intent and to do it mercifully.

Suppose the video demonstrates that when so many animals are involved, it is close to logistically difficult to make sure each pig is sedated and stunned properly on an assembly line type process.

[wacey]

When it comes to cows being separated from their babies, yes it is sad. Sometimes on the farm, even after the Hefers have been with the yearlings all summer, and they get sorted out in the fall, they moo and cry for them for a week.

Its actually kind of annoying because they moo non-stop day and night.

[wacey]

I didn't really care when I was a teen, but it is honeatly hard to care if you haven't gone through tremendous physical or emotional pain yourself. You can't relate so you see no issue. It's just not fair to these creatures.

It is easy to empathize when you can understand yourself. I agree with you.

For me, its been the other way around. I used to care a great deal. As I get older it becomes easier to disassociate.

[wacey]

Several years ago, the provincial government, heavily restricted and outright banned privately owned, small operation slaughterhouses. They did this in favour of large scale, publically funded slaughterhouses in an attempt to regulate the meat production industry with some kind of blanket standards. This was, it is thought, to maintain health and safety standards for the consumer, the producer, and the animals themselves. Governments like to centralize industry because it is easier to regulate.

There was a large uproar from industry players. They believed that smaller slaughterhouses had the advantages of providing local communities with local grown animal products, tighter regulations and faster response to inspector oversight, as well as more humane animal slaughter practises. When there are less animals coming from specific farms and regions as opposed to large scale, multiple vetted regional animals, then there is less contamination of meat, better animal handling practises, and locally supported economies. In doing so, the government shutdown many lucrative, albeit small meat slaughterhouses. One such small scale ware house was where I killed and butchered Turkeys in my teens. It is no longer operating due to heavy licensing fees.

Another such small meat house that I know of had to have a large "Not For Human Consumption" sign posted on the doorway, to circumvent some kind of law that would shut it down otherwise. This was where I experienced butchering of a cow for the first time. Making ground beef is a laborious chore.

In the end, large scale factory assembly line production serves the needs of modern production and investment interests, while simultaneously dehumanizing and mechanizing a process that can and does cause great suffering for animals.

[wacey]

Years ago I was extremely anti-clear cut and deforestation. Having worked in the forestry industry now I have very different values. However, although I can appreciate and understand the needs of industry and those that consume forest products, I can still empathize and hold wonder at the natural ecosystems that are being destroyed, altered and harvested for human gain. It is, in many instances, a shame.

What can be done?

What do you suggest should happen with the pigs?

[woofwoofl]

Factory farms are horrible and definitely unethical. Want to fund them as little as possible. I lift and move a lot for work; my body needs protein, I need money. Chipotle gets meat more humanely than most, I go there; helps that they're nearby and delicious. Was vegan for seven years in a row, needed more muscle to pull heavy stuff when working @ McDs, chicken was free at the end of the day; it either went to me or to the trash can, so it went to me.

[Pookie]

meh, beggers cant be choosers is how I look at it.

I want to eat, and I want there to be enough food in the world that my family can eat. There is, under this system. Change it and there might not be. Ethically, it's fine to me because morally animals will always matter less to me than being grateful for the multitudes of things we don't have to question everyday, like how are we going to eat?

On top of that, if the entire world was vegetarian, more animals would die everyday than they do now, and they'd all be massacred by giant bladed machines and poisons(Bugs) which is worse than what the cow's go through. In my opinion.

[End]

What are your thoughts?

If it can't learn to do calculus then it's ok to eat it. That said I agree with you, CAFO's and other such operations are blatantly unethical. The animals are essentially nothing more than units to be converted into cash. I mean, it may not be self-aware but it is a life form that feels pain and shit, why not give it a nice, happy, comfy life right up until you harvest it for its meat?

The Morlocks didn't torture the Eloi, keep them in tightly confined cages, and make them live knee deep in their own shit, just sayin'. Hopefully these practices will end soon. People are becoming more aware of the bullshit that occurs behind the veil the elite have put over our eyes. Once critical mass is reached, well, I'm glad I'm not one of elite. Oh the things that will happen to them once the torches and pitchfork wielding mob get their hands on them .

[yeves]

I've been a pescatarian for the past 3 years. I eat only wild caught fish and forgo buying anything farmed. still I worry a lot about the stress we're putting our oceans under and some of the greedy and inhumane fishing practices. i think a major problem is that there are too many of us on this planet, yet we haven't organized our society and labor to provide sustainable and decent living standards for everyone, which would include taking care of our planet, its ecosystems, and other livings things on it.

my hippie-guru friend, who studies all sorts of mystic writings, is convinced that the anxiety, fear, and near suicidal depression that animals experience in the living conditions of these farms gets passed to those who consume them, and is the reason for the epidemic of depression, food and pill abuse in the west. there are a lot of problems with his theory but if you're superstitious enough that's one more reason to eat less meat.

[Beautiful sky]

In the old.country animals were never treated this way. They were walked and allowed to graze. Idk..I just thinking that it is human of us to treat them better if we're going to farm and eat them.

[Pookie]

There would still be enough food for you and your family to eat if the farming system were changed to a more ethical one. Meat may be more expensive in such cases, but Americans eat far too much meat than can be considered healthy anyway (look at all the heart disease and cholesterol issues we suffer from). It would actually benefit our health more, as well as the planets. Besides, rice, potatoes and frozen vegetables are cheap, cheap, cheap.

I don't believe that all humans should be vegetarian, but why would far more animals be massacred if that were the case?

Tractors kill more rodents and insects than the amount of killed for food animals a year.

[End]

I can't learn to do calculus (dyscalculia), I must be ok to eat as well then.

That you can't is irrelevant. A goodly number of people who are of your species have displayed the capacity. Yep, you're sentient, self-aware, etc. Can't really raise you as "cattle" without dinging the morality bell now, couldn't sleep with myself at night knowing that a being I could have a legit conversation with was being treated as a mere food source and farmed/slaughtered as matter of course as totally normal. I ain't a hungry morlock, there are lesser animals that can serve as a good source of protein as of now.

I don't wanna have to kill anything I could actually converse with. It's already hard enough as an ILI. People are just so... stupid. I mean for god's sake can't they even see what the logical conclusion of their ideals leads to? They clamor for "more" ruin and desolation. Fuck I'd give my life for just a few minutes to attempt to explain to them how their "best case" scenario is indeed a self-inflicted nightmare. Gah! How can they all be so fucking stupid! Well, at least I got my own plans, I can survive in the woods and be happy doing so, not many others can say that.... Gotta love being an sp first kinda guy, I live on, the others... don't.

Too bad I can't really pull that off. There's the problem of the second instinct and I'm damn sure it's sx, so I'm in need of a girl to have my back. Once you go beyond a single party you have a whole cacophony of potential outcomes that just can't be mapped out accurately. It's a giant shitstorm in the end, might as well roll some dice or flip a coin.

[Reficulris]

I used to cry everytime I saw a truck full of pigs being driven off to a slaughterhouse, their little noses coming out of the crude woodwork... The older I get the easier I close off from suffering, I nowadays limit it to those directly around me. The alternative is a sliding scale of caring for one person, one thing more everytime, and then I just get depressed because the world is such a cruel callous place.

Instead I nowadays play the part of the cynic uncaring hedonist, it shields me and stops people from trying to use my vulnerability as guilt tripping window.

In general I care about humans before animals, and there's so many human to human cruelty going on that I have a hard time taking people serious that focus on human to animal cruelty. It just always seemed hypocritical to me to focus on animals first.. idk.

Once we hit a bird with a car, it was not dead yet, flopping around with its head in the grill of the car. I was with several "animal lovers" and they were just all yelling and wanted to drive past it (once it fell out of the grill). I euthanised it, I remember it being extremely hard to twist it's neck, it took me multiple attempts. From that time I took away that we're not good at killing anymore, so we do it in factories and have opinions about it. But not a lot of people could actually hunt, or euthanise, or stay with a dying animal. We're very much in denial about our relationship with animal death.

[mu4]

Eating a moderate amount of meat seems fine to me, ultimately farm animals exist essentially solely for our consumption, without our need to consume them they would simply cease to exist. More ethical farming techniques are good, but I put a priority on human welfare so I see worker rights are primary and animal rights as secondary. Working conditions in industrial farming is more important than animal rights to me although this sort of thing is interrelated. Even if we stopped eating meats there would still be farm workers with vegetables and they have fairly bad conditions at the moment.

I don't blame farm workers for being callous, either they are selected for this trait or they're desensitized to it after working in it for a long time.

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

Oh Starfall you compassionate caring goody goody str8 female heroine you. <3

All kidding aside, I think the sort of root spiritual cause of this is viewing cruelty as some sort of virtue.

"What the fuck is wrong with the USA... it's worse than a concentration camp and animal farming should NOT be allowed to go down this way."

Yeah indeed - and the issue is a lot bigger than how we treat animals. It's the ease of how we can get guns, doing nothing to protect the heartfelt and vulnerable, rewarding narcissists and sadists instead of kicking their ass, glorifying the villain and anti-hero in tv shows, using art in a cheap & tawdry attempt to terrorize others instead of inspire. Though we can only work and solve one issue at a time; the base underlying morality of this is 'It's cool to be a jerk. kek kek fuck you phags.' (which is sadly the attitude of a loooot of people if you take time and live in the ghetto harsh real world and aren't sheltered so much by the internet) Without changing these underlying values of our community, the external world is going to show these things as a result.

IT's quite amazing how the shamanic/natural word of Mother Nature is so fucking beautiful and the "alpha" str8 male businessman for this world is so dark/industrial and negative lol.

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

I will say that while I always will be very liberal at heart, I don't think big government is the answer....

because most ppl who work for government tend to be pussies and cowards anyway, that harp on punks/ppl who do petty theft while secretly enjoying and masturbating to the real villains of the world. I've seen this too many times to know that it's true.

We have to flush these things from the inside out. You also only change by realizing your own darkness, and not acting on it. I could have gotten a gun today and shot a bunch of ppl but hey I didn't. But that isn't rewarded, ur not gonna hear on the news "Man controls temper." Cuz another tv trope is Good = Boring. But I don't think it is. I think at this point... it's the other way around. It's so predictable that somebody is gonna be a heartless ass, boys like zap are our hope.

[jason_m]

One day, I was eating meat and, after deep contemplation, I realized that what I was eating was once alive!... (And if it was alive, why couldn't have been someone's pet?) That got me scared: I didn't know whether to continue to eat meat or stop immediately... I figured out how to settle the issue: I would look at YouTube videos and see for myself whether or not animal slaughter is humane. That in fact settled it. I now hate the notion of eating meat, but I cannot cook at all, so about 3/4 of what I eat is vegetarian... (And a lot of the non-vegetarian food is seafood...) But I have to admit, since I can't cook, it's the cheap, crappy kind of vegetarian...

Jason

[jason_m]

What are your thoughts?


After watching some of these videos, I really question my own ethical beliefs. I don't so much mind the thought of consuming meat and dairy, but I do mind the horrible way these animals are treated and the amount of trauma and pain that they are enduring... not to mention, these creatures are sick and not safe to consume. It's almost insane that they allow this stuff to go on legally. When I was in the UK last summer we drove past a few pig farms and these piggies had miles of land to roam, mud to play in, friends to socialize with and little pig houses to sleep in and they looked happy as hell. Apparently the UK has much better ethical farming laws for animals and you can really taste the difference in the quality of meat. In America pigs are kept cages so small that they can't even move for the entirety of their lives, where they easily develop puss filled sores and illnesses. What the fuck is wrong with the USA... it's worse than a concentration camp and animal farming should NOT be allowed to go down this way.

What about Canadian farming? (That's important to me, because I eat vegetarian and I live in Canada...)

[Not A Communist Shill]

Being able to ask the question about whether it is ethical or not is of course part of what makes humans philosophical beings. Animals generally don't trouble themselves about such matters. I think we have to work with the situation we have: we know animals can feel pain, that breeding things just for them to be killed and eaten is possibly not completely justifiable, but we also know that eating other things is an inherent part of our nature that predates moral dilemmas. If we can eat meat grown in laboratories or if we are compelled to become entirely vegetarian to avert environmental catastrophe, this would change things of course.

[Jeremy8419]

Eating meat is ethical. You have canines. Overconsumption of meat and unethical treatment of animals is completely separate.

[Jeremy8419]

Humans actually have herbivore teeth. Our canines are not primarily for meat.

Well, if that's what you want to believe, then you've already made up your mind about meat.

[marooned]

i want stem meat pronto.

i feel bad about all the shit in the world i contribute to by living in this society. i was vegetarian for a long while due to some of this stuff, although i still was contributing to the problems of cattle and chicken by drinking milk and eating eggs, which i don't remember scrutinizing boxes to look for "cage free" or whatever at the time.

anyway. after a while i became all disheartened (and unhealthy due to not getting enough protein because i was an irresponsible vegetarian). and i just thought the world fucking sucks and everyone is suffering and that's just the shit existence this is.

however, recently i've been going back to my original way of thinking, only now the next level up in a way. when i was a vegetarian i accepted that there was nothing i could do to change anything, but i at least would not add to it. i've been looking at it in this strange "responsibility way" lately though (the last several months) and it somehow means something that it didn't mean before. i think it's more thinking that there are things we should all be doing - things like reducing our waste and materialism, and assuming some sense of responsibility for animals in our society and making choices that might lessen their suffering (at least in the long run). so rather than looking at it as some hell that i just won't contribute to (but that will go on anyway no matter what i do), i guess i'm starting to see it more like there are responsible things i *should* be doing, as should everyone.

i don't mean this in some way where i'll pay attention to things others aren't doing and criticize them. i understand that it is difficult and as someone who has struggled a lot and suffered a lot in life, i know that it can be hard to fend for oneself and take care of oneself, let alone extra things that would make it more difficult to do both of those things (in some cases, more cost and effort and mental resources). however, there are just things that if we don't do them, then we are kind of saying "yes" to an unfavorable world with a lot more suffering for other creatures and devastation than there needs to be. that's why this is so frustrating, because it's not even necessary. there are ways to arrange this so that it works better for animals without taking much away from the needs of human society.

maybe i've just been thinking this way because i just don't have any control over my life, it feels especially lately, and beneath how heartbroken i feel, i am kind of mad and tired of it.

also i just feel i've been slowly stripped of my dignity and person by trying to adapt to this world, and i'm reaching a point where maybe i'm feeling bold enough to say "no." the question of how to say it in a way where you don't end up starving on the streets, is another matter.

[kopyk]

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3985...s-of-character

[Bain]

I've been vegan for quite some time for health reasons. It's shitty these animals are treated poorly but I certainly don't eat them for ethical reasons. People who throw that moralistic vegan shit in your face are godawful jackasses. The cooked flesh Bambi and Thumper is so damned tasty.