Thank you as well! 1. I guess it doesn't bother me so much that their lives are being cut short, for the same reasons that the killing in general doesn't bothe

Thank you as well! 1. I guess it doesn't bother me so much that their lives are being cut short, for the same reasons that the killing in general doesn't bother me. I would say that waiting until they're old may make the meat taste bad enough that it would be better to not bother (in which case, veganism!) 2. I agree wholeheartedly with this point. Somewhat related, we recently bought a freshly butchered duck from a small local farm and when I looked up how long we could wait before cooking it, I was shocked at how long freshly butchered meat lasts! It makes the shelf life of meat from the store seem almost disgusting, how close it is to going bad on the day you buy it. But that information has been obscured to the point that we all think raw meat is just naturally gross. 3. I also agree completely with this point, if the animal's existence is misery, then it shouldn't happen. We really don't eat very much meat, we buy from nice, little, local farms (and that's expensive) and we raise our own meat rabbits and try to give them as much room and freedom as we can while making sure they don't get disease from the wild rabbits in our area. I decided a while ago that I wouldn't eat meat if I wasn't willing to do at least some of the slaughtering myself. It felt too important to outsource completely. And it may sound weird, but the slaughtering itself has made me appreciate nature way more, and really changed my relationship with death, in that I see death less as a horrible thing that happens and more as part of a cycle whereby nutrients are redistributed and renewal is allowed to occur. We happen to live long enough that lots of things will die while we live, and it's easy to forget that we'll die and something will consume us, too, even if it's just a microbe or a plant. And factory farming is way more... extractive? It feels like it doesn't allow for the redistribution and renewal, the same way that mono-culture farming on a massive scale can leach away nutrients and destroy biodiversity.