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People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them. Ironically, vegetarianism really only s

People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them. Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.

erellsworth 2y ago
It makes sense to me. If you grow up seeing animals slaughtered on the regular you probably won't think much of it, especially when the adults around you treat it as completely normal. You grow up in an environment where you might think meat comes from the magic meat factory, when you see an animal slaughtered for the first time it's likely to be shocking enough to turn a lot of people away.
- deepvibrations 2y ago
  Very true. Just like when slaves were commonplace, it was 'normalised' and many people just turned a blind eye.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 2y ago
    The people who think meat comes from a magic meat factory are blind.
  - georgeecollins 2y ago
    Everything biological is going to be eaten. Your dog or cat would eat you if you were dead and they were hungry enough. I am not saying we shouldn't evolve past eating meat, it would be great for the environment. But to say that one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical is an indictment of nature.
    - vengefulduck 2y ago
      I think the problem with this argument is the assumption that nature is inherently good. Nature is cruel and uncaring. Moving beyond it is a good thing imo. We’re just lucky that as a species by the roll of the dice we were given the power by nature to usurp it.
      - Psillisp 2y ago
        Literally picking a fight with Nature, what a trope. What will they think of next man versus self? What if the thing that man creates in his hubris isn’t actually better?
        jamiek88 2y ago
        What if it is? We transcend nature and evolution because of our culture and foresight. We are the ultimate result of 4 billion years of evolution. Nature has made itself redundant in some ways. Actually, transcend is the wrong word we are still a part of nature of course but we can literally leave the planet and have the ability to irradiate this globe to erase most macroscopic life. We are an outside context problem as an Iain Banks Ship Mind would say. It’s a huge responsibility and opportunity that we will almost certainly squander.
        jack_pp 2y ago
        We are nowhere near being able to live outside this planet without significant struggle. It would be far easier to live in a submarine in the ocean than anywhere else in this solar system. Our culture and foresight has brought us into such misalignment that 25% of the US population is on psychiatric drugs, you have a lot of homeless, a drug epidemic, there's a general crisis of meaning, males have given up on finding partners, women are all competing for a few men or think they're all animals and stay away from them. To be able to eat quality food costs a lot and few people have the time or energy to cook anyway because city life is so stressful to most. We are living in a profoundly sick society and economy all over the world. WW3 is knocking on the door, one wrong move and we fuck up the only ecosystem we have in the galaxy. I'd bet if people were given the choice between living in a small fishing village from 2000 years ago and modern lower middle class the choice would be obvious. So to say we have mastered nature and we know better requires a lot of hubris.
    - aziaziazi 2y ago
      I agree with you but think you miss that the common concern is with the farming process. The fact to eat another animal usually comes as - a shortcut : “I don’t eat animals” instead of “I avoid encouraging the farming process by consuming the product of those farms: […]” - and/or a following philosophic stance, that seems logical (debatable) when someone avoid encouraging the farming process. Few are the vegans that claims that an animal eating another animal is not natural, or that they cats wouldn’t eat them in the condition you describe (which to be honest, rarely happens).
      - meowface 2y ago
        There are plenty of great moral arguments for why animals (or humans) shouldn't be eaten unless they died of purely natural causes. Factory farming is just the strongest to argue against and the main source of both suffering and death, so it's what people focus on. If factory farming were abolished overnight, vegans and vegetarians would (rightly) immediately move onto hunting and small farms. (I personally think there's nothing wrong with home/farm egg laying as long as the animals are taken care of well and the male ones aren't killed. That's why I'm vegetarian rather than vegan.)
    - erellsworth 2y ago
      This seems like a category error. We don't typically assign moral agency to animals the same way we do to humans. No one is saying "one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical." Some people are saying it is unethical for humans, who we typically do believe have moral agency, to eat other animals. Just as no one would say it is unethical for a snake to kill someone with its venom, but we would say it is unethical for a human inject someone with snake venom in order to kill them.
    - meowface 2y ago
      What's wrong with indicting nature? Male animals regularly rape female animals. We shouldn't hold animals morally culpable, as they aren't moral agents, but humans are moral agents. There is no human act in this world for which "this is commonplace in nature" is a moral defense.
      - xpe 2y ago
        Nature can be harsh and cruel indeed. I think we agree the term “natural” should almost always be questioned and unpacked. It often serves as a rhetorical device instead of a nugget of wisdom. Dismissing an idea solely for being “unnatural” is premature. Or vice versa. At the same time, there is wisdom in being curious about weirdness that seems nonsensical. Some weird things have a backstory and even rationale that is non-obvious. Or maybe their benefit is subtle or hidden to those who only look narrowly. (Chesterton’s Fence) Slight topic shift, but conceptually related: I hope the slash and burn “reformers” we’re seeing have the humility to recognize that institutional knowledge is diffused in ways they do not understand as outsiders. It doesn’t grow back quickly. Just because Chaos Monkey works at Netflix doesn’t mean it works for Congressionally-authorized government agencies. Rapid destruction can be far worse than measured reprioritization. I get it though — as a programmer I sometimes prefer to throw out a previous code base and start a-fresh, and this can help with clearing out technical debt. Such a rewrite is risky though, as is well known. Besides, technical abstractions are often orthogonal to domain knowledge and expertise.
- tmerc 2y ago
  I grew up buying meat and never seeing farms. About 7 years ago, I helped my sister/BIL raise a flock from hatchling to food. We did everything. Having actually slaughtered and butchered chickens I raised, I'd rather raise my own. I know the chickens I raised had a better life and death than factory farmed chickens.
- partitioned 2y ago
  Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life. The constant meat eater trolling about how its natural to eat meat and animals do it, ignore the fact that its not natural to keep animals in pens where they cant turn around for their entire life that is basically pure torture from birth to death. If all meat was produced the way it was farmed 100 years ago, youd see way less vegans.
  - erellsworth 2y ago
    I mean, it can be both. Factory farming has been around for more than 100 years. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906. The meat industry has done a pretty good job keeping the horrors of slaughter houses out of the public eye, especially in the days before almost everyone was walking around with a video recorder in their pocket. I'm sure exposure to what's really involved in modern meat production has increased the popularity of veganism, but veganism has been around for at least a thousand years.
  - animal-husband 2y ago
    Were that the case, you’d see vegans advocating for eating classically-husbanded animals. But I for one have never seen such a thing. And when I’ve spoken with vegans about this very topic, they’ve insisted that no animal can possibly be raised/slaughtered humanely – the belief seems almost axiomatic to them.
    - gbear605 2y ago
      I’m generally a vegetarian, but I eat chicken, beef, and pork from local farms that raise the animals ethically.
    - bluebarbet 2y ago
      This conflates animal rights with animal welfare. The vegans who are motivated by the latter might do as you suggest. But a strict interpretation of animal rights means respecting the right to live. This underpins religious vegetarianism too. Still other vegans are motivated by concerns about the environment. For them too, "classical husbandry" will not be a winning argument. If anything the opposite, since it requires more land.
- munificent 2y ago
  Put another way: If 99% of the animals you see on a day to day basis are pets and not livestock, it's hard to not think of all animals as potential pets instead of resources.
deepvibrations 2y ago
Surely this is more a case that it used to be much harder to be vegetarian and almost impossible to be vegan! Now we actually have a clear choice given the development and availability of so many other foods and supplements. Hence for me to value my enjoyment of foods above the life of another animal seems pretty harsh at best. Even chicken eggs really are not cruelty free - if you truly love animals, you would stop eating all animal products imo. Otherwise you are simply lying to yourself. Converse opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k
- engineer_22 2y ago
  Thousands of nations, billions of people. If only they knew the gnostic truth you hold in your breath...
- __turbobrew__ 2y ago
  > it used to be much harder to be vegetarian Millions of Indian people have been vegetarian for hundreds (if not thousands) of years now. I guess there are manufactured meat replacements now, but I prefer to just eat things like legumes over factory made vegan food.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - kelnos 2y ago
    I assume GP meant "... in the West". I grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s, and I can't imagine being a vegan, or even a vegetarian then. Certainly it would be doable if you always cooked your own food, but restaurants would mostly not accommodate you (unless you'd be fine with just a boring, flavorless salad), and if you went over to anyone's house for a meal, they'd think it was weird that you didn't eat meat.
Workaccount2 2y ago
To be fair, food was very difficult to come upon historically. Killing an animal and not eating it was equivalent to burning money for fun. Vegetarianism (voluntary) didn't become more than an edge case until food was heavily commoditized and readily available.
- amonon 2y ago
  This rings more true for me. Food simply used to be a lot more expensive. "Between 1960 and 2000, the average share of Americans’ disposable personal income (DPI) spent on food fell from 17.0 percent to 9.9 percent." [1] I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools. [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-share-of-income-spent-on-food-in-the-united-states-remained-relatively-steady-from-2000-to-2019 https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
  - gadabout 2y ago
    > I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools. You are correct that it used to be even higher. The US BLS estimates around 40% of DPI was spent on food at the turn of the century (1901). [1] [1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....
p_j_w 2y ago
> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms A classic case of mixing up correlation with causation?
conjectures 2y ago
> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms As did dental care and cars. Correlation is not causation.
scotty79 2y ago
People also have been publicly maiming and killing other people for vengeance and entertainment for millennia. Morality really does evolve. That includes animals as well.
dbtc 2y ago
This is about when people starting realizing such farms are contributing to planetary environmental harm. Also, as gruesome as a backyard slaughter might seem, it's nothing compared to the industrial equivalent.
rthomas6 2y ago
But unless you were nobility, meat wasn't available at every meal, or even every day. It cost too much. Meat for most people was a special occasion kind of thing. Ever notice how the English words for animals have Germanic roots but the words for their meats have French roots? Chicken -> poultry Cow -> beef Pig -> pork That's because the peasantry, the ones raising the animals, spoke Old English, and the nobility, the ones eating the meat, spoke French.
- kelnos 2y ago
  I always wondered about that. I thought it was just for euphemistic purposes to create more separation between the food we eat and the animal that it came from.
janalsncm 2y ago
When you’re hungry, you tend to care less about deep ethical questions and more about being fed. There’s the old trope about wealth and food: Poor people ask if you got enough to eat. Middle class people ask if it tasted good. Wealthy people ask if it looked good. Which correspond to points on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I think we can use that framework to understand where vegetarianism and veganism fit in. You might say that they are either related to personal feelings of being ethical or status symbols, or both.

erellsworth 2y ago

It makes sense to me. If you grow up seeing animals slaughtered on the regular you probably won't think much of it, especially when the adults around you treat it as completely normal. You grow up in an environment where you might think meat comes from the magic meat factory, when you see an animal slaughtered for the first time it's likely to be shocking enough to turn a lot of people away.

deepvibrations 2y ago
Very true. Just like when slaves were commonplace, it was 'normalised' and many people just turned a blind eye.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 2y ago
  The people who think meat comes from a magic meat factory are blind.
- georgeecollins 2y ago
  Everything biological is going to be eaten. Your dog or cat would eat you if you were dead and they were hungry enough. I am not saying we shouldn't evolve past eating meat, it would be great for the environment. But to say that one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical is an indictment of nature.
  - vengefulduck 2y ago
    I think the problem with this argument is the assumption that nature is inherently good. Nature is cruel and uncaring. Moving beyond it is a good thing imo. We’re just lucky that as a species by the roll of the dice we were given the power by nature to usurp it.
    - Psillisp 2y ago
      Literally picking a fight with Nature, what a trope. What will they think of next man versus self? What if the thing that man creates in his hubris isn’t actually better?
      - jamiek88 2y ago
        What if it is? We transcend nature and evolution because of our culture and foresight. We are the ultimate result of 4 billion years of evolution. Nature has made itself redundant in some ways. Actually, transcend is the wrong word we are still a part of nature of course but we can literally leave the planet and have the ability to irradiate this globe to erase most macroscopic life. We are an outside context problem as an Iain Banks Ship Mind would say. It’s a huge responsibility and opportunity that we will almost certainly squander.
        jack_pp 2y ago
        We are nowhere near being able to live outside this planet without significant struggle. It would be far easier to live in a submarine in the ocean than anywhere else in this solar system. Our culture and foresight has brought us into such misalignment that 25% of the US population is on psychiatric drugs, you have a lot of homeless, a drug epidemic, there's a general crisis of meaning, males have given up on finding partners, women are all competing for a few men or think they're all animals and stay away from them. To be able to eat quality food costs a lot and few people have the time or energy to cook anyway because city life is so stressful to most. We are living in a profoundly sick society and economy all over the world. WW3 is knocking on the door, one wrong move and we fuck up the only ecosystem we have in the galaxy. I'd bet if people were given the choice between living in a small fishing village from 2000 years ago and modern lower middle class the choice would be obvious. So to say we have mastered nature and we know better requires a lot of hubris.
  - aziaziazi 2y ago
    I agree with you but think you miss that the common concern is with the farming process. The fact to eat another animal usually comes as - a shortcut : “I don’t eat animals” instead of “I avoid encouraging the farming process by consuming the product of those farms: […]” - and/or a following philosophic stance, that seems logical (debatable) when someone avoid encouraging the farming process. Few are the vegans that claims that an animal eating another animal is not natural, or that they cats wouldn’t eat them in the condition you describe (which to be honest, rarely happens).
    - meowface 2y ago
      There are plenty of great moral arguments for why animals (or humans) shouldn't be eaten unless they died of purely natural causes. Factory farming is just the strongest to argue against and the main source of both suffering and death, so it's what people focus on. If factory farming were abolished overnight, vegans and vegetarians would (rightly) immediately move onto hunting and small farms. (I personally think there's nothing wrong with home/farm egg laying as long as the animals are taken care of well and the male ones aren't killed. That's why I'm vegetarian rather than vegan.)
  - erellsworth 2y ago
    This seems like a category error. We don't typically assign moral agency to animals the same way we do to humans. No one is saying "one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical." Some people are saying it is unethical for humans, who we typically do believe have moral agency, to eat other animals. Just as no one would say it is unethical for a snake to kill someone with its venom, but we would say it is unethical for a human inject someone with snake venom in order to kill them.
  - meowface 2y ago
    What's wrong with indicting nature? Male animals regularly rape female animals. We shouldn't hold animals morally culpable, as they aren't moral agents, but humans are moral agents. There is no human act in this world for which "this is commonplace in nature" is a moral defense.
    - xpe 2y ago
      Nature can be harsh and cruel indeed. I think we agree the term “natural” should almost always be questioned and unpacked. It often serves as a rhetorical device instead of a nugget of wisdom. Dismissing an idea solely for being “unnatural” is premature. Or vice versa. At the same time, there is wisdom in being curious about weirdness that seems nonsensical. Some weird things have a backstory and even rationale that is non-obvious. Or maybe their benefit is subtle or hidden to those who only look narrowly. (Chesterton’s Fence) Slight topic shift, but conceptually related: I hope the slash and burn “reformers” we’re seeing have the humility to recognize that institutional knowledge is diffused in ways they do not understand as outsiders. It doesn’t grow back quickly. Just because Chaos Monkey works at Netflix doesn’t mean it works for Congressionally-authorized government agencies. Rapid destruction can be far worse than measured reprioritization. I get it though — as a programmer I sometimes prefer to throw out a previous code base and start a-fresh, and this can help with clearing out technical debt. Such a rewrite is risky though, as is well known. Besides, technical abstractions are often orthogonal to domain knowledge and expertise.
tmerc 2y ago
I grew up buying meat and never seeing farms. About 7 years ago, I helped my sister/BIL raise a flock from hatchling to food. We did everything. Having actually slaughtered and butchered chickens I raised, I'd rather raise my own. I know the chickens I raised had a better life and death than factory farmed chickens.
partitioned 2y ago
Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life. The constant meat eater trolling about how its natural to eat meat and animals do it, ignore the fact that its not natural to keep animals in pens where they cant turn around for their entire life that is basically pure torture from birth to death. If all meat was produced the way it was farmed 100 years ago, youd see way less vegans.
- erellsworth 2y ago
  I mean, it can be both. Factory farming has been around for more than 100 years. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906. The meat industry has done a pretty good job keeping the horrors of slaughter houses out of the public eye, especially in the days before almost everyone was walking around with a video recorder in their pocket. I'm sure exposure to what's really involved in modern meat production has increased the popularity of veganism, but veganism has been around for at least a thousand years.
- animal-husband 2y ago
  Were that the case, you’d see vegans advocating for eating classically-husbanded animals. But I for one have never seen such a thing. And when I’ve spoken with vegans about this very topic, they’ve insisted that no animal can possibly be raised/slaughtered humanely – the belief seems almost axiomatic to them.
  - gbear605 2y ago
    I’m generally a vegetarian, but I eat chicken, beef, and pork from local farms that raise the animals ethically.
  - bluebarbet 2y ago
    This conflates animal rights with animal welfare. The vegans who are motivated by the latter might do as you suggest. But a strict interpretation of animal rights means respecting the right to live. This underpins religious vegetarianism too. Still other vegans are motivated by concerns about the environment. For them too, "classical husbandry" will not be a winning argument. If anything the opposite, since it requires more land.
munificent 2y ago
Put another way: If 99% of the animals you see on a day to day basis are pets and not livestock, it's hard to not think of all animals as potential pets instead of resources.

deepvibrations 2y ago

Surely this is more a case that it used to be much harder to be vegetarian and almost impossible to be vegan! Now we actually have a clear choice given the development and availability of so many other foods and supplements. Hence for me to value my enjoyment of foods above the life of another animal seems pretty harsh at best. Even chicken eggs really are not cruelty free - if you truly love animals, you would stop eating all animal products imo. Otherwise you are simply lying to yourself. Converse opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k

engineer_22 2y ago
Thousands of nations, billions of people. If only they knew the gnostic truth you hold in your breath...
__turbobrew__ 2y ago
> it used to be much harder to be vegetarian Millions of Indian people have been vegetarian for hundreds (if not thousands) of years now. I guess there are manufactured meat replacements now, but I prefer to just eat things like legumes over factory made vegan food.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kelnos 2y ago
  I assume GP meant "... in the West". I grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s, and I can't imagine being a vegan, or even a vegetarian then. Certainly it would be doable if you always cooked your own food, but restaurants would mostly not accommodate you (unless you'd be fine with just a boring, flavorless salad), and if you went over to anyone's house for a meal, they'd think it was weird that you didn't eat meat.

Workaccount2 2y ago

To be fair, food was very difficult to come upon historically. Killing an animal and not eating it was equivalent to burning money for fun. Vegetarianism (voluntary) didn't become more than an edge case until food was heavily commoditized and readily available.

amonon 2y ago
This rings more true for me. Food simply used to be a lot more expensive. "Between 1960 and 2000, the average share of Americans’ disposable personal income (DPI) spent on food fell from 17.0 percent to 9.9 percent." [1] I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools. [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-share-of-income-spent-on-food-in-the-united-states-remained-relatively-steady-from-2000-to-2019 https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
- gadabout 2y ago
  > I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools. You are correct that it used to be even higher. The US BLS estimates around 40% of DPI was spent on food at the turn of the century (1901). [1] [1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....

p_j_w 2y ago

> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms A classic case of mixing up correlation with causation?

conjectures 2y ago

> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms As did dental care and cars. Correlation is not causation.

scotty79 2y ago

People also have been publicly maiming and killing other people for vengeance and entertainment for millennia. Morality really does evolve. That includes animals as well.

dbtc 2y ago

This is about when people starting realizing such farms are contributing to planetary environmental harm. Also, as gruesome as a backyard slaughter might seem, it's nothing compared to the industrial equivalent.

rthomas6 2y ago

But unless you were nobility, meat wasn't available at every meal, or even every day. It cost too much. Meat for most people was a special occasion kind of thing. Ever notice how the English words for animals have Germanic roots but the words for their meats have French roots? Chicken -> poultry Cow -> beef Pig -> pork That's because the peasantry, the ones raising the animals, spoke Old English, and the nobility, the ones eating the meat, spoke French.

kelnos 2y ago
I always wondered about that. I thought it was just for euphemistic purposes to create more separation between the food we eat and the animal that it came from.

janalsncm 2y ago

When you’re hungry, you tend to care less about deep ethical questions and more about being fed. There’s the old trope about wealth and food: Poor people ask if you got enough to eat. Middle class people ask if it tasted good. Wealthy people ask if it looked good. Which correspond to points on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I think we can use that framework to understand where vegetarianism and veganism fit in. You might say that they are either related to personal feelings of being ethical or status symbols, or both.