If you couldn't stomach eating meat if you had to butcher it yourself you shouldn't get to eat meat
"I need my chicken to come in drumstick form or I can't eat it" fuck you either own the murder or change your diet coward
Here's a post that definitely won't end up locked after at least one Hexbear gets banned
We have vegan struggle sessions much like the moon has cycles
Vegan struggle sessions are like Hexbear Highlander. Eventually there will only be vegans left because each one some of the carnists get deleted from the Internet, but then they'll argue about some semantic difference between various types of veganism, until the only Hexbears that are left are Jains. I don't think they'll fight each other off though all that Jains I've ever known were the chillest.
So I guess the end state of Hexbear is Jainbear. Which sounds neat probably
I've done some hunting and skinned a deer in my time. It's not as stomach churning as you may think.
However what is stomach churning is what happens in factory farms. I'm not nearly as concerned with the slaughter as I am with the conditions the animals are kept in up until the slaughter
I just get meat from hunting, but I know a lot of people that just get their meat from local farms. I think it makes it a lot easier knowing that the animals get a good life, instead of how horrible those factory conditions are on the poor guys
The real problem with people who eat meat is that they haven't completely inured themselves to the screams of the dying.
More Americans should do the FFA thing, where you raise a baby piglet to slaughter weight and then personally tear the adorable creature's heart out with a knife. That's definitely going to produce a bunch of vegetarians and not a generation of hollow-eyed psychopaths. Can't wait till we have more guys like Ron DeSantis, staring blankly into empty space for hours on end, then giggling softly any time they hear the sounds of pain.
Yup, you can tell people what’s going on in the background all you want but until they see it themselves, nothing will change.
It’s why factory farms and other agricultural industries have basically made it illegal for you to know what’s happening
I don't get whether this is for op or against them
If you can't stomach soldering fumes you shouldn't get to use electronics. If you don't acid etch your own circuit boards you disgust me.
Do components suffer in order to be produced into useful electronic devices?
You're making a separate argument. The argument OP is making is that people shouldn't be able to eat animals if they can't butcher them. Which isn't really a Vegan argument, or even an argument against making animals suffer since it implies that people should be able to eat meat as long as they have experience hunting and butchering. As someone else said
Killing something yourself doesn't make it better or worse, this argument just appeals to you because you know many people wouldn't be able to. Wanting to make fewer people eat meat is cool and good, but vapid sophistry is not how you get there.
no but the workers do.
How does me killing my own meat stop animals from suffering? If anything OP is encouraging animal suffering. When amateurs kill animals there is more chance for the animals to have a prolonged and painful death. Encouraging amateurs to butcher their own meat will lead to more waste meaning more animals will die.
You are giving the rocks the power to think. So I can only assume that they suffer
Do components suffer
They may start soon
Surely you're trying to miss the point.
I think breathing solder fumes is disgusting. I pay for someone else to do it for me and they don't get paid well. My using electronics is contributing to humans dying for pennies. How is that more ethical than paying someone to process meat instead of doing it myself?
If you want to talk about poor living conditions and inhumane slaughtering practices I cant argue against that. You want to debate that all living animals have a right to life I'll ask why don't plants have that right. But the OP's argument is silly and not a solid argument against eating meat.
I have killed and butchered my own chickens and I have gotten pretty good at it but there were a few near the beginning that didn't go as smoothly as I'd like. If anyone really cares about the suffering of animals they wouldn't be encouraging amateurs to do it just to prove they are worthy of eating meat.
The point has been fully grasped, the point just happens to be very silly.
Everyone should learn how to solder. It gives them more of an appreciation for the equipment they use, and brings them closer to being able to repair or tweak or reinvent their own electronics.
Saying that you should participate directly in the production for yourself, and that this should be normalized, is not the same thing as saying that you should produce everything for yourself on an individual batch level.
If you have objections around how lithium is produced you probably should take some steps into lessening the demand of it. Systemic change, sure, but thinking "wow this is fucked up, not gonna do the tiniest bit about to help" is psychopathic.
Like if you only buy smartphones when they get actually too old or broken instead of on a 2 year schedule you're way out ahead. There, look, a freebie
Why does your conception of a connection to production involve the worst abuses of capitalism? Of course it would be the adult consumer doing a stint in the mine.
The complete separation and obscuring of consumption from production is possibly the most insidious part of capitalism, and there are many reasons to have an alternative in which it's at least possible to take part in making the items and supplies we use.
It's more like lithium mining if lithium had its own feelings and subjectivities, and lithium mining actually meant raising young lithiums in a concentrationary universe of lithium meat factories and denying lithiums their own freedom and ethical significance in order to feed a grossly excessive, alienating, and generally unnecessary addiction to lithium meat. In other words it's a shitty comparison
I went to school to be a butcher, originally. I actually know how to break down a whole beef into primals, then, i can passingly get primals broken down into finish cuts. Ive done that in the past several times. Chickens too, from live to its final nugget form.
I agree fully, if youre going to eat it, you should be able to stomach the task.
Im also a vegetarian, so make of that what you will.
I've known omnivores that couldn't field dress a dear they shot... They took it to a processer.
Most dudes i know (im from texas, home of the manly man) will do the bare minimum to prevent spoilage, but nothing beyond that. Hell, most of the guys i know go to ‘caged hunts’. with on site processing. It a hunt on a game ranch. game ranches have fences high enough that Nilgai, mule deer, whitetail and the like cannot get over.
You sleep in a lodge, someone makes your breakfast, feeds you, drives you to a blind or stand on their property, and lets you go. Some provide guns and ammunition.
After you shoot Bambi, they take the carcass, dress it, process it, and you get back some steaks and some 2lb chubbs of ground meat. Then you go back to the lodge, brag about what a stud you are, drink tequila, and let someone else cook dinner for you.
My wife has never shot a deer in her life, but she's skinned and butchered a few her dad brought down during hunting season. Genuinely kinda terrifying to watch her work.
She does have a cousin that lives out in Victoria and herds cattle as a big part of her family income. They do the whole job, from bottle feeding the calves to BBQing the brisket.
I mentioned it elsewhere in this thread, I got a friend of mine that went hunting with me to go vegetarian after getting to the dressing part. I don't think most people can handle seeing it up close
Lmao your pfp
There are schools specifically for butchers?
breaking a carcass down into the relevant muscle groups is not a trivial task
I'd imagine it's a little similar to being a massage therapist or osteopath or something, tons of anatomical knowledge (but only muscle and bone)
Look, I don't think stomaching slaughtering animals should allow you to eat meat.
It's more honest at least.
I agree, but I think practically it works. People who are totally comfortable with slaughter probably aren't generally going to go vegan, but the vast majority of people would be traumatized by the experience. So it's not very useful like philosophically or whatever, but in most cases it makes sense for real people. I'm not making any sense.
And in general, even though I'm vegan, I just have no faith that talking to people about it will actually produce a better world or whatever, so idk why I'm even weighing in. I think revolution is more likely than animal liberation.
I used to live on a homestead where we'd occasionally kill and butcher chickens after giving them a long happy life of running free on a large property - basically the "happy farm" every carnist likes to pretend they buy their meat from.
It was still wrong and I think back on that time really negatively - the killing at least. I loved taking care of those little dinosaurs and watching them run around while I smoked on the front porch. They should have just been pets.
Family has kept birds for years that are essentially pets - it's funny how chickens are written off as these stupid meat beasts when they each have individual personalities and quirks. Like, even the farm animals people feel less guilty about eating because they're "less intelligent" are just individual lil guys doing their own thing.
Had some chicken pals for a while when living on a farm. No one at meat there and we did move the eggs into a section of the barn so there wouldn't be egg bits making the place gross.
May I ask did you take a liking to any of them? Like gained a special connection with one that you think about every once in a while.
Every one that I got to name. We had 40 chickens and 3 ducks so there was a lot to keep in mind, but I got to name one of the ducks and a few of the chickens, and they were my favorites. Especially the ones I named after commies - my housemates never knew why we had a duck named Tito, or that Emma's and Rosa's full names were actually Emma Goldhen and Rosa Cluxemburg.
But they were all pretty special, and even the ones I didn't form a long-lasting emotional bond deserved better than being eaten.
you should change your diet either way tbh
I can excuse institutional ecocide and mass murder, but I draw the line at hypocrisy
ngl you shouldn't get to eat meat regardless of your feelings about violence towards animals
If there was a product that functioned in a culturally appropriate way at the store no one would really care what it was made of. So, all it would take was the government to ignore one lobbying group and we'd be set.
I don't really hunt or farm(don't live where that's an option) but I have butchered and ate a grouse that flew into my window and died one time. Free food is free food.
Uncritical support for this post.
If you can't butcher your own meat, you're using the disconnect of letting someone else handle that trauma for you to allow yourself to be complicit in the murder of a being.
Kill it and cut it yourself, or don't fucking eat it.
I was a butcher for nine years so it doesn't bother me to break down a dead body.
What always bothered me was killing lobsters from the tank. Seeing the life leave their body was rough.
I've butchered birds before and I've butchered deer before.
I'd butcher them live in my house if it was cheaper to buy them live. All my poultry is bought as the whole dead bird and cut on my countertop to save money.
I think they're talking about people who would never ever do it cause it's icky, but will eat meat. I don't think OP's expectation is that people would butcher their own meat in all circumstances
I actually did spend a few months working at a meat plant before i started college. It was genuinely preferable to working fast food.
Thats how i feel about the coal mine
Better yet, just eat beans
Or cops, they mostly consist of pea protein.
I've been fishing before and cleaned the fish. Not really too difficult. The only reason I wouldn't do it again is that fishing is fucking boring.
Harvesting and foraging for fruits, veggies, greens, and mushrooms is such a nice experience.
Then there's butchering, hunting, and fishing. I haven't done any except fishing though I've been a witness to all. All horrifying and scarring experiences.
Apparently people do feel the same sense of achievement in these as foraging. Idk man, to me it's like the difference between finding a coin on the ground vs mugging someone
I don't have much of a problem with killing animals, i just get worried I'll do it wrong and prolong their suffering, which I think is reasonable. give me the right tool setup I would go much faster. I've only had to do mercy killings of injured birds and mice, and it hasn't been that pleasant when all I have is a hammer.
I had to put down some kittens. I placed them in comfortable bin with blankets and then emptied a box of whippits into the bin and closed the lid. I think this has been the most humaine method I have found.
Retvrn to persistence hunting. If you can't/won't walk after an antelope for day or two until they exhaust themselves you should change your diet
So does this also mean I’m only allowed to drink femboy milk if I do the milking myself?
No, it means you're only allowed to drink femboy milk if you would be comfortable milking a femboy
I grew up helping my family 'process' cow and deer (and occasionally other game animals). It doesn't especially gross me out, and I'd do it again if my choice was to butcher animal corpses or have me and my family die.
Luckily, I developed a functioning moral and ethical framework, and don't need to eat animals or animal byproducts to live... so I don't. I think its wrong, even if it doesn't literally turn my stomach to think about doing.
And, I'm not the furthest off from being forced to eat animal products or die; I have a lot of food allergies, and my body seems like it likes getting more over time. Biggest struggle for me is being deathly allergic to all nuts and several seeds, but I'm okay with beans and wheat. Hope my body doesn't take me 🫘 from me.
When my wife and I went to Iceland a year ago, my wife was worried about being able to find halal food, in particular lamb. So before we left she asked me if I would be comfortable with being the one who had to do the slaughtering, because she doubted that the small coastal town we would be staying in had a halal butcher/super market, given that we would probably be doubling the towns muslim population upon arrival. "luckily" i didn't end up having to do the slaughtering, but it did make me question if our family should go vegetarian for a while.
If she's asking you to do it? Yes most definitely should think about passing on meat. I love my partners but short of a survival situation I'm not killing something for them to enjoy the taste of. There's plenty of food they can eat that doesn't require suffering to indulge in.
why is this site so interested in this topic? I never see this particular struggle session take over twitter, what gives?
some crossover with an irrelevant subreddit 3 years back
I kind of agree. I leave people alone about their dietary choices, but I do respect meat-eaters more if they have 'hands-on' experience with the process of turning an animal into food. I was raised farming and hunting, and I've been vegan for almost 25 years now. My wife eats meat and it doesn't bother me, but she also grew up on a farm and knows where food comes from.
I don't think vegans have issues with dietary choices, it's the ::: spoiler CW: abuse exploitation, rape, torture and murder that the animals are put through that we have a problem with. :::
If carnists can find a way to eat meat without doing any of those, most of us wouldn't mind it.
Plants May Let Out Ultrasonic Squeals When Stressed
Do Plants Feel Pain? A Primer on Plant Neurobiology
Can't eat meat without feels bad. Can't eat plants without feels bad.
meat eats plants so eating meat means you hate plants too
what have plants done for me lately other than everything they do for me
No plants are stupid as shit they lack a CNS or really any nervous system. They just use fairly basic chemical signals and cool cascading sensor networks to carry out behaviors like, "release the poison now" and "it's gonna be dark soon, maybe".
Just eat fruits and vegetables then. Plants might feel pain but it makes no sense for their reproductive processes to cause any feeling but pleasure. Plants make fruits so animals will pick and eat them, and disperse their seeds. At least most plants do, or more precisely, the fruits we eat are those meant to be eaten by those which eat them.
Plants might feel pain but it makes no sense for their reproductive processes to cause any feeling but pleasure.
I hate to tell you this, but nature doesn't run on what makes sense. There's nothing about them feeling pain that implies they feel pleasure at having their reproductive organs ripped off.
Hunted a lot and butchered everything we killed for quite a few years. At one point i just decided I didn't want to eat meat anymore and haven't since. I definitely think it played a major role in me going plant based.
Turns out hexbear is 50% butchers and hunters huh.
Almost like we're not all vegan, but respect those who choose a vegan lifestyle.
interesting....looking into it.I bought a bow to hunt the rabbits that were eating my father's garden. I couldn't do it so I just started leaving the dogs toys there so he would patroll the area more.
Jesus fuck, the way a chicken twitches after it's been killed will haunt me forever.
When I was a little one, my dad decided to raise a bunch of broiler chickens to fatten up for Christmas. IDK if others have experienced this, but there's a nauseating smell about a dying animal that seems to linger even when the blood's been washed away.
Yeah, there sure is. I'd forgotten about that smell until I read your comment. But reading it, well, I was transported back to being like 8 years old and watching my dad kill and pluck chickens. That awful smell, horrific. The smells of animal agriculture are impossible to explain to someone who's never been around them. The burning smell from branding cattle has stuck with me all these years too. And the awful fake milk formula shit that gets fed to baby dairy cows in their tiny, solitary hutches. I should have gone vegan years before I actually did, but carnism is so damn normalized in our society that it was easier to just pretend those awful smells weren't so bad, or that the baby dairy cows were "gross" and so "deserved it". Fuck I'm glad
I did some minor home butchering of like big cuts into small cuts, parting up mostly whole poultry, and the like. The turning point for me was a whole (as whole as the FDA will let be sold) duck.
was what really put it together for me. I wholeheartedly agree that people who eat meat should butcher it themselves and think about the anatomical similarities to their own body.
Not sure how to do spoilers but Content Warning below
I had a friend that wanted to go hunting with me, he could not handle the stripping portion. Convinced him to at least go vegetarian if he can't do it himself. Really puts it in perspective to people when they aren't so far removed from the reality
The spoiler thing is under the “exclamation point inside a triangle” button, between the superscript button and the markup help button
did we stop doing dissection in biology class?
Please stick to the cabbage and the leeks that you're used to
I really like that brand so what is the meme saying is it confirming or challenging the virtue of my treats and goodies
Butterball or Tofurkey?
To be fair, I couldn't stomach producing many things I consume or use. Though personally the meat one is fine.
processing a thanksgiving turkey was all it took for me to stop eating meat. just the smell makes me want to wretch now. I have no clue how anyone butchers an animal and then eats it. it's clearly a carcass, not food.
I think this is swaying in the opposite direction too much. I mean it is food in the sense that is edible and calorie wise, pretty good. Easy to see why people used to eat meat.
There's a side question to the one in OP along the lines of would you eat tongue or heart, or one step further, liver of an animal. Even back when I used to eat meat I thought it was pretty fucked and contradictory for meat eaters to enjoy things only as insofar they've been brought up on a very sterilized version of it and wouldn't touch the other stuff - especially heart and tongue, that's still just muscle, that's not even like organ-y
humans breed billions of new "livestock" animals every year to perpetuate the cycle of carnage; trying to cast repeated forcible insemination and wide-eyed thrashing death in a blood-slicked abattoir, institutionalised torture on an industrial scale, as somehow compassionate is fucking disgusting
Agreed
Humans are the only animal that has to cook meat to be able to consume it.
That's actually true of pretty much all food, not just meat. The way the human digestive system is set up it's almost impossible to thrive on a raw food diet even with all the modern conveniences of selectivly bred high yield plants and intensive processing (chopping/blending). You can still survive eating nothing but raw food in a modern context, but historically it would have been extremely difficult. There's a really interesting book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by anthropologist Richard Wrangham that proposed it wasn't eating meat that kicked off the evolution of smaller guts and bigger brains that characterizes the rise of the Homo genus, but harnessing fire to cook food in general that allowed us to decrease the amount of energy investment in food digestion (which is one of the biggest investment of energy the human body makes, after the brain) and increase the amount of energy available to our brains. This is because cooking increases the amount of energy we are able to gain from food in multiple ways.
Take a potato as an example, starting with taking a bite and chewing it. It's going to take longer and more energy to break down that raw potato into something you can swallow vs the cooked one. Then when you actually start digesting it, the cooked potato has the advantage that a lot of the longer complex starches and other molecules have been already broken down by the cooking process, while the raw potato is going to take a lot more energy to break down, lowering the amount of energy you gain compared to the cooked potato. And due to our very short digestive tracts compared to animals adapted to raw food we won't absorb as many nutrients from the raw potato anyway, whereas the cooked potato can be taken up much faster.
Of course even with cooking food eating meat was a relative rarity, with the grand majority of calories consumed coming from foraging plants in most cases. There are some exceptions including arctic peoples that had much higher rates of meat eating due to the environments they lived in, but for most hunter-gathers and early agriculturalists meat was a luxury, not a staple.
There's also other interesting side bits like the increased amount of time spent socialising around cooking fires helped with the development/improvement of communication and the intelligence that comes with that, but I've infodumped enough for right now
Lies, I saw the documentary Ratatoille and the mouse was coocking all over the place
I'll go out of my way to protect a spider, but I guess I don't mind eating a bit of fish or even chicken. Then again, I hope to go something of a soft pescatarian someday and have a stomach and knowledge of food that goes beyond that.
I remember seeing bones stick out of a slab of meat, think it was called Rack of Lamb, and that freaked me out.
😠
Yeah. Meat is a pink rectangle I get from the grocery store. If I got TVP instead of animal square I probably wouldn't know the difference. Most people I think could not say the same if they got an animal part instead of a pink square.
Do you think the stomach to butcher an animal is a learnable skill or do you think you have to be born with it or raised to do it as a child?
oh it's definitely learnable
It's learnable but not something you want to do as a job... https://www.surgeactivism.org/articles/slaughterhouse-workers-and-ptsd
Both. You can learn it but some people just have it
Hmm
Inch-resting set of posts you’ve got here
✍️
You are going to quickly arguing yourself into hopeless contradiction if you think this framing of intrinsic deserving as a variable feature and moralistic bullshit like that. Killing something yourself doesn't make it better or worse, this argument just appeals to you because you know many people wouldn't be able to. Wanting to make fewer people eat meat is cool and good, but vapid sophistry is not how you get there.
You are effectively murdering at least part of an animal by choosing to eat it. The average meat eater will kill several animals over the course of a year.
Living an unexamined life to prevent guilt about something you know you would feel is wrong so you can keep benefiting from that act being commited in your name is just as bad as doing the act itself but with the added element of cowardice and so is therefore worse.
I don't know man, there's a lot of people out there who couldn't stand killing an animal but eat meat and don't see any problem with it.
Like this doesn't gotcha people who hunt, because then the answer is "yup". Hell I know quite a few hunting meat eaters who think similarly on the basis of thinking factory farming is fucked up.
I feel like there's a point about how a lot of this is socialization of how food is procured. People in the US generally speaking don't eat bugs since it's a settler colonial state descended from Europe that doesn't really have edible insects. In SEA though you'll see much more insect consumption without a stigma because it's part of what you grow up with and there are a variety of edible insects. Similarly, someone living far to the north will likely be very comfortable with hunting. In an industrialized society we're very alienated from most of the production chains that go into our daily lives. We don't pick our fruit and vegetables, we don't toil on a farm, the food just sorta appears in a grocery store packaged for easy consumption which leads to people making videos where they'll swear off fruit after dunking a strawberry in brine and seeing worms come out.
hunting is also somewhat necessary to keep a stable ecosystem in many places (granted it's also unstable because of human activities). If we need to shoot some deer or whatever every year I don't see a problem letting those who did it eat the corpses, meanwhile animal agriculture should just be abolished all together
Strip out the moralistic nonsense. Here's an earnest question: would you eat meat if you had to kill it yourself?
No that sounds like a lot of work. But i wouldn't eat veggies if i had to harvest them all myself either. I would just die lmao
The unfortunate thing is that it would probably still be doable for me if a butcher took it from there.