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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Veganism = Attention Seeking
« on: February 01, 2023, 01:25:19 AM »Think about a Thanksgiving dinner.
There are side dishes. There in fact are side dishes enough to fill you without ever touching the turkey.
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Moreover, there is nothing preventing you from cooking your own food. If asked to prepare and clean a vegan Thanksgiving meal themselves, most "vegans" instead of rising to the challenge, instead want the host to cook an addition meal just for them. This proves that it's really not about animal cruelty at all, but special snowflakism. Sure, you are welcome to use the kitchen to bake a vegetable casserole with no lard, butter, or cream. You are in turn expected to clean that pan. But when it becomes about other people treating your differently from the other guests, you are basically a narcissist asshole.
To be honest, I think that it comes down to manners. If you invite someone to a meal, knowing that they're a vegan, then I think that it's reasonable for you to ask them to cook them a meal they can actually eat. If you didn't know and you find out the day before, then I think it's reasonable to say 'Oh, sorry, we've got all this stuff for x, y and z, but you're welcome to bring something along.'
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If this were about not eating an animal that has cruelly been killed, what defines cruelty? Thanks to Temple Grandin, most animals killed for meat are prepped in such a way that they cannot see other animals killed (stress hormones can actually alter the flavor of the meat), and are often knocked out prior to being killed. Generally, animals are killed humanely.
The moral objection to the killing of animals is not just at the moment of death (which, by the way isn't always humane. Bolt guns to stun cows don't always reach their mark, between 9-32% require multiple shots, but also how they're raised up to that point. Chickens suffering organ failure due to excessive growth, pigs trapped in farrowing crates, etc.
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But let's assume you want to define all killing as inhumane. Is torture inhumane? Suppose an island was filled with rabbits, and they were slowly eating all the grass and other shrubbery on the island. Don't you think maybe shooting every fifth rabbit to prevent rabbits from eating the last leaf ever and turning into skinny rabbits that slowly digest their own bodies is more humane? Starvation is a very long and painful way to go.
We're not dealing with Bunnyopolis, though. It's an irrelevant thought-experiment.
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Or this:
https://theconversation.com/ordering-the-vegetarian-meal-theres-more-animal-blood-on-your-hands-4659
It turns out that while letting cattle graze on naturally occurring grass is friendly to the local environment, bulldozing massive stretches of land to grow crops on means that snakes and rabbits and foxes and groundhogs all get to DIE while the bulldozer cuts them up into little pieces.
The majority of crops are grown for livestock. We cannot support the amount of meat consumed in the world today on natural grazing. In addition, much of the 'natural pasture' land was cleared for grazing in the first place and is currently the leading cause of deforestation in places like Brazil and Australia.
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There's also an unmentioned fact of farming. When you don't eat something for meat, don't use it for wool, and don't need its eggs, it either becomes a pet or you have to put it down (or release into the wild, where developers squash it with a bulldozer when they make the next town).
We could choose not to breed them into existence in the first place.
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You wanna be vegetarian? Know yourself out, but do it the traditional way without a tractor. Drink milk and support the dairy industry. Eat eggs and use wool. Don't consign animals to being put down because farmers now have no use for them.
There is no reality where veganism is adopted so quickly that every farmer decides to cull their entire livestock overnight. Ideally it becomes adopted over time so that farmers simply have to breed fewer and fewer animals.