The self-reference in this was expected but somehow also the perfect cherry on top
I actually respect vegans that are vegan to prevent the suffering of animals.
I get it. Grew up farming. Chicken houses are an industrial horror machine.
We’ve recently bought a play farm and hope to raise or hunt all our meat. Only the slaughter and butchering of steers will be outsourced. Takes some serious equipment to handle an animal that large.
I’m an omnivore by evolution and enjoy meat and hunting. I’m always a little sad when I kill something, however. I figure that sadness means I’m human and is a good thing. When I eat meat from something I killed, it means more. There is a lot of respect involved in it as well something like religion.
If more people had to kill their meat, we would probably live in a very different world and there would be a lot more vegans.
If more people had to kill their meat, we would probably live in a very different world and there would be a lot more vegans.
I agree with your overall post, but you have the conclusion backwards.
The closer you are to hunting or slaughtering the more it’s just a normal part of life. I’ve never met a vegan when I grew up in a rural area around farms, only after I moved to the city and it’s almost exclusivly people that grew up in the city.
vegan here who grew up on farms. Just because you don’t know them doesn’t mean they aren’t common.
Well, I wouldn’t say vegans are common anywhere (where I’ve lived). It’s like 1-2% of the population.
And while my point indeed was totally anecdotal, it goes beyond just knowing people. There are other hints. I still often visit family in my childhood home area and even today you can notice a different in marketing. Restaurants there often don’t even mark meals as vegan on the menu, while restaurants in big cities often have an entire section for vegan meals.
Also supermarkets specialising on bio food and such (our equivilant of like wholefoods) aren’t present at all. You’d have to drive like 30km to get to one. Also in regular supermarkets meat replacement options are either not availible or poorly stocked.
So I’m not sure if it’s a result or a cause, but I’d say it’s much harder to be vegan in a rural area, just from a logistical standpoint. And you get a lot more local farmers markets, so you also have access to fresh and relativly cheap meat.
I’ve tried to search for some statistics about the distribution of vegans in urban and rural areas, but didn’t find anything useful. I did find some quora and reddit threads with quite a few replies of people that have similar expirences to mine.
If you have any, please share.
We need to eat. We don’t need tol take joy in aninal deaths. These are different things and the meme is dumb.
I’m vegan btw. The meme is making fun of people who eat for taste pleasure and not any other type :)
Except you don’t need to eat animals and so it is the same. You’re killing animals for your entertainment, just because you eat them after that doesn’t change anything.
you don’t know what they need. and I seriously doubt they are killing for entertainment. I doubt they kill anything at all.
People have eaten meat for thousands of years. That’s been a matter of survival, not entertainment. But my comment was about people taking joy in killing, which is what the meme is about, not taking joy in eating,. I appreciate your zeal but I’d prefer you to not ascribe to me arguments I didn’t make
I grew up on a farm, I’ve killed and slaughtered my own food my whole life and I always felt good about eating meat because of that fact.
As I get older I’m really starting to hate killing things, I don’t want to end a life at all. My couple of vegetarian days might turn into a whole lifestyle.
You’ve got this! There are a ton of benefits to going plant-based. Dominion is a great documentary to show how most (~90%) are treated, which emphasizes the importance for us to shift away (it doesn’t sound like the way you did it was as bad as this, but this is the info that made me swap away recently).
The whole taste argument completely ignores nutrition.
Why don’t you only eat potatoes? Do you derive taste pleasure from B12 supplements?
Attaching a system of morality to a diet is just religion.
I maintain that veganism is just halal/kosher for atheists/agnostics.
Attaching a system of mortality to a diet is just religion
… what? I’m sorry, but this simply doesn’t make sense at all. By this logic what is wrong with cannibalism? Attaching a system of morality to that diet would just be a religion right? And I’m sure eating human meat has all kinds of nutrients.
Nothing is inherently wrong with cannibalism.
I’m not a moral realist. So I don’t believe in moral facts I.e. that murder is ‘wrong’ or being charitable is ‘right’
It’s kid stuff (IMO) to believe in mystical rights and wrongs of the universe. The universe does not care one iota that you cease to exist tomorrow or if all humans were to become extinct (IMO).
If you disagree please point me to the source of your morals, how do you know what’s right and what’s wrong?
Who here is claiming that there are moral facts? Of course morals are constructs of human culture, but that doesn’t make them less important. Morals are essentially what we have learned to be important rules for good, healthy societies. Humans who abide by the idea that it is “wrong” to kill another human are far more compatible in a community than ones who do not. These concepts have developed over a very long time, which is why we tend to “know” when things are wrong (eg feel bad, guilty conscious, etc). One of these “rules” is that needlessly inflicting pain on intelligent animals is wrong. Similarly, causing unnecessary damage to the environment is wrong. The context of climate change is quite new, but the principle is the same.
One of these “rules” is that needlessly inflicting pain on intelligent animals is wrong.
that is not universal
who gets to define need
Obviously the observer decides for themselves what they think is needed. I didn’t think it would be controversial to observe that people tend to dislike/have an aversion to hurting intelligent animals for no reason.
Not everyone necessarily feels this, but many people do. Enough for us as a society to largely ban/shun things like dog fights, bull fights, circus animals, animal torture videos, etc
The experiences of animals are real and matter. Their suffering is identical in nature to your own. Your moral perspective demands that you deny or ignore these facts. If you can deny that an animal’s experience has any value, you can do the same to a human.
So you’ve never killed a mosquito, right? Or a spider? Ants, perhaps?
This is a bad faith argument, similar to saying “so you’ve never left a light on all day?” To someone protesting climate change.
The point of veganism (besides the environmental side) is that there is far too much unnecessary suffering caused to animals; complex and intelligent animals, because of the meat industry. Of course humans will probably always cause death and suffering to animals and even other humans, but accepting this and taking it as a reason for “why should I care at all then” is ridiculous.
I don’t think we are at the point where all of humanity can refrain from meat. Maybe most Americans but we should maybe collectively decide this is the goal before pursuing it.
Being incendiary is a strategy that only had small short term gains. Looking at th big picture more people need to understand the argument and it can’t be, “you should feel bad.” At least not until you’ve established the expectations and clear reasons why they exist outside of one’s own personal judgement.
Why can’t we?? Meat is a luxury product!! The only reason you can afford it at all is because I subsidize it so heavily with my taxes. It is made by refining cheap, safe, plentiful plant food using the bodies of animals to create a toxic, addictive, scarce luxury good. In that process, MOST OF THE NUTRIENTS ARE LOST. If we all stopped eating meat, we would have such an overabundance of food, we would have to stop farming more than half the land we are currently farming for plants.
Now tell me why YOU can’t stop being cruel and violent against the kindest, gentlest creatures on the planet? Because even if you can come up with a tortured hypothetical reason some unlikely hypothetical person can’t, if you can, then what you are doing is atrocity.
Not that I was going to listen to you anyway, but the entire way you’re going about this just makes you look like a dick.
Also, accusing me of being cruel and violent for buying a slab of meat off the shelf is laughably stupid.
If you can deny that an animal’s experience has any value, you can do the same to a human.
values are subjective
And yours are inconsistent. Is there a problem with people pointing that out?
no one can value everything the same… of course they are inconsistent
I didn’t say they had the same value. I said they had value. Consuming them for hedonistic pleasure is only ethically consistent with the view that animals have effectively zero or even negative intrinsic value.
nothing has intrinsic value
All of your efforts at self-preservation seem to disagree.
Okay? So?
Being cruel and violent to innocent creatures requires that you learn to suspend your empathy. Being cruel and violent to innocent creatures EVERY SINGLE DAY requires that you main your empathy, to actually injure yourself and impair your ability to be empathetic AT ALL.
To respond to your apparent non sequitur, I value compassion and empathy. Don’t you?
I value compassion and empathy
everyone does…not everyone has a problem with eating animals.
I can deny the importance of human experience (the heat death of the universe will erase all traces of our existence and impact) without wanting to kill humans right now.
How did you conclude the experiences of animals matter?
How do you know animals are having experiences?
How do you know human experiences matter?
I don’t claim to have any answers to the above but I’ve never heard a satisfactory answer to these questions other than ‘I just believe it is so’ and if it boils down to my belief versus your belief I have to conclude that neither one of us actually has any idea.
I dont know why you call it your moral system, when your system apparently is that the earth is supreme, humans dont matter, therefore anything that happens is okay. Morals are a societal thing, if you dont care about society then what’s the point?
How do you apply this system to your own actions? Just anything goes cause it doesnt matter?
I agree, morals are a societal thing and right now it’s perfectly socially acceptable to eat meat.
How I apply this to my own actions is by conforming to the made up rules of society because that seems to keep me alive.
If I lived in a vegan society and it was not socially acceptable to eat meat I likely wouldn’t.
I do actually like to see mosquitoes die.
Specially when they are running away with MY blood.
Yeah I like to flatten them in a millisecond
I like the trick where you squeeze the skin around where they’re sucking so they explode
Oh hey, a 1-day-old account posting 6 vegan posts in 1 hour to unrelated communities. I’ve seen this one before.
Hey! I made this content and was made aware of Lemmy by a friend two days ago. I decided to join and wanted to enter with a bang by sharing some of my OC.
Hey, I’m vegan!
Hello!
Yep, Social Media Manipulation 101
I’ve seen an increasing trend of vеgаns doing this especially on lemmy
Yep, those awful vegans pushing their agenda for their own gains. Make ME aware of MY CHOICE to pay for animal abuse and torture?! Blatant manipulation!
no one is paying for animal abuse or torture
Exactly! My ancestors didnt pay for slavery, they just wanted cotton. Everyone need cotton, right? I mean they wouldve harvested the cotton themselves, but it was way cheaper from neighboring farmers for whatever reason. That didnt concern them though, they had enough prpblems!
want to see a westerner have a full on tantrum? Suggest to them that their actions are not always morally neutral
The smug, always morally neutral easterners:
Look up the prevalence of veganism
The smug, eternally morally superior vegan:
I mean, Vegans are morally superior, that’s a solved question.
Thry certainly earn the smug reputation
They’re better than you and it should be known.
The first time we harvested one of our pigs we had a wake for him. We ate all kinds of delicious cuts and raised a toasted to him.
To Biggun. He was a nice pig and he is a tasty pig.
TO BIGGUN!
<om no nom>
I’m sure that comforted Biggun while he was murdered by his friend
Murder is the killing of a human. You can’t murder a non-human.
lol okay dude
It’s in the definition. Murder is the killing of one human being by another. Vegan fanatics try to shame everyone else by calling it murder but it just makes me laugh. They try so very hard but just sound silly.
pedantry is an incredible argumentative strategy. Truly unstoppable. Why think critically when you can read a dictionary instead?
Dismissing the truth as pedantry doesn’t change the fact that it’s the truth. Your beliefs don’t change reality.
Using linguistic prescriptivism to shut down an argument and calling it “the truth” and “reality” to avoid thinking about what somebody means when they say a word is… certainly something
If you like: pretending that killing an animal is morally equivalent to killing a human
You should try: growing a brain
When did I say that? My statement points out that rituals to make yourself feel better about killing an animal do not change that animal’s experience of being killed or the moral weight of that action
You said they were morally equivalent when you called it murder, and you said it again just now. Why does killing an animal for food carry any moral weight? Cheetahs don’t get any flak for hunting caribou.
A human is an animal too, so i might kill it for food with no moral weight to it. Great.
But if you compare yourself to a cheetah, I get that your intellect and morals are just… Primal 😁
So to be clear you are officially saying that killing an animal is morally equivalent to killing a human?
I actually didn’t say anything and just followed this dude’s logic. But actually I’d say it’s not equivalent. The non-human animals are always innocent. Man is rarely.
You said they were morally equivalent when you called it murder
I didn’t, actually
and you said it again just now
I didn’t, actually
Why does killing an animal for food carry any moral weight?
Because humans aren’t special unique beings with souls that make us the only ones with moral worth. Many animals are capable of suffering and emotion.
Cheetahs don’t get any flak for hunting caribou.
We are the ones with the social system allowing for moral frameworks to guide our decisionmaking. Cheetahs aren’t moral agents. And if they are, they follow cheetah morality. Plus, they are obligate carnivores anyway (which is why your cat should not be deprived of meat)
You said they were morally equivalent when you called it murder
I didn’t, actually
Yes you did, that’s what the word “murder” means
your cat shouldn’t be deprived of meat
All right then. Do you believe that owning a cat is immoral, since in order for the cat to thrive, creatures with souls must die?
There are no creatures with souls. But no, I wouldn’t say keeping a cat in general is immoral. There are definitely ethical concerns around things like kitten breeding mills and letting cats roam around outdoors, though
There sure is a lot of vegan propaganda on Lemmy. It’s very annoying and not particularly memey.
I mean I’m not a vegan but I can’t help but feel like this meme’s got a point
The fact people are getting butthurt in the comments proves they know it’s true
What you’re referring to as taste is in fact taste + nutrition
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Taste, is in fact, Nutrition/Taste, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Nutrition plus Taste. Taste is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Nutrition system.
The more animal flesh you consume, the younger you die and the more major diseases you suffer. Google: “all cause mortality meat”.
The more animal flesh you consume, the younger you die and the more major diseases you suffer
you have no idea what their nutritional needs or risk factors are
Well now, that’s not entirely true. If you will grant me, at least for the sake of this discussion, that /u/dullbananas is a homo sapiens, then I know, to a scientific certainty, that the more meat this homo sapiens consumes, the younger they will die, and the more major health consequences they will suffer.
Would you like to see the several significant and influential studies, some of which span several decades, that establishes this as an indisputable fact or would you just like to keep coming up with the same pat objections that everyone who wishes it was okay to keep eating meat tries to use to rationalize the decision?
I know, to a scientific certainty, that the more meat this homo sapiens consumes, the younger they will die, and the more major health consequences they will suffer.
no, you don’t
I think you meant to say, “no, you don’t, and I won’t look at any evidence to the contrary, la la la, i cannot hear you, la la la”
Hey all you modern-day meat eaters out there, raise your hand if you’ve ever actually killed an animal.
No one?
That’s what I thought.
Well three of them are psycho strawman and the last one is nature playing out lol
I really don’t see how they are strawmen. The vast majority of people do not need meat, the reason they eat meat is because it tastes good. Taste is merely one of our senses, why is it ok to kill to enjoy the taste, but not ok to enjoy the sound or sight? That’s what the meme is getting at.
Nature playing out
Why is this an argument, when it isn’t an acceptable reason for anything else? Rape, murder, thievery are all things that most people see as wrong, despite them happening in nature plenty.
One of the things that makes humans unique is our ability to consider logic and mortality beyond what happens in nature, because nature certainly isn’t perfect.
The vast majority of people do not need meat,
you don’t know what others need
I of course don’t know what any specific person needs, but knowing what the vast majority of people need is trivial, it’s basic science.
Please stop arguing is such bad faith in every response you make.
i’m stating facts, and you concede those facts, and then claim i’m arguing in bad faith. you don’t know what that means: your accusation of bad faith is, itself bad faith.
You are stating strawmen: facts with no relevance to the argument presented, which you then point to and refuse to address the actual argument.
I never claimed to know what any individual needs, but you have started it as a fact as if that is at all relevant. It’s not, because I never claimed it. I claimed that I know that the vast majority of people need, based on basic science and statistics. If you have fact which actually argued against that, then please go ahead. But unrelated facts posing as arguments are strawman arguments, and are bad faith.
I never claimed to know what any individual needs
we can all read what you said
yeah, yummy meat. I like it a lot. Sometimes i salt it than dry it myself, and god, does it taste delicious. I might be bothered by the cruelty of all this meat industry, but guess what, if i were to choose, i’d rather be a farm pig. Anything actually that does not comprehend the cruelty of this reality, and i’m not talking about farms here. Also, unlike most of us they go away quickly.
P.S. fyi, latest studies show that plants might also feel the pain. Sorry to disappoint you guys, but it seems like we are just doomed to bring more suffering in this world. You better find a way to cope with this before it became more researched.
Vegans kill the least plants though because of something called trophic energy loss. Most plants are fed to animals you kill.
good point. i don’t kill them though, silly, there are people to do it for me.
Also, unlike us, animals eat literal grass which does not require all kinds of fossil fuel machines, tons of earth-polluting pesticides, you know, stuff like that. Also we don’t need to exterminate trees in order to be able to herd them, you know, that long things sticking up from the ground, producing oxygen, green all the spring, summer, and even autumn, unlike wheat and stuff.
Note that an estimated 90% of global farm animals are factory farmed, and are fed monocrops like corn and soy that humans can eat. It’s about 10 times more efficient to eat the plants directly than the animals due to Trophic Levels, so if you’re worried about plants feeling pain you’d reduce their pain by eating them directly instead of their inefficient middlemen.
Welcome on Lemmy!
Thank you! It’s been fun so far! :)
