Although I don’t fully agree with the sentiment expressed by this thread, it did get me thinking about leaning even further into contributing to an environment I’d like to participate in. I personally much prefer dedicated discussion threads to discussing news stories myself and reading through the comments it seems like there is a huge desire among many for exactly that. In this thread I’d like to brainstorm with y’all about the conversations we wouldn’t risk trying to have on reddit, conversations you don’t have people around willing to engage in but would work well here, community vibe checks, or something I’m not considering. I would also like to explore what obstacles others see for why this hasn’t happened already despite the apparent desire so any solutions we experiment with can avoid issues which we are already aware of.
My response to my own question will be in the comments.
Ooh, alright you asked for it. If this were Reddit I’d probably be downvoted to hell, but since the website protects me, here goes my controversial opinion:
I find people who describe themselves as “animal lovers” - you know, the kind who’d love to have all sorts of animals as pets if they really could (not just cats and dogs), the kind who love going to the zoo, the kind who’d look at pics/gifs of say cows playing on a grassy field or something and go “awwwww so cute!!!”… and yet have absolutely no problems eating these animals, completely hypocritical. I mean, lying to others is one thing, but how could you lie to yourself, for years? Do they not see the fallacy of their existence? Do they not have a conscience? Do they never stop to think that the cow they’re eating could’ve very well been the very same cow that was in that gif, who’s life was cut short just because people like them have no control over their carnal instincts?
I’ve known a few people like this IRL, and I don’t get them. I genuinely don’t understand how their mind isn’t in a constant state of conflict when they’re either eating an animal or aww’ing over them.
To clarify, I have no problems with people who eat meat in general, especially if it’s for survival. I just don’t get the people who also claim to actually like animals, claim to care about animal rights, claim to care about whether the chicken they’d eat were raised in cruelty-free free-range farms, but also don’t see an issue with killing them.
I really don’t get them. If it were me, my brain would self-implode. My conscience would kill me, I’d lose my appetite. Which is exactly what happened to me as a little kid, when I walked past a butcher store and saw a chicken getting killed and it suddenly struck me where meat came from and what it really was - I felt disgusted, and lost my appetite for life. I just wonder why these so called “animal lovers” have yet to go thru that phase, why they didn’t feel the way I did and continue to ignore their conflicting feelings.
This can be a tricky conversation in general, so it would have to be approached very carefully and deliberately to foster an actual conversation without triggering defensiveness. You might not get downvoted but also might not be able to get any engagement when your question is framed as an accusation. This is not to tone police you because you are of course free to express your own beliefs with all the passion which you carry for them. This is only offering a strategy if your aim is to get people to feel comfortable enough to honestly answer your question, where you may be able to challenge them and perhaps cause them to really consider their actions if they haven’t. This isn’t general advice of course, because as you stated however you frame something like this on reddit it’s going to drive antipathy. I think you could do it on this platform with some considerations. I know that there have been talks about a vegan community here, so it’s possible when that exists you would be able to ask this there without reservation with non-vegans who choose to go there to offer their perspectives.
Two of my four grandparents were raised and lived most of their lives in a small village, that didn’t even have electricity until they had kids going to school. Extremely poor with almost nothing of most of what is now common in western societies. So, try to imagine living in a place where absolutely nothing is considered waste. Whatever little objects, their houses, everything they used was made by people who knew how to work with some crude material, whether it was wood or some kind of metal. They relied on animals and small pieces of land to get through each year. Literally zero waste. Composting was not a trend, but a necessity.
Now try to imagine a woman, who had little (no plants, chickens don’t lay eggs in the heavy winter, goats don’t have young ones to feed, so no milk either, no fridges, let alone freezers) food to go through the winter and would rather eat a little less and feed wild birds than watch them freezing to death (most living animals need food to regulate body temperature, among other things). Same thing I would watch her do during all seasons. She would always leave fruit on the trees during spring and summer just so that birds would have something to eat near her house. Fruit that was essential to her nutrition, because it was extremely limited, but she did it anyway.
Now try to imagine this woman, butchering a rabbit or a chicken or a goat. Because she did. Feeling no remorse or any negative emotion. And was pretty good at it. The same person who would get furious if someone mistreated a living animal in her presence.
There is some order in life, which is lost on people who never had a chance to see anything except an urban environment. If you were to meet a person like that, who pretty much embodies the supposed conflict you think exists in this behavior, and you talked in the manner you wrote this comment, you probably wouldn’t even get a response. Maybe a smile, maybe a shake of a head.
If you actually want to get how both those actions (butchering and eating a living animal, and caring for all living animals -even the ones you know you are going to kill and eat at some point in their life) can be done by people in peace with their actions, if you really want to do that, to understand, probably the best way is to find people living like this and spend a month near them. Live and observe.
This comment is not meant to justify all the wrongs of how livestock is treated on large scales in pursuit of profit. Neither people eating more meat in a week than their ancestors probably ate in many months. I am not interested in debating this either. Just pointing out that this was the way of life of most people in the past. How long ago, depends on where you were born on this planet.