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.
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.