alt Hacker NewsPeople have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them.
Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.
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Surely this is more a case that it used to be much harder to be vegetarian and almost impossible to be vegan! Now we actually have a clear choice given the development and availability of so many other foods and supplements. Hence for me to value my enjoyment of foods above the life of another animal seems pretty harsh at best.
Even chicken eggs really are not cruelty free - if you truly love animals, you would stop eating all animal products imo. Otherwise you are simply lying to yourself.
Converse opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k
To be fair, food was very difficult to come upon historically. Killing an animal and not eating it was equivalent to burning money for fun.
Vegetarianism (voluntary) didn't become more than an edge case until food was heavily commoditized and readily available.
When you’re hungry, you tend to care less about deep ethical questions and more about being fed. There’s the old trope about wealth and food:
Poor people ask if you got enough to eat. Middle class people ask if it tasted good. Wealthy people ask if it looked good.
Which correspond to points on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I think we can use that framework to understand where vegetarianism and veganism fit in. You might say that they are either related to personal feelings of being ethical or status symbols, or both.
This is about when people starting realizing such farms are contributing to planetary environmental harm.
Also, as gruesome as a backyard slaughter might seem, it's nothing compared to the industrial equivalent.
People also have been publicly maiming and killing other people for vengeance and entertainment for millennia. Morality really does evolve. That includes animals as well.
But unless you were nobility, meat wasn't available at every meal, or even every day. It cost too much. Meat for most people was a special occasion kind of thing.
Ever notice how the English words for animals have Germanic roots but the words for their meats have French roots?
Chicken -> poultry
Cow -> beef
Pig -> pork
That's because the peasantry, the ones raising the animals, spoke Old English, and the nobility, the ones eating the meat, spoke French.
> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms
As did dental care and cars. Correlation is not causation.
> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms
A classic case of mixing up correlation with causation?
It makes sense to me. If you grow up seeing animals slaughtered on the regular you probably won't think much of it, especially when the adults around you treat it as completely normal. You grow up in an environment where you might think meat comes from the magic meat factory, when you see an animal slaughtered for the first time it's likely to be shocking enough to turn a lot of people away.