this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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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.
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.
Yeah, you're right it's a different thing to doing it in cities, cooking is important. In my experience, I have lots of vegan rural friends however that's due to my social circle and isn't representive. In the uk apparently we are on 4.7% vegan now (1567% increase in 10 years) its become noticeably more over the last few years but probably not to the same level as cities.
Is that from people converting or because of immigration from places like India?
To be honest I'm not sure. The increase I have seen has been across all ethnicitys, mostly younger people though.
Ah interesting
You might be right. When I was young; didn't meet vegans until I experienced big cities.
If people had to kill their own meat, not only would there be more vegans, but people who did eat meat would probably eat a lot less on average than the average person today does. It would probably make a lot of people healthier too.
It would eliminate fast food that's for sure.
Healthier is debatable. Meat is, relatively speaking, pretty good from a health perspective.
Most of what we eat that's "bad for us" is refined carbohydrates. Sugar, fried starches, breads, that kinda shit. The burger patty is far from the worst offender on the plate.
If suddenly everyone is slaughtering their own animals, the foods they turn to to replace this calories aren't going to be leafy greens, they're going to be shitty carbs. Shitty carbs are already most of people's diets.
That's a fair point, I was mostly thinking that many people consume far too much meat, and that reducing it would be healthy, but if it's only being replaced with trash then it wouldn't be any better
If we're talking about processed meat, that's probably true. Even a small amount is probably too much.* If we're talking about like, grilled whole cuts? Which admittedly probably isn't typical in most diets, hard to get too much of that. And would be much more common if we were butchering our own meat. But so too would probably be sausage and cured meat so, now I'm not so sure things would change that much.
*Guilty as charged.
people would probably eat less meat sure just because of the logistics of it, but did u forget that history is a thing? 150 odd years ago most people regularly slaughtered their own animals a few hundred years further back and basically everyone did, and at the same time almost everyone with very very few exceptions ate meat.
Of course they did, they also had drastically less options than they do today. It's no coincidence that veganism is a fairly new concept, it's only fairly recently that it's become feasible.
My point is that slaughtering ur own animals is in no way a deterrent for eating meat at least no more that any other prep for any food is. Also Pescetarianism was available as a life style and very few people chose it despite not having to slaughter anything smart, and despite fish being very easy to kill and butcher from a literal and moral perspective.
Well I agree with you that I don't think it was much of a deterrent, because that was the reality of how people were raised. But I think these days many people have never killed the animals they eat, and they were also not raised in the same conditions, so I suspect that forcing people to kill their own animals today would indeed be somewhat of a deterrent, at least to certain groups of people. But this is of course all just my opinion and speculation.
Really, all you need is a small tractor to lift the steer after you've skinned it and to drop the gut. Skin the animal on the ground and roll it from side to side to get it all off, split the chest and cut out the anus, start lifting at the rear legs with chains through the achilles tendon, and pull the anus through, then as you lift more you can free the gut from the backbone and gravity will pull the gut down as you get higher.
Let it all fall on the skin, pull out the bits of organs you want or can feed the dog, and you have the carcass hanging now. Split with a sawsall and a long demolition blade. Make yourself a handhold between the fifth and sixth rib, then cut through the spine and breastbone above the 6th rib.
Leave as much fat on the inside of the cavity as possible so the tenderloin and brisket don't dry out when hanging. Try to hang it at 2-4C for a couple weeks.
This sounds like excellent advice. I don't even have a small tractor yet. Before steers, I'm going to have to string new fence. Next spring, if I'm lucky and have worked real hard, I'll be getting a bottle calve or two.
Did find a cinder block shed with a good roof that wasn't even listed. Has a loading ramp for a pickup. I'm real tempted to just outsource it.
Have a hernia and don't know if I can do it.
Do have a root cellar that will be perfect for hanging.
It's not a bad job, but with a hernia you might find it distinctly unenjoyable. There's quite a bit of bending and kneeling as you skin, obviously.
we used to live in a world were almost every slaughtered their own animals to eat and withing a rounding error everyone ate meat. its only icky to us today BECAUSE we dont interact with it.
I heartily agree. I'm also an omnivore, raised on a farm. The best meat is the meat you raised or hunted yourself, both ethically and taste wise.
The respect I have for the animal I personally kill for sustenance is the closest an atheist like myself will ever get to religion. I respect the lives of animals to sustain mine as a human, and I know if I raised it or hunted it, it had a much better life and will taste better than any meat you'll see at a Wallmart.
Damn skippy. I've learned I'm an atheist with a pagan heart.
I've found that I must be hunting something when I go in the woods or on the water. Animal, vegetable, or something else. Don't care if I actually kill, catch, or find; there just has to be a goal. I love taking other people and helping them get in tune with the world.
This makes me angry. You murder a creature for your pleasure. You do it against her will. If she could talk she'd beg you for her life, if she could fight back she would. Talking about respect in this violent relationship is self-righteous, cynical and speciesist bullshit. Like talking about respect after raping a child. The best pussy is the one you hunted yourself, right?
For hunting, would you prefer the animal overpopulation starve, get torn apart over hours by predators, or get hit by a car, killing people? A hunters bullet is one of the fastest deaths a wild animal will get.
If plants you kill to eat, the trees that became your furniture and home could talk, they'd beg too. So would the termites, bedbugs and lice, viruses and flesh eating bacteria.
Lastly are you nuts?? Eating a steak isn't child rape, that's insanity lmfao
Wow, like you're pretty warped. Here we are with the rape stuff again. Raping children, no less.
You need to do some thinking. That line of argument isn't effective.
You're claiming this crazy shit and the above person and myself are actively working minimize the suffering of animals.
Go touch grass and pet a dog.
Why crazy? It is a very accurate comparison:
Having sex and eating food is a core pleasure baked deep into our brains. We can decide what to eat and who to have sex with and we can use force to get what we want. It's a taboo to rape and a taboo to kill. Animals can't fight back like adult humans because they are innocent and often don't understand the situation they are in, just like children.
Not seeing the similarities is because specisism and carnism are normalised to us in every aspect of our lifes since we're born. Watch the videos, I'm not fighting you. If you want to minimize the suffering of animals, leave them alone! It took me quite some time to figure this out as well.
I'm currently working outside my old home, preparing it for sell. Taking a break right now.
A little old lady just stopped to grab things I'm sitting by the road for picking. She has a daughter and grandkids that are running from abuse. They'll be getting a bunk bed and dressers from us. She likes pigs, we have pet pigs. I'm sitting aside some pig figurines that my girl left behind. One is a birdhouse that is full of piss ants, an invasive species. I poisned the fuck out them because they need to die. They're varmints.
I have a rat problem I'm dealing with due to the cat moving and a bag of feed being left behind. I'm using poison, traps, and a gun to kill the varmints.
I'm not going to take the time to watch whatever videos you're suggesting. Eating meat isn't rape. That is a stupid argument you shouldn't use. It is killing. I'm comfortable with killing.
I'm likely way more in tune with nature, animals, and trying to minimize my impact on the earth than you ever will be. Some of your ideology is poisonous and you are sick from it.
Humans have canines and binocular vision because we are omnivores. Meat and killing can be ethical, it's just difficult.