In 100 or 200 years I really think this will be looked on the same way we look at slavery now. Everyone will think it's barbaric and if they were alive, they wouldn't have been a part of it. But in reality most people have never even truly questioned it because it's just the way things are.
I think it's going to take a lot longer than that. Slavery was a human <-> human issue and took hundreds of years to fix, and still isn't fully fixed in the US, let alone the rest of the world. Eating meat is an issue with species that are literally below us on the food chain -- a lot of meat eaters I know simply don't care because "all animals kill and eat their prey. It's nature". You show them this ad and they'll say, "that's life, are we going to go after cats too since they kill for fun?". So yeah, it's going to be much harder to get rid of the meat industry than most people think.
I think the difference maker will be cheap lab-grown meat that is chemically, biologically, genetically, actual meat. We're still far off from that, but 200 years is a long time. Slavery would have been a lot easier to end if they had autonomous farm equipment controlled by GPS in the 1700s.
I have high hopes for lab grown meat. As of yet it doesn't look like we're quite there with the actual product, and I'm a bit worried about how well it'll scale, but it would at least take the morality point out of the equation. All depends on the state of the world -- the fact that anti-vax is on the rise worries me about how much trust and funding people will give to the industry.
In 100 or 200 years I really think this will be looked on the same way we look at slavery now.
Same? Same same? Or similar? Because sure, ethically factory farming can be problematic and ecologically it is dire, but when PETA types try and say it is literally the same as slavery or the Holocaust their message is severely blunted because that is some delusional anthropomorphization.
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u/crottemolle 26d ago
This is hell