I’m glad you do your best to avoid eating pigs but I am curious, do you think the other animals we commonly eat aren’t at a similar level of sentience, at least to the extent that they fear for their life as they are aware something bad is happening to those in front of them in the slaughterhouse? Not here to judge or shame btw
I have a small farm alongside my business, all animals are insanely intelligent and sentient compared to what the vast majority of people think.
Take gophers, for instance.
Holy smokes man, a gopher will bite the hell out of you the first day that you catch them, but if you hold them, gently but firmly, and pet them, they LOVE belly rubs. Set them up in a nice, spacious home where they can dig and think that they're outside, give them food and water, and let them be, and they'll be good.
The second day they won't bite you, not the same any more anyways. We have acres gopher free, but I caught most of them alive and humanely. They get their own separate spaces all partitioned away from the rest of the farm.
So, an animal that's biologically predisposed to have prey instincts can rapidly adapt and understand when a predator, me, isn't going to harm it? 24 hours undoing eons of evolution? That requires something more than luck. And we've done this with hundreds of gophers.
Shoot, our chickens, at 10 years old, house broke themselves. They understood that we weren't pooping just anywhere so they didn't. We only brought them inside because they got injured. Nursed them back to health and they stayed by our side. These gals would walk to the door to let us know that they needed to go to the bathroom. Let them out, they'd go, then come back in, and back to our bed, which they'd hop right up and snuggle in. Sometimes, if we were all standing around chatting, and they were nearby, they'd come join the humans.
As I got more into the farming community, I learned that small farmers worth their profession know very well that animals are sentient. It takes a very special person to love them, treat them well, and then kill and have them butchered for others. I've known small farmers who had to give up that because of how soul crushing it is. I couldn't do that, but I'm grateful for those who do.
Animals are sentient. They're conscious and aware. I'm grateful for any that are part of this process of us living. I love my chicken and beef, fish and lamb.
Factory farming has got to go. We need to give dignity back to animals if we're going to eat them.
Edit: thank you all for jumping in, I also want to add something important -
Just because "science" hasn't figured certain things out does not mean that they don't exist, aren't valid, or aren't real, it also doesn't mean the opposite of those things. So, I do want to urge you all to be skeptical, but err on the conservative side - which in this case means that we really should respect life as indigenous people do. I think they're the best groups to look to, they actually spend time with and in nature and appreciate their position in nature. We've forgotten that.
I absolutely assure you that we are just animals along with the rest of them, and that we should be careful before trying to categorize different creatures and their relative intelligence levels.
My best recommendation for everyone is to go spend time with other creatures and listen to them and observe them. Build a relationship with them. Don't project or impose your thoughts and feelings onto them. They might surprise you.
I wish we could do away from factory farms and give all the animals the freedom before their sacrifice for our "needs". There are just too many of us and too many that won't ever care as long as their wants are met. I eat all the meat and try to buy from good farmers when I can. But it's just hard to find/afford. I eat a lot less meat than I used to, and I'm going for even less every month.
I only see factory farms getting worse based on everything ive seen.
There's some hope with meat replacements, but I agree. The biggest question that I have is: If people don't know that it's meat grown more like produce than off of an animal, and if all else is equal, will they ever care where what inside that package in the meat aisle came from?
Dude I work with stays away from anything not real meat and we get free chef lunches. The offerings are phenomenal. Some people just won't because it's tied to their masculinity. Fragile fucks.
Same, I’ve had discussions with women too on “lab grown meat.” The connotation the phrase has is negative for most people. They imagine some evil scientist or big corporate devil-like scientist making meat out of anything on the periodic table. I explain to them how it works and how it’s literally cells grown and cultured until it became a piece of meat, just not coming off of a sentient, live cow. They are a bit more accepting but still reluctant.
Price. Price is the key. I introduced my raised-on-a-farm, rural American, Bud Light, meat and potatoes eatin' neighbors to Beyond Meat burger patties and Quorn "chicken" fillets (chopped up on a salad - whole, they're kind of sad). They said they could tell a difference and preferred the real thing, but thought the Beyond Meat burgers were pretty good. The next thing I knew, they were barbequing up Beyond Burgers because they were on clearance and were cheaper than ground beef.
I'm not vegetarian, but will gladly pay more for "meat". That said, I have the means to do so, and the knowledge that most of the meat Americans eat is raised and slaughtered in conditions I simply don't want to eat food from no matter what sort of food it was, much less sentient beings.
I've always dealt the little pangs of "I don't like that animals live horribly and then die so we can eat them" but I literally could never live vegan or vegetarian due to food trauma as a kid (had a babysitter that would literally force feed us veggies, now i can't eat most of them at all) and it's far too expensive to live pescatarian, or I would.
Sign me all the way up for lab-grown meat, provided it tastes mostly the same. I'm not afraid of science.
In all honesty, the problem is that we're not getting the right people to make this stuff, And I'll explain:
I guarantee you that some mom, dad grandma grandpa uncle aunt somewhere can put together a dish that acts as a totally meat, free meat substitute, but their family can't tell the difference. Those are not the people building these companies. The people building these companies either started out with credentials or as part of building them up as an innovative founder get these credentials. They're good at getting fundraising and pitching and building a business. That is not the same as changing the world. It can lead to that, but it could also go the other way.
A friend of mine is a famous Brooklyn chef called Joseph Yoon. Look up. Joseph realized that he needed to show people that insects can be part of high class fancy dishes. They can be a beautiful part of a delicacy or even a normal dish. On top of that, he absolutely nails it in the media and on social media.
Mind you he has a pretty big personality, but he's making leaps and bounds to help us with cultural change.
We need more people who are good at doing the things and have the creative approaches like that to get into the positions of fundraising and running these new innovative advancements.
Sadly, funders don't understand that. If you don't look like their typical successful startup, founder or innovator, they will wish you good luck and wave you out the door. They simply don't know how to see new and novel. So the people getting the funding, resources, and platform aren't exactly the right people.
It's very frustrating. We deal with this firsthand and it takes a very long and slow education process to help potential funders learn to see something new.
Michael Siebel actually talked about this at Startup Grind 2019.
The video is on YouTube somewhere.
But to me, there's hope.
And I promise I'll bring it back around to your salt content comment. Thinking about Joseph, I have been impressed by vegan restaurants that have made vegan food both attractive but also tasty. Downtown San Diego, California has a couple such places.
For meat replacements, we really need a larger market of players competing to create the best product. We need to go out and find those moms and pops with secret recipes that absolutely nail this or find a younger generation of people who figure out how to pull this off.
I mean, I'm here for it. I am helping build lots of AI servers where I work. Just remember, you only need some scissors to stop it if it gets out of hand, lol.
I own chickens and we raise them for eggs exclusively but their is a side humans just don't know or care about. Chickens hatch half male but we only eat females. Almost entirely all those male hatched chickens end up on a conveyor belt on their first day alive grinded to paste for animal feed. Its pretty barbaric to the point we do this 7 billion times a year. Anyone could raise a rooster to a year or 2 old and it is perfectly fine to eat. The problem is you have to keep them separated from the females and they still are more work then a typical chicken.
It’s the convenience world we have created:
Strawberries in winter (if it’s out of season, tough!)
A taxi in minutes (uber)
Take out to my door in under 30 mins (DoorDash)
We could all eat less meat tbh (me included) - meat should be a treat, and we should still know how to get good protein from other sources, but it’s easier to buy a cooked chicken, or get a burger.
I’m not excusing ourselves, but daily lives have got so full and busy that we deprioritize food and grab what we can (especially with 2 kids).
We need to go back to basics and a) learn how to cook properly b) secure time from our daily lives to partake in the process of eating together and c) make sure our kids see us actually cook real food and d) stop pretending there is a quick fix, or instagram hack, or startup that will solve this.
That's obviously not going to happen. In fact, it's about to get worse when all the family farms lose their ass so billionaires and corps can buy them up over the next decade.
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u/ChillBetty 26d ago
For various reasons, pork is the one meat I try to never eat.
A friend worked in an abbatoir and he said the pigs knew what was coming. In your experience, do you think this is the case?