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Thatâs a bit disingenuous TG. Deploy some empathy.
The fact is most people just donât want to think about it.
It doesnât work. Itâs held together by reams of legislation and duct tape.
Anyway, all I was really asking was: why do you (or most people) apparently have no problem at all with the cruelty inflicted on farm animals from birth to death, but get upset when the same thing happens to dogs? It is, as liam_og pointed out, completely inconsistent. Even the laws are inconsistent. Youâre allowed to bash an unwanted pigletâs brains out on a concrete floor, or put an unwanted chick in a blender, but youâre not allowed to do it to an unwanted puppy. Why?
Incidentally Iâm not making an argument for veganism or vegetarianism here. Iâm just pointing out that meat-eating doesnât have to be cruel (not to mention inefficient). The meat industry inflicts cruelty because it wants to, not because it has to: and that, surely, is precisely what revolts us about cruelty to pets?
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Me neither. Nothing worse than an angry holier than thou vegan. I am in fact wearing a leather belt and shoes as I type. However I am not wearing a leather belt and shoes and also complaining that someone stepped on a dogs tail, because that would just be pretending that I value animals, when I clearly donât.
my opinion, and only my opinion -
i am convinced that if there was dog farms or cats farm - people will eat them - as there is rabbit farms- it will take time to put in everyone head but at one point we will just do it -
it works with everything - getting used to something and making it ours
it is a society things too â there is part of south america which dont see Guinea pig as a pet but more as a meal -
part in nordic countries slaughters thousands of pilot whales, dolphin everyyear â and just by pure tradition-
I think everyone should be able to mind his own business , be healthy how he intend to be and thats it.
animals in farms are breed for the sole purpose of feeding human or other animals- Maybe that s why it is ''more ââ ok for me to see no objection of them being slaughtered-
if you do have a farm and just want to keep animals on it then i guarantee you that none of them will ever been slaughtered even if you are a CARNIVORE -
regarding the little girl swinging her dog, this has nothing to do with food and it seems an intentional way of hurting her OWN pet with the agreement of the parent - that is what is shocking
but hey, just my point of view - i have weeks without meat and weeks packed with meatâjust depend on what my body want.
i respect vegan, vegetarian and omnivore sooo just enjoy the memes
[quote=âfinley, post:43, topic:158264, full:trueâ]
The meat industry inflicts cruelty because it wants to[/quote]
I would say they make money because they want to (though I concede some people do go into a one line of business or another for sadismâs sake). 
brobonek: well, like I said, I donât have any problem with the eating part. I agree that if people want to eat dogs or cuy, fine. Itâs the raising and killing part I have a problem with.
There is no reason at all why you canât give a meat hog a completely ordinary, piggy life, right up until the moment he becomes bacon. For a naturally-raised pig, thatâs about a year.
Itâs actually 70% more efficient to do it that way because the primary output of a pig is manure, not meat. And you can use that to grow vegetables, to feed the vegetarians ⌠who would otherwise be 100% dependent on fossil fuels and unsustainable mining to grow their crops. You can raise the pig on otherwise useless land and feed it with otherwise useless stuff (at least partially).
Thereâs also no reason why you canât kill the pig in a way that is effective, reliable, quick and painless. Nitrogen-argon asphyxiation works well. Nobody uses it because itâs expensive and difficult to manage. Cruel and ineffective methods are used instead because governments allow them to be used, or even promote them as âbest practiceâ.
Yes, thatâs the point. However, since the whole show is run by economists - who as a group appear to be mostly innumerate - they donât realise theyâre making less money than they would otherwise. Raising a cruelty-free animal is (slightly) more expensive. It also produces a much, much better product. Which means you can sell it with a higher profit margin. All you need to do is call your friends in Congress and make factory farming illegal (it already would be illegal if it hadnât been exempted from cruelty-to-animals legislation). But because they failed high school math, they engage in a race to the bottom instead, and everyone loses. Including the animals.
i am with you on that - but that is the FâŚg world we are living in - just money and profit AND ASAP-
the ones who will try to go the good way as you proposed, will have to sell their meat way more expensive and therefore will have more difficulties doing so. Big corporation always win unfortunately and will always smash the little ones.
the pace of our society is just getting out of hand â everything faster and faster - same with kids, technology, dating etc⌠fast fast fast
( waiting for a cab??? nop - use an app⌠take 30 sec
want a quickie â no problem, use tinder
want some food â ok â any food app with delivery at home
want a movie â easy-- netflix etcâŚ)
of course all what is suggested above is not bad, but that the new human being transition i guess-
so to get back to your topic, as i said, i am with you on this one â but it is the pace which regulate everything -
trust me, if they can grow a pig in 2 weeks, they will do so.
ps:working for an international company once a sales is not even finished that discussion are already processed for the next one and so onâ
The time where people were enjoying the seconds and minutes is long gone i feel - maybe that is why so many people are trying the self sustaining way of living but escaping cities and corporations etcâŚ
We definitely need a zombie apocalypse to reset everything â because except that, i can see only a horrible WWIII to do that job â preceeded or followed with revolutions and all the horrible package which go with it.
I think that is a bottom line here for me. Like Ricky Jervais calling people the c word for hurting animals in a different way to the way he hurts them in.
Intention is also a key point. But in all fairness its not really defensible to say that you donât intend to hurt a creature by paying someone to own, kill and deliver its body parts to you. Thatâs like hiring a contract killer and then saying whoops, i didnât intend for anyone to get hurt. That argument doesnât stand up for me. I buy leather shoes: I intentionally participate in the owning and killing of an animal. No two ways about that really.
No, itâs just for the sake of profit that all these horrendous factory farming practices are perpetrated, and itâs pretty much exclusively a phenom that didnât happen before the late 19th century.
There are loads and loads of producers providing ethically raised and slaughtered food animals all over North America and Europe, But their produce is, by necessity, more expensive (actually not much more) than what the mega packers can provide.
You can get beef and chicken and veal and pig meat from animals who lived comfortable existences and were quickly, cleanly, and relatively painlessly killed.
But people donât want a seven dollar Big Mac.
When my one kid was about 14, she asked me if we ever eat dolphins. I told her no, and she asked why. I said because itâs pretty much recognized that theyâre really intelligent, maybe as much or even more than people.
She just looked at me and said, yeah, so what?
I didnât really have an answer.
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Thatâs a bit of a mixed bag. Some are interesting, but some are pretty silly âworked in a Burger Kingâ. Notably, I didnât see anything about slaughterhouse workers. If anything, it seems there could be a vivisection link.
Thatâs silly. I wouldnât choose to take such a job, and I have no idea if I would remain sane after presumably being forced to do so for a year. I donât see what that has to do with empathy.
You seem to be speaking on an economic level. It plainly does work on a functional levelâitâs happening. The workers are not suddenly going insane and butchering rooms of people or their pets.
Eh? I havenât said this, at all. All Iâve said is that it doesnât seem to be linked to general criminal behavior, in a way that torturing small animals is known to be. As for most people, that is another question.
I was under the impression you arenât overly concerned with factory farming methods. Whatâs your opinion on the report about the dog?
Youâre conflating two completely different things. Psychopaths tend to start off torturing animals and then move on to bigger creatures. Theyâve already got something wrong with their heads.
Slaughterhouse workers start off as ordinary people and eventually come to view cruelty as normal or as entertainment, because theyâre exposed to it day in, day out. A bit of googling with throw up plenty of case studies. They donât, however, become psychopaths; nobody really knows what causes psychopathy, but itâs most likely a genetic fault.
Itâs worth pointing out that people often end up working in meatpacking facilities because they think they have no choice. In a lot of bumfluff towns in the middle of rural America, itâs a slaughterhouse/meatpacker facility that provides 50% of the jobs. Thatâs one reason why legislators bend over backwards to accommodate their faulty business model. All they see are jobs, taxes, and votes.
Also worth pointing out that a large fraction of their extra costs are imposed by vindictive government rules that favour big operations, such as the inspection requirement. If that werenât so, CAFOs would be even more uneconomic than they already are.
How I look at that is something like this:
If the animal is an object then its ethical to grow them in a cage, skin them and slow boil them alive, doesnât matter, its all ethically sound. That is a justification for any treatment of an animal.
But if the animal has a value besides being an object, like it has the ability to suffer, and has an interest in staying alive, then the only ethical way to kill it is if its experience and life is worth less than what you get from killing it.
If the choice is between you starving, or killing the cow, then yes go ahead and kill it and you have a justification because you can validly say that your life is worth more to you.
But if you are choosing between your taste buds and convenience versus the cows life and experience then its an ethically tricky decision regardless of how it is raised and killed. No matter how you do it you are assuming that the cows life is worth less than the taste and convenience of a hamburger. If thatâs the situation then âethical slaughterâ is a bit of an oxymoron. Got to get me some of that âhappy miseryâ!
It depends on how you define âoverly concernedâ. I had no plans to protest them or anything, but I might possibly, or take some other action in the future. Iâm a meat eater as of now. I think itâs wrong for a pet to be treated in this way, regardless, and the girlâs parents or someone else should be intervening.
Iâve said they are linked which you clearly recognize here, and that a propensity for one is a sign of a potential propensity for other violence.
Iâll definitely look into that, but my original point would seem to remain true. A possible propensity for future violence is a reason why we should be concerned about behavior like the girlâs, but not a reason why we should be concerned about the issue of slaughterhouses (though there may be other reasons.) Iâm willing to be corrected if it turns out that slaughterhouse workers are actually prone to other violence, but as I said itâs odd that I canât recall any anecdotal evidence to that effect.
Liam, I donât see how this is a question of âvalueâ. If one takes it as axiomatic that humans are meat-eaters, then itâs a fairly simple ethical decision: do I need to treat this cow cruelly before I eat it? No? Then perhaps Iâd best not.
Iâd also say itâs as much about the human as about the animal. Hereâs a thought experiment. Imagine a toy company produces a Furby-like robot thatâs designed to be tortured. Or even a humanoid one. Itâs programmed to show realistic fear and pain responses. Your kid tells you he wants one for Christmas. Whatâs your reaction?
Incidentally, I suspect itâs only a matter of time before such things appear on the shelves.
Yea I guess so. But if you google for slaughterhouse videos, you will see people routinely mistreating animals in horrendous ways for no reason. Some studies into it have shown that it is the norm rather than the exception. And have also shown links to domestic violence and alcohol abuse. I can get a link to that later, although you might not want to watch any because they are grim.
As liam said, the effects tend to go unnoticed: domestic violence, alcoholism, that sort of thing. Poor-people crimes. Oh, white trash beating his wife up again. Ho hum. Nobody cares.
Those who donât react in that way peversely take out their frustrations on the slaughterhouse animals. The information is available; you just might not want to find it.
Thatâs one way of looking at it.
But itâs not the only way.
Given that humans are unable to photosynthesize, itâs a basic fact of existence that they gain essential nutrients at the expense of organisms that can. Death gives life, big cosmic circle, etc. No matter what level of Evolutionary Badassery (Neal Stephenson?) humans achieve, the fact remains that, like bazillions of fellow Earth citizens, someone had to die so that you could live. Just like that.
(Iâm consciously neglecting to differentiate between plant and animal life here, dying is dying)
Even so, thereâs nothing in the biological imperative that justifies inflicting undue suffering on another living thing. Any living thing, really.
Yeah, Iâm with you here, I get the feeling Doc Finbarr might be on a bit of a fishing trip here.
Seems like there have to be tens of thousands of folks doing this work in the US alone.
Or not, I guess
Killing for a Living: The Traumatic Consequences of Slaughterhouse âŚ
Certainly the industry has historically been a major perpetrator of worker maltreatment, as far back as Upton Sinclair wrote about in 1906.
Who knows.
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Looks interesting, will give it a read later.