To believe that eating meat should be illegal?

A disturbing number of posters on this thread seem to think it’s a choice between rump steak and eating fake-chicken nuggets or ‘Fakin’ Bacon’.

Also, I think research is moving on fast to 'grow' meat in the laboratory by taking cells from hen's eggs and doing something I don't understand to them in order to produce lab-grown chicken.

While I can't see foodies going for this (and there'll be snobbery, of course), as someone who has a particular horror of poultry production, I welcome it. I haven't eaten chicken for nearly 40 years but I remember it was delish (I smell it when my family cook it!) but if it was grown like a vegetable and no poor bird had to die, I'd get stuck in to it with gusto!

I hope this is the future for most meat production, and any actual animal farming is then more elite, very, very humane and suitable expensive.

No, they don't have the ability to think about life and death.
Sheep definitely don't have a survival instinct. If anything they generally appear to have a death wish. They are quite the stupidest animals around.

I don't think the greatly increased independence of blind people, with all if the challenges they already have to live with, is yours to throw away.

Even if you personally are blind, you still don't speak for all blind people - although you are, of course, perfectly at liberty to not have a guide dog yourself.

Oh wow. First it's enforced veganism on the poor and now they're to be sterilised.

Great to see a new fascist state being planned in MN, of all places.

I also think that believing animals have a level of cognitive function that allows them to express a preference about whether they are alive or dead leads to some appalling cruelty.

You don't think a cow cares whether he lives or dies? You don't even think they have this basic survival instinct?

No thanks. No over processed plant based crap for me thanks.

No. I love the stuff. What do you think will happen to the animals? They won't be kept as pets!

It absolutely will be.

Callous, how?

If I were PM, I'd ban the meat and dairy industries to start with. I doubt it would be feasible to police the streams, but we'd officially ban fishing, much like fox hunting is banned. I do think that in due course, humans will stop with these barbaric practices.

It can only remain a freedom of choice. If no one ate meat then certain breeds of animals would become extinct. The farmers are not going to keep them as pets. Where would the fertiliser come from to grow all the veggies that we would require? Would we want chemically produced fertilisers to encourage crop production. I admire your stance on this subject. I eat very little meat in my diet but cannot see how this would work in reality. I think more should be done to make sure that the animals are treated well when they are alive. I would love your idea to be achievable and could quite easily live without meat, but I would not go as far as becoming a Vegan.

I'd be really interested in hearing how @BySpoonyBlueScroller @DiscoBaIIs etc live their lives. i.e. what transportation they use, what electronics they have, what brands of clothes & where they buy from, how many kids they have. Even their whole fresh food - where do you get them from?

My husband is vegetarian which makes me vegetarian at home because it doesn't remotely bother me not eating meat -I sometimes do at a restaurant or other people's houses. If I couldn't ever eat meat again I wouldn't be that bothered even though it is delicious.
Presumably we wouldn't need to keep sheep other than for wool? Or would that be out too? Pigs, cattle, turkey and chickens would just disappear as they no longer have any use and aren't in the food chain of other animals (in the UK anyway -how do we square that circle in the wild?)
Plastic use increases in the absence of leather as a side product of the meat industry.
As PPs have noted, wildlife killed by the absolute billions in order to clear land for arable.

I think the only way is to make prices sufficiently high so that fewer people can afford to buy meat - but if legislation was tightened up around animal welfare in farming then at least animals would be treated better and have happier lives. I know that sounds elitist but such is life -just because we desire something we don't have an automatic right to it.

I don’t think a cow has “preferences”

This is basically my stance too. We're not meant to eat as much meat as we do (as a species, currently). I don't think it's realistic to outlaw meat but we do need to reduce our consumption and I would like to see all farming and meat production done ethically. Won't happen though as it's too expensive to do that. Market forces etc etc.

I said we're moving away from working dogs. This includes guide dogs.

They could go to Ellwood!

https://www.elwooddogmeat.com/

For people who profess to be aghast at people eating animals there are some callous views about how to take this forward.

Also would you have police stationed st every river and coastline? Or don't fish count?

We'd literally just stop breeding them. That's it.

There have been two other threads started recently in a similar way to this, that make me wonder if they are started just to gauge public opinion. The other two were about banning inheritance and making adultery illegal. Feels like the government nudge unit at play to me.

@Octopies actually, offering free sterilisation to young people who are likely to remain poor, is not a terrible idea. For once the population growth problem isn’t western countries in general - and there are political issues with enforced mass sterilisation.

I am gently encouraging my kids to consider being child-free by choice, or having one child at a very young age. In a few decades time, I do not think the world will be a good place to have a young family.

If we're going down that route -

we should make processed food illegal before we make natural meat illegal.

( I don't think either one should be illegal)

Amazing how much vegetarian and vegan food is imported. Once they start eating only food produced here, they can start lecturing us on meat-eating.

A lot of the information about animal production and welfare is based on systems other than that in the UK too.

With due respect, they are NOT giving the very best care to "their" animals. They are literally only using them for profit. They are literally sending them off to be slaughtered. But hey, it's only a 15 minute drive away, so that's fine.