to wonder WTF would it take for people stop eating "meat"

[ElenorRigby]

Just that really!

Eleanor - until we evolve beyond torturing and killing our own kind in wars and the like I think the natural killing of our prey is the least of humankind worries with mental evolution.

Break time

Well quite, although you will get MN slapped for implying one cannot care about more than one thing at once

Right, laters

watch out for burger king though - they've ditched british beef as a result of the horsemeat scandal nice one, BK

Hully - cows, sheep and pigs are prey to more animals than just us though. Plus scavengers will eat them too.

Eleanor - whats with the link? Relevance?

I firmly believe there would be less meat eaters if people did indeed have to raise,kill and prepare their own meat.

Tbh it's the very best way to ensure what you're eating - I know what my chicken have eaten and what chemicals aren't in their bodies.I know they have led happy lives.

We have killed,prepared and eaten our own chickens in the past.

And,believe me,the actual doing, when you are looking at a chicken you have known, is an entirely different thing from talking about doing it. And once you've done it,you have to justify it,and make sure you eat it even though you're gagging on it trying not to think about what you're eating. It's not sanitised - it's blood guts and shit,not a nicely washed trussed piece of meat on a little plastic tray.

Just saying,that's all.....

I'm not sure there would be less meat eaters if people had to raise their own animals - up until very recently, thats exactly what we did!

Liza80
So we'll skip quickly over the gist of the post and get pedantic about the definition of a word when you know perfectly well what I meant. (I thought carnivore just meant an animal that eats the flesh of another animal?)

Horcrux if we we felt as a society it not acceptable to use and abuse mere animals, we would also hopefully be less inclined to abuse our own kind.

Squeak - I've killed a chicken I raised (not as a pet) and even though I hated that chicken (it woke me up A LOT) and had not had fresh meat in months (I was living in rural South Africa at the time) it was very very hard. I know exactly what you mean

(I imagine you'd get used to it though)

My main reason for not raising my own meat it, of course, the practicalities! I couldn't do it. I don't have the room, the commitment or the time! So I buy it!

I would also like to sew all my own clothes but that isn't practical either.

I have been put off eating some meats after watching them be prepared, it's not the preparation itself that has put me off but the smell, quail stinks, pigeon stinks and the smell from a rabbit bladder is evil. At the moment I'm off eggs after visiting a hatchery and smelling what was being pumped into the back of a lorry.

But I think we have led a much more cosetted existence since then. BigBo.

the links just my idea of a little joke, sorry

sunflower stop trying to pick a fight, we are all enjoying the debate. you are coming over as a GF

yes, but seriously it's only a couple of generations away at most - I think if all our meat and the things we rely on that come from animal products (tallow for a start goes into most proctor and gambel products and who doesn't use any of those?) were taken away, we'd soon get over ourselves

Eleanor - I'm pretty sure our society doesn't think it is acceptable to abuse animals or humans. It still happens.

Apologies Hully, I didn't know I needed to run my posts by you first.
As I don't know what GF is, I'm not altogether sure what it is you think I'm doing, but whatever it is, I don't see anything wrong with flagging up the obvious disregard directed at someone who would, on any other subject, be given due regard for her bona fide insight.

I still can't quite see people chasing live chickens around in Sainsbury's to take home and kill,pluck and gut anytime soon BigBo !

There is a complete disconnection now between the sanitized meat on the plastic tray and the process of getting it there.

yes there is but what im saying is that if that was all taken away, i think most would roll their sleeves up - millions of years of doing it doesnt evaporate over 2gens at most...and only for us in the west too!

I kind of hope you are right and I am wrong here BigBo

I'd like to feel more convinced that the population of many first world countries could get back to the real processes of nature and simple living if pushed.

humans are not slaughtered (yet) for culinary pleasure, whereas lower animals are.

tbh sunflower, I didn't fully understand your post, but I didn't mean to seem pedantic.

verysmall, I wholeheartedly agree with you! Our way of consuming meat is totally unnatural! It it were done in a more intimate and natural way we would certainly eat less meat!

In Serbia, where my family come from, it is still quite normal to buy 'meat' alive and slaughter it yourself... Much as I was a little distressed as a child, to find our new 'chicken friend' slaughtered in a bucket of blood, I have always had a greater respect to that more honest approach than we have in this country, generally speaking!

I am still waiting for someone to tell me what GF means???

I don't think it takes a genius to realise that:
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

ALBERT EINSTEIN

A lion would kill and eat a human. But as gazelle are more convenient they go for them instead. Not many animals kill each other for food, that wouldn't make sense in the food chain. But as plants are eaten by bugs, bugs eaten by mice, mice eaten by snakes and snakes eaten by hawks, hawks die and are consumed by bacteria, which then feeds the plants etc the natural predatory cycle goes on.
You say that eating meat makes me think I'm superior? Not so superior that I think that I am above nature and natural processes.

albert einstein wasnt an expert on everything, he might have been good at physics, but a shit nutritionist.