To think that meat eaters...

[hashbrownsandwich]

Should be comfortable to slaughter animals if they are happy to eat them?

The 'cheap chicken' threads have got me onto this and I'm at home with covid so be gentle!

My own personal background is that I am vegetarian and have been since I was 7. Own decision. I cook meat for my children and my husband because I believe, like i was given, it's a choice that can be made for themselves.

My husband is from farming background and has proactively raised and slaughtered animals. His conscience is entirely clear because he very much has the farmer mindset of raise the animal, give them a good life, dispatch and consume.

It's coming up to 'Turkey time' on the family farm and with the so called shortages forecast this year, I've found myself having more conversations with colleagues about the food chain/supply etc.

We live in an affluent area and we have lots of farm shops, butchers etc. However, I'm shocked that most people I know have said while they couldn't give up meat, they also wouldn't be happy to raise animals for slaughter themselves or to witness their slaughter.

So AIBU to to believe, if you're going to eat meat, it's your moral duty to be ok with animal slaughter?

Just to say, what I've tried in a long winded way above is that i'm not a preachy veggie and I'm not vegan.

It would be very messy and unhygenic to have everyone slaughtering animals in their back yards. How/where would the guts, hides, bones etc be disposed of? Abbatoirs may be unsavoury but at least they are equipped to dispose of waste and hides can go on to tannneries, bones to make fertiliser or whatever.

What about people who live in flats or who don't run chest freezers - should they never eat meat because they don't have the space to slaughter animals and store the excess?

These kind of arguments are on a level with my kids thinking everything should be free.

I have a couple of chickens. Before I got them I researched how I could put them down humanely if I had to, and I think I could.

I think I could kill an animal if I needed to, mentally, although I've never been hunting.

I do think that people should think about this, but I also think that the reason we have society is so we can work together to achieve things we couldn't do alone.

Because lots of people don't feel they can do lots of things - catch spiders, remove ticks, lance boils - I absolutely hated injecting myself after an operation, I don't think that because someone can't do something from first principles means they shouldn't be able to do something.

OP I agree with you. I also acknowledge that I would find it extremely difficult even though I eat meat, which does not sit comfortably with me. I've held a sick chicken while DH dispatched it but that's as close as I get.

I'm a carnivore. When I was a child, we would spend at least a month at my Mum's parents' farm. The rabbits, chicken, ducks, geese were all from the farm, bred and slaughtered for their use. Pig slaughter was an annual event in winter and we would eat the sausages, bacon and use the pork fat throughout the year. All eggs were from the farm hens.
As long as the slaughter is done quickly and avoiding the suffering and the animals are bred in good conditions (i.e. they can run free, have fresh and good food etc.), I have no problem eating meat and if asked, I would have no problem killing a chicken or a rabbit if they were supposed to feed my family.
Those animals were lovingly bred and fed by my Grandparents but they had a purpose at the end of their pretty happy life - to be food. Otherwise they wouldn't live at all because they simply wouldn't be able to afford it.

@Mamadothehump

Oh, fuck off with your sanctimonious shit. I'll eat meat if I want. Where exactly does this "argument" end? We all do/use/consume things that we haven't built, grown etc. Why does this even bother you? If you don't want to eat meat then don't. End of story 🙄

Her 7 year old brain couldn't work out the difference between cats and dogs and pigs and cows so we all have to suffer.

@JackieWeaversZoomAc

It would be very messy and unhygenic to have everyone slaughtering animals in their back yards. How/where would the guts, hides, bones etc be disposed of? Abbatoirs may be unsavoury but at least they are equipped to dispose of waste and hides can go on to tannneries, bones to make fertiliser or whatever.

What about people who live in flats or who don't run chest freezers - should they never eat meat because they don't have the space to slaughter animals and store the excess?

These kind of arguments are on a level with my kids thinking everything should be free.

Brilliant

I'm fucked then because I'm neither motivated to slaughter my own meat or tend to my own vegetable patch.

Ugh. Wrong threads. Sorry!

@NutellaEllaElla

I'm fucked then because I'm neither motivated to slaughter my own meat or tend to my own vegetable patch.

I know! We we could invent some sort of society where 1 person can trade their labour for that of another. Maybe we could even invent some sort of tokens that have an arbitrary worth ascribed to them, so it wouldnt have to be a direct swap.

@REDHERO - if someone can't explain their children the difference between herbivoures such as sheep, cows, rabbits and birds such as chicken, ducks and geese which have been bred and modified for centuries for a particular purposes - which is to provide us with fur, wool, feathers, meat, eggs etc. and cats and dogs which were bred for a completely different purpose, then it's the adult's problem and ignorance, not the child's one.
I love the vision of vegans as everybody being the happy, healthy living and woke being because they can afford it. In reality, people will end up being fed the likes Gregg vegan sausage, full of palm oil and additives crammed into a factory produced funghi mass.

I wonder how many vegans grow and harvest their own grain, nuts and beans.

When it comes to carbon emissions, the type of food consumed is far more impactful than the distance it has travelled.

You might think that a vegan dessert made from South American bananas would have a bigger carbon footprint than a main meal made from organic beef from a nearby farm. But surprisingly, you’d be wrong.

Meat has the highest carbon footprint, followed by dairy, followed by fruit and veg.

@BelleOfTheProvince

Vegans aren't the only people who eat avocados by the way.

Well, if you're planning on saving the planet, avocadoes aren't the way to go

I have raised and slaughtered chickens and rabbits as humanely as I can, but every time it makes my heart heavy. I still eat meat because I felt gradually unwell as a vegetarian, but small amounts of the highest welfare meat. As a family, if we ate chicken as our only meat, we would consume around 40 per year. That is 40 lives taken for our benefit. I sometimes think I should buy a sheep for the freezer then it would be only one life per year taken to feed the family.

I prepare fish including gutting (trout farm down the road) and have defeathered and gutted game and chickens in the past. I'm not in farming but have no issue with butchering animals with the correct tools and guidance (no idea how to do it)

I have in the past and I would again, but with a job and a family I don't really have time to be plucking birds and skinning rabbits on a regular basis.

I think its difficult to really unpick which foods have the worst environmental inpacts as most people who quote facts have a particular point they are trying to make and will pick and choose their facts to fit their agenda. Cattle drink vast amounts of water but is that really a problem in the UK which has plenty of rain. California grows most of the worlds almond crop, less water is needed than is needed for beef production but California does have a water supply problem, is this taken into account when comparing the two.
Using antibiotics to boost growth in beef cattle was banned in the EU in 2006 but this is still sometimes quoted as a reason not to eat beef rather than advise to eat meat produced in the EU or UK.
Yes I am bias, as I said finding anyone who is truely neutral to supply these facts is difficult.

Meat has the highest carbon footprint, followed by dairy, followed by fruit and veg.

Unsubstantiated.

I think you can be OK to consume meat and in turn understand the animal has been slaughtered but not many people would want to watch the slaughter.

But meat eaters don't only eat locally so that's not really fair.
The reason some vegans think their diet is more eco is because that is largely what the scientific community have been saying for a while now. So your beef would be with them.

The point is that if people are going to be moralistic about the best way to eat, maybe they should look at their own plate first.

Vegetarianism isn't more "eco" unless you are starting from the perspective of globalized, industrial ag, and then even vegetarianism is quite destructive. So not much of a win.

@Bananaman123, yes. Equally, I've had surgery but would not be particularly confident in performing it on someone myself.

I don’t think OP has posted this in good faith I’m afraid. The argument was a silly one, almost like it was designed to make vegetarians and vegans look silly. And the last post of ‘some good points have been made and she’s going to think about them’....yeah right. Total bollocks.

The idea that people shouldn't eat meat unless they're prepared to slaughter the animals doesn't really make much sense to my way of thinking.

I don't eat meat for a number of reasons but I do eat fish and no I don't think it makes me a hypocrite that I don't go out and catch and kill my own fish, I do clean and gut them though.

Slaughtering animals for food is a job that has to be learnt. You can't just pop into a field of sheep, pick the one you like and dispatch it, well you could but you'd probably make a god awful mess of it. How exactly are all the meat eaters going to be trained to do it properly.

At some point, hopefully not for a very long time, I'm probably going to have to ask my vet to put my dog to sleep, as I did with my cats, are you suggesting OP, that if I'm prepared to end my pets life, then I should be prepared to administer the lethal injection myself instead of getting someone else to do my 'dirty work for me'?

@Cattenberg

When it comes to carbon emissions, the type of food consumed is far more impactful than the distance it has travelled.

You might think that a vegan dessert made from South American bananas would have a bigger carbon footprint than a main meal made from organic beef from a nearby farm. But surprisingly, you’d be wrong.

Meat has the highest carbon footprint, followed by dairy, followed by fruit and veg.

It's really not just about food miles.

In part it' s about food security, and there are also issues around people having more ability to influence local regulations, see what happens locally, as opposed to a banana plantation half way around the world, where, even if it's certified organic, you really have no idea what is going on.

But mostly it's about synergies in complex systems. The best, most efficient and sustainable agricultural systems almost always involve integrated plant and animal husbandry. You can't separate them out and say "this potato has this carbon footprint, and this pork a totally separate footprint." The two are intertwined at a basic level.

When you try and separate out these components, which is what industrial ag does, you end up with systems that are environmentally damaging, non-sustainable, inefficient in terms of real energy use, and often petroleum dependent as well.