To believe that eating meat should be illegal?

[BySpoonyBlueScroller]

The environmental damage and animal cruelty outweighs the cultural or personal benefits. AIBU to think it’s time to outlaw meat production?

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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’.

Google 'decline in guide dog use'. AI will help you out if you don't understand 👍

Well, how do you think you're going to feed everyone without either meat or fake meat?

@LaundryPond isn't it?

But ethically it makes no sense to me, as I think it'd far less cruel to kill an animal outright than to systematically impregnate a mammal, then separate it from its young and steal its milk.

I stayed on a camp site recently that had a herds of cattle in the field behind. We were kept awake by the cows. They were moaning and moving around all night. The noise was loud, unpleasant and unsettling. I spoke to the manager in the morning as I didn't want to stay another night if the cows continued. He said that they had been separated from their calves and would continue for some time. It was horrible, very distressing. Those animals were in a lot of distress.

Why do we continue to treat animals this way?

Instinct, yes. But that’s just a very basic reaction. An animal will fight to live, choose to mate, call for a calf. But they won’t fear to die, or love a partner, or miss a child. Mistaking basic reactions for human emotion is just silly.

Sorry but I require a species appropriate diet. But doing this as humanely as possible is a worthy goal.

'He'? It doesn't sound like you're that clued up on animal biology or concerns in the first place!

Your comment highlights the exact lack of education the PP was referring to. Plant based diet does not need to include anything processed. Just like a meat eating diet does not need to include processed foods.

I have dairy goats and it’s hard to articulate how wrong you are to use such black and white thinking

Of course there are bad dairy practices but my view is that is largely down to ridiculous regulations that force farmers to be working on such thin margins

Anyway, my goats and me love milking time. You’ve all acknowledged animals have feelings and therefore you will believe me when I say that I know they love it. I don’t have to force them over, they run over to the milking shed.

On that vein, there are some dairy farms who offer cows on demand milking so they can walk into the barn themselves and get on the machine on their own. Turns out they do it more often than the traditional am / pm scheduled milking. Explain that?

We managed to live on just a little meat before and besides there are alternatives some clever scientists have helped out.

Sorry - me again.

As I said upthread, it's not the eating of meat that upsets me, just the production and slaughter process.

Long ago there was a TV programme where people lived for a year as Iron Age farmers. They had to slaughter a big piggy (a bit like a wild boar), but luckily, they had to do it legally and get a professional in to dispatch it. The slaughterer had a gun which shot a bolt into its head, and went into the field where the lovely pig was grazing. He just did the job in an instant and the pig collapsed immediately. That was as humane, I should think, as it's possible to be. But most animal slaughter is not like that at all.

I didn't say it was human emotion, did I?

But let's not pretend that a herd would happily trot to their death IF they were given a choice.

The fact they are unable to action this choice makes it more, not less abhorrent.

I support everyones freedom to eat what they want but a plant based diet is literally that: vegetables! Why is that so hard to understand?
I have been veggie all my life as has my family.
Never had an iron deficiency
Never eaten fake meat.

I have a car for essential journeys.
I have the necessary electronics for modern living, but certainly not a high-tec household. Literally can't work without a laptop or phone. Can't function in society without them either (booking classes and paying for things at school etc).
I have two children. Honestly, had I been a bit wiser before I had them, i would not have brought them into this world. But they are here now. I am making them aware that whilst having them has been the best thing that ever happened to me, it is not something that everyone should feel is an obvious life path - it's more than ok to choose child-free.
I buy mostly from Vinted, partly because I can't stand shopping, and mostly for financial reasons, rather than a primarily ethical thing.
I have a weekly delivery of random fruit and veg from a local company (think oddbox or riverford, but local), but do top up at my nearest supermarket. I have tried growing my own veg, but am not very good at it yet, but we do keep trying.
I am absolutely not saying I am perfect. But I am doing my best. I truly believe animal agriculture is an easy one to fix, to make the world a better place.

Animals taste nice, and nothing touches the sides of a minging hangover like a greasy fry-up full of animal parts.

Get ready to welcome this months lucky heart attack ! 😄

I agree with your post, however one of the unintended consequences of this view is that regulation for abattoirs is so intense that there are now very very few in the uk.

What it means for small farmers like us is a 2.5 hour trip for the animals. It upsets me greatly. We’ve been trying to open an abbatoir locally for 8 years now but it’s genuinely impossible

Oh are you one of the people who still believes animal fat is the problem?!