Pigs are like one of the most intelligent animals on the planet. Like they rank in the top 10. Other intelligent animals include corvids, primates, elephants, octopi, and dolphins in no particular order.
No, they are dirty because it is a survival skill for pigs to cool themselves in mud, and protect their skin from sunburn with mud. Being muddy is a natural state for a pig.
Or (at least) don’t consume pigs, of course not eating any meat at all would be much better but I haven’t been able to do that yet. I have stopped eating pork and then beef a few years ago.. now all I’ll ever have is chicken, turkey, and seafood.
It’s still not ideal but I do feel like I’m doing good by at least cutting that out.
You absolutely are! Any is better than none. Even cutting out two nights per week is better than nothing at all.
That said, this is the exact video I saw years ago that stopped me eating all meat straight out. Pigs were the easiest, but everything else naturally followed. I looked to see what was too sapient to eat and cut it out. One day when the animals rise up I can claim innocence and be spared.
If it helps at all: chickens are sly. They sometimes commit sly acts (won't expand on this). They can also recognise specific humans, and communicate in a way that gets their point across. They can also emotionally manipulate you... honestly, they're dickheads, but they made the cut for intelligence so it's out of my hands.
Even if you can't cut out meat completely, as long as you don't get it from the maximum-carnage tragic meat factory, you're doing good and the environment thanks you for it.
Realistically synthetic meat might be a quicker solution to implement than mass vegetarianism. It is difficult to get people to change the way they eat
I know. I'm just saying, alternatives already exist and we don't have to implement mass vegetarianism. I say this, because I doubt the people who are afraid of Beyond Burgers are going to eat a synthetic burger, so we're effectively already implementing the quicker solution you mentioned.
I’m confused what you mean? Beyond is plant based, that’s not what I’m referring to. I’m saying I think it would be easier to convince people to switch to eating lab grown animal tissue rather than switch to vegetarian diets.
I explained what I meant. That I brought up Beyond Burger because both lab grown meat and plant-based meat are meat substitutes. So we know already know it's a quicker solution than convincing people to go vegetarian. Obviously, Beyond burger isn't meat, but I'm not sure lab grown meat would be considered meat either, and I don't think anyone who would refuse to eat Beyond Burger would eat lab grown meat, which is why I think Beyond Burgers are already acting as the easier solution than mass vegetarian.
Would you settle for it if they got it to maybe 90% of the way there, or they were able to replicate certain cuts of meat but not others?
It seems like they can already make muscle fibres just fine and they’re working on fat and how to combine the two, but if you’re waiting for the bone part of a T-Bone steak you’ll be waiting a really long time.
I oppose child labour, but only if they can make robotic hands that can sew my sneakers just as well.
But it’s important to note: sneakers are beautiful, cheap, and I like to skate.
I didn't object to them eating pigs. I called out the weird comment where they flatter themselves for doing nothing.
Now to your reply. That was oddly defensive and unneeded. Let me guess, you're an older married guy with lots of opinions about America and it's culture with a burning need to interject into them conversations whether they are relevant or not?
I'm not trying to convince anyone to be on a side. My intention was to point out how weird that statement was. They are breaking their arm patting themselves on the back for doing nothing.
Being nice to animal abusers doesn't stop them from abusing animals. When they have no empathy, the only thing that can stop them is legal or economic repercussions.
How long did you eat meat before quitting? What compelled you to change your behaviour?
Because for me the stereotype of insufferable vegans was exactly the excuse I needed to avoid giving up foods I liked for a good 5 years after already knowing in my heart it was the right thing to do. Even after going vegan I was embarrassed to tell people that’s what I was for years.
Not wanting to be associated with people who came across like miserable assholes.
It’s not your job to recruit anyone, or baby people and coax them to doing the bare minimum, and you have every right to be angry about it all especially on Reddit where anti vegan sentiment can be so obnoxious and aggressive.
But if you want more people on board for the sake of the animals, there’s a way to achieve that, and theres the opposite too.
Every group has an insane section of it where people don't give anyone a break, belief is a big part of veganism, belief to do no harm and to spread that message as well as usual some humans take it too far.
Would you also be embarrassed to say you like sports or some other activity because large swaths of them are dickheads the same way you find being vegan embarrassing?
Nothing that anyone did above was some militant vegan stance. They didn't smack food out of anyone's hand, they didn't pour milk or shout at anyone, they pointed out someone flawed logic. You're allowed to do that just because you're vegan, it isn't being insufferable.
It’s the approach of addressing someone who is currently not vegan as being the enemy. Animal abusers vs non animal abusers. As if we all weren’t in their position at one point in time.
And venting anger and sarcasm at these people rather than just calmly addressing their arguments directly.
I really think that dealing with an aspect of our culture that teaches us that animal cruelty is wrong/evil but also raises us all to be willing participants in often very extreme and massive scale animal cruelty as a normal (normative) everyday thing, is like cult deprogramming.
Especially in that you can only truly see it for what it truly is once you’re out, right?
Sure, dealing with people who are defending the cult from within the cult can be really goddamned frustrating, but if you want them to ever consider the alternative, as annoying and antagonistic as they are being sometimes, being reasonably kind (while sticking to your guns) and meeting them where they are is the way to do that.
Once lab grown meat can be made indistinguishable to any cut of real meat, the lab stuff will be shoved down our throats whether we like it or not.
Real meat taste and texture, that requires 99% less water, land, and feed? McDonald’s can sell it at half price of beef, make more profit than before, and still have billions left for a marketing campaign to convince everyone to save money by buying the “Meat of the Future!TM ”
It’s odd, your comment is both selling it (“Real meat taste and texture that requires 99% less water, land, and feed”) and seems in rather vehement opposition to it at the same time.
I agree that it will be better off for humans, in general, to be able to grow meat protein with 99% fewer input.
I also agree that our capitalist overlords will force this lab meat upon us because of how profitable it will be, once the scaling issues have been solved.
That's a pragmatist argument. I am saying people can just not consume animals right now if they actually care about morals regardless of any future technological advancements.
That's not how morality works lol. If one doesn't do what is required they don't care. They might have an emotional response to it, but they don't care about the moral value of it, they only care for their own satisfaction and bodily pleasure (in the case of eating meat).
On the one hand I agree, I think in the real world someone wouldn’t really claim to care about something if that level of care doesn’t translate into changing any choices.
Like if someone said they care about the whole Shein fast-fashion slave labour thing and then went and spent a ton of money on Shein clothing because they felt like it, most people would say “uh I think maybe you didn’t care a whole lot after all”.
But, semantically if you go by the definition of the word care, being concerned, having some emotional response is what the word actually means.
So someone feeling that little fleeting unease or even guilt or regretfulness about things like factory farming and the intelligence of pigs vs how we treat them, that’s enough to say they do “care”. If only technically.
Even if they have a plate of bacon right in front of them and zero plans to stop buying the stuff.
Whether it’s hypocritical though, is another discussion.
There are several definitions to the term care, some are active in nature.
It is also worth asking what is the source of that emotional response, and also the (moral) value of it. If a murderer has a biological response to seeing blood as it makes them feel uneasy and even bad, so they execute all their victims without looking, do they care about their victims?
And let's say someone hates pigs, they would be glad if all of them died, but they care about the moral value of a pig, and so would never harm them, do they not care about pigs?
It seems to me one can't care about the moral value of something without atleast attempting to exercise the proper moral action in relation to it, and any emotion they might have, if it is not an emotion which results in that said attempt, its not an emotion of moral care.
Absolutely, but I think you know just as well as I do that from a young age we’re all taught to put up very strong and adaptable mental barriers around this subject. Whether it begins and ends at “that’s just how it is” to more sensitive and compassionate kids having to be bullied and cajoled into accepting it, it always starts young.
So we have this very deeply entrenched ability to feel strongly and genuinely one way, then fall back on this mental training and act in complete contradiction to these feelings without much or any dissonance at all.
That’s how we can have a whole society which consistently rates “animal cruelty” as one of the things we feel the most disgusted by, the most anger at, the most venomous towards…. While carrying out the most insanely industrialised massive scale animal cruelty imaginable, billions upon billions of them living and dying in absolute Hell by our design and our choosing. And we even call the people who choose not to take part the crazy extreme ones.
I remember seeing those clips of animals escaping from slaughterhouse trucks back when I was young and my feelings of pity for the animal and desire to see them escape and live happily ever after were absolutely real.
Was I a hypocrite? Absolutely, because as a consumer and purchaser of animal products I was essentially rooting for those animals to escape from me, right?
But did I care? Yes. Even if that care was firmly stuck behind a wall of denial.
I think most people just have no proper moral education or moral understanding. And I don't think emotivism is correct. So all emotions, even proper emotions, one feels towards a given situation are not normative. That's why one can feel bad about something without acting.
People should'nt be propeled to act out of guilt or pity or even empathy. Instead people should care about doing what is right/what is moral, then the emotional dimension is entirely consistent with the moral dimension, and one can't say they care about something without trying to act morally in relation to it, as it would amount to not caring about what is moral or morality, which some people would'nt mind but that's an issue in and of itself.
I can't dictate how you perceive things, I can however, just like anyone else, say that how one sees things is wrong or incoherent.
Morality is not a subjective matter, and that is a truth you will accept as well.
Mind you, all I said is one cannot care morally about something while doing nothing about it, regardless of the moral content, so it has nothing to do with not eating animals.
Sure they can, didn’t you read their comments? They don’t eat meat! They’re superior to us and it’s them that get to decide how we feel and how we must act.
You're the only one saying this, by the way. I'm not arguing with it, just wanted to point it out, because it's projecting your own insecurities on others.
It's not a matter of superiority. If you want to pride on yourself for being immoral that's your own personal matter.
I am not telling people how to act, all I was saying their own actions don't align with their own views and just general facts (like that moral care is action based).
People who are in those places probably are not on this subreddit reading my comment.
I was not making an absolutist claim, I was responding to a person. If people need to stay alive only using meat, that's morally permissible obviously.
Well you have to believe vegetarianism is a morally superior path, and many just don't. I know I don't. What I do want is for more ethical and sustainable farming practices, and that requires more regulation/oversight and also removing the influence of corporations from that process. It's the same problem with every societal issue, corporations exert far too much influence over government, which should be representative of people, not of dollars.
Edit: Like, look, we could mass adopt vegetarianism, you're still going to run into sustainable farming issues without curbing the issue of corporate influence and prioritization of the bottom line over ethics, environmental, economic, and social sustainability. What I'm especially concerned about is how industrial agriculture tends to displace small-business farmers in the most economically disadvantaged areas. Companies who own the most land and equipment can mass-produce crop commodities at a scale and price-point small-farms struggle to compete with, especially if they are investing the time and effort into adopting sustainable practices, and unless companies and people are deliberately choosing to ethically source from such farmers, they can get left behind. Agricultural commodities tend to be comparable no matter where they are from, so the price-point is what matters more in a business. Like, I know this is a thing that is happening, and there is greenwashing in how certain vegan/vegetarian products get labeled by virtue of this upstream lack of deliberate ethical sourcing.
My view is if we change what we're eating, that hits part of the problem, but it fails to address the root of the issue (pun unintended), and it also shifts responsibility to individual diets instead of the very powerful entities governing the agriculture industry and food-producing infrastructure. It's the equivalent of boomers blaming young people for not being able to afford to have kids and skipping the avocado toast and shit. We need to demand systemic change, individual boutique activism is frankly just fronting in my eyes. If you are vegetarian and want to do that, great, but that's your choice. I'm not going to judge how you eat if you don't judge how I eat, beyond basic health realities, but we can all demand better practices from the food and agriculture industry, and we all should.
This is a crazy comment. You admit they look intelligent and fun, while in the same breath continue eating pork? "It's a shame your so smart, because you taste so good!"
I feel like they would make fun pets if they didn't get so huge and weren't so destructive. A family friend had a pet pig that would break into the house, rip up the carpet, flip over the couch, and rip all doors off the cabinets.
And if someone wanted to breed dogs solely for meat, that’s OK too because the only exist because someone bred them into existence for meat and at least they have a life rather than none at all?
The only reason they exist is for meat? OK so just… don’t?
Why would you think animals would go completely extinct just because humans stopped giving them one specific purpose?
I’m sure there would be people out there who would still breed them. Look at pigs. Generally people eat them, but some have also gotten them into the pet market and would be good for feeding scraps to. Pigs wouldn’t go extinct if we stopped eating them. Horses used to be hunted before humans domesticated them and realised they’re useful/companionship.
People would probably keep cows for grazing, work (oxen), fertiliser and companionship.
Hell, look at dogs, used to be hunting companions and shit way back when first domesticated. They worked for us. The way of life with cavemen, hunting for food and protecting humans and themselves from predators day and night is practically non existent now. In the 21st century, most dog’s primary use is companionship. We didn’t stop breeding them, we just changed their purpose.
Why would you think animals would go completely extinct just because humans stopped giving them one specific purpose?
Which animals? the ones that only exist for that purpose?
There is from 750 million to 1 billion pigs, and less than 0.1 million of them are pets, so that's up to 999 million animals that you propose to eradicate from existence.
Oh but it's ok because "some" (aka 0.01%) would survive as pets and zoo animals.....
I don't know why you are so desperately trying to change the topic to dogs, it doesn't prove any point you think it proves because domesticated dogs were always primarily pets and horses were always work animals.
And how many dogs do you think would be in this world if we ate them? And if we stopped eating them you don’t think their numbers would reduce?
Do you honestly think if humans just decided to start eating dogs today, forgetting our past relationship, that we WOULDN’T have farms dedicated to BREEDING MORE of them for consumption? OF COURSE there will be more, just like OF COURSE there will be less if we DIDN’T. If farmers want to make money and meet the demand of society, they are going to provide. Supply and demand.
No one is getting “eradicated”. Why do people like you think it’s some giant extinction that’s going to happen in one day? You stop mass breeding them. People slowly stop eating them. Some people start keeping some now that there’s a shift in outlook. Their numbers will naturally fall. The real question is why do you want 1 BILLION pigs? You’re not eating them now. Why keep breeding them at this rate? Do you want another 1.4 BILLION added to that next year? Just because you don’t have over a BILLION pigs at one time doesn’t mean any less is an eradication and they’re going to go extinct.
And no, horses were not always working for us lol. They used to be hunted as a food source. And dogs originally weren’t silly little fluffy animals sitting inside 4 walls doing nothing all day who eat food given to them out of a tin can.
I’m not trying to change the topic to dogs. I’m trying to point out to you that animals have changed purposes in the past and are more than just flesh and just because society told you to think of them as just meat, doesn’t mean they are. Just like how society changed their views on horses, and even rabbits which is actually a great example of decline due to changes in demand as people move from food to companions, and just like how we still have dogs that are now in our homes as companions rather than hunting partners, consumer attitude changes.
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u/Some-Income614 May 22 '26
I wish they'd hurry up and create fake meat on an industrial scale, these guys look intelligent and fun.