Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life. The constant meat eater trolling about how its natural to eat meat and animals do it, ignore the fact that its not natural to keep animals in pens where they cant turn around for their entire life that is basically pure torture from birth to death.

If all meat was produced the way it was farmed 100 years ago, youd see way less vegans.

I mean, it can be both.

Factory farming has been around for more than 100 years. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906.

The meat industry has done a pretty good job keeping the horrors of slaughter houses out of the public eye, especially in the days before almost everyone was walking around with a video recorder in their pocket.

I'm sure exposure to what's really involved in modern meat production has increased the popularity of veganism, but veganism has been around for at least a thousand years.

Were that the case, you’d see vegans advocating for eating classically-husbanded animals. But I for one have never seen such a thing. And when I’ve spoken with vegans about this very topic, they’ve insisted that no animal can possibly be raised/slaughtered humanely – the belief seems almost axiomatic to them.

> its not natural

Neither is using fire to cook food.

Your point? (Or are you recommending a raw food diet?)

As I read their message, the point is that non-meat eaters have more problems with the unethical ways to farms than the killing itself or the process to eat another animal. Those two last points may be used in punchlines but if you discuss with the speaker you’ll ear way more about the raising condition that the instant they animal is killed.

You're a reasonable / pragmatic vegan. Vegans that won't eat meat because of the kill are ideological / dogmatic vegans.

There's even a small amount of vegans that consider lab meat to be something immoral (how they loop their head around that one, I do not know).

I'm currently dating a girl that's vegan and is super chill about it, but when I was 16 I dated a vegan girl also. My mother made two separate dishes for her, one specifically with esoteric stuff she would like (Christmas being special and all that). Then my mother made the mistake of quickly flipping some burning food with some meat in it, then using the same spatula to muddle the vegan dish. That girlfriend immediately said she would not eat that dish.

I nearly decided to break up with her at that moment.

I'm never quite sure it it's anecdata, but it always feels like there are much more obnoxiously stringent vegans than there are obnoxious meat eaters.

On the other hand, I've seen firsthand how vegans have to consistently defend their lifestyle choice, because by making that choice they reveal the "default" was never really that. Same with those who chose to be sober.

I’m generally a vegetarian, but I eat chicken, beef, and pork from local farms that raise the animals ethically.

These dogmatic vegans aren't born that way - they're created by a completely unethical farming environment and detachment from farm life as /u/partition mentioned.

As I grow up I am beginning to realize just how many "bad personalities" and "horrible life choices" are really just driven by a poor environment - and that speaks more of our society and governance than the individuals.

part of Western society ethos is our quick action within any sort of realm to "pick X; be a dick about it"

I think I and most vegans also wouldn't eat it. It has nothing to do with rudeness or even the specific ethics of that situation or something. Just I wouldn't be able to physically stomach it. I would feel guilty but I wouldn't be able to eat it.

Peter Singer makes this argument in Animal Liberation, one of the seminal works on modern animal ethics. One of Singer's points is that it's ethical to eat animals so long as they are raised and killed in a way to minimize suffering.

IMO everyone should read it, regardless of your stance on eating animals.

Best course of action imo is watch yourself in that moment, understand that people are going above and beyond for you even though they don't fully understand you, they are trying to accept you. I'd go to the bathroom, try to reason with myself that no animals are being killed specifically for you, the accidental touch won't give any flavour to your dish and it's all in your head. There's no ethical issues whatsoever in that situation.

If after that you still can't make yourself eat it then you should apologize, explain it to them, tell them you tried to make yourself but couldn't and I bet you'd get a LOT more sympathy.

> Vegans that won't eat meat because of the kill are ideological / dogmatic vegans

I've never met any other kind of vegan person. If they were concerned only about the living conditions of the animals, then they would eat free-range ethically-raised meat. They don't. Even if it's really free-range and not what the government allows to be called "free-range."

This conflates animal rights with animal welfare. The vegans who are motivated by the latter might do as you suggest. But a strict interpretation of animal rights means respecting the right to live. This underpins religious vegetarianism too.

Still other vegans are motivated by concerns about the environment. For them too, "classical husbandry" will not be a winning argument. If anything the opposite, since it requires more land.

Eh, not sure I buy that interpretation. Ensuring that the meat you eat only comes from ethical sources is hard, especially if you eat at restaurants, or if you eat food that other people have cooked. (Do you really want to be that person who goes to someone's house for dinner and on-the-spot refuses to eat because their host isn't sure of the provenance of the meat?) It can also be significantly more expensive. It would be entirely reasonable to decide to give up meat rather than deal with all that, if it matters to you.

And on top of that it does make a statement about one's values. Even if someone was ok with doing all that homework, they might want to give up meat as a form of protest against all the factory animal farming out there.

I absolutely love this characterization of modern discourse.

> Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life.

But definitionally a vegetarian is someone who abstain from eating meat period, regardless of the source. Someone can avoid eating unethically sourced meat but still eat ethically sourced meat and thus definitionally not be a vegetarian. So it's fair to assume that ethical vegetarians (those who practice it for ethical reasons) believe that all meat consumption is unethical. Otherwise they wouldn't be vegetarians.

I acknowledge there is probably a caveat of people who practice vegetarianism because they don't believe they can find ethically sourced meat and thus forgo meat consumption entirely. I find that strange though as cage free meat is pretty widely sold, at least in the USA per my experience.