The staff ate it later

In the west we have “No Animals Were Harmed in the making of …”, which I’m only just learning comes from the American Humane Society: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Humane_Society#No_A...

I had always thought it were a generic phrase!

Tripwiring (and thus fatally wounding) horses was quite a thing back in the day.

Wasn't there some horrible story about the number of animals killed in the filming of Homeward Bound or some similar movie? I simply cannot comprehend the callousness of people towards animals back then. I guess our cultures are simply too different, but it genuinely seems like people saw all animals as "things" until, like, the 1950s or something like that. What the heck?

> I guess our cultures are simply too different, but it genuinely seems like people saw all animals as "things" until, like, the 1950s or something like that.

There’s a weird disconnect where people ignore or are wilfully ignorant of cruelty to animals in industrial food production but are sensitive to it in virtually every other context. I saw a woman the other day who was tending to an injured pigeon and had called animal welfare people to come tend to it. Meanwhile, millions of chickens live in appalling conditions and die horrible deaths en masse.

I am genuinely unsure where this disconnect comes from. I was the same for most of my life but a few years ago, I started thinking about the animals I was eating and then I couldn’t eat them any more.

I don’t begrudge people their compassion. A few nights ago I went outside to put some stuff on the barbecue and my wife was in the backyard, concerned for the fate of a female cardinal that had flown into our sunroom window. It was stunned and couldn’t fly. Its mate was worriedly flitting through nearby bushes. “That’s so sad,” my wife said. “Yes,” I agreed, and then I put her skewers of meat on the barbecue.

If the little bird was tasty it might have gone on the bbq too.

We humans are capable of empathizing with different creatures differently. Some people have their empathy dial set up so high that they anthropomorphize plants. Some have it set so low they're psychopaths. Most functional people are in the middle.

Personally, keeping chickens has almost completely put me off empathy with them. Roosters are assholes. Into the pot with you.