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.

"Cruelty" is a rhetoric word because its meaning is caught between the classical "deliberate causing of pain" and the new "neglect, indifference towards another's pain" and of course, that discrepancy is fully exploited. What livestock beasts suffer is purely for practical reasons.

>I am genuinely unsure where this disconnect comes from

1. Empathy is a base emotional response triggered by nearby animals, not a rational/moral one.

2. Empathy is also an evolutionary tool that "happened" in (some) humans to help survive situations that require some sort of cooperation, like harsh winters. Anthropomorphization is an associated bug, not a feature.

2b. Being disconnected from nature and reality is the #1 cause for such disorder; you don't see any kind of vegetarianism in rural people.

3. People with a brain realize that eating meat is important.

4. People with a bigger brain also realize that that eating other animals is the prerogative of power: humans have simply won the animal kingdom's oldest game and are enjoying its spoils. Things wouldn't (and shouldn't) be different if positions were reversed.

> 2b. Being disconnected from nature and reality is the #1 cause for such disorder; you don't see any kind of vegetarianism in rural people.

This is just untrue, hundreds of millions of rural South Asians are vegetarian.

> 3. People with a brain realize that eating meat is important.

Everyone has a brain. Both vegetarian and omnivore groups have their share of geniuses and fools. Meat was important as a calorie source but it has many drawbacks in modern society totally unrelated to animal ethics; cancer risk, inefficient land use, methane production, etc.

> 4. People with a bigger brain also realize that that eating other animals is the prerogative of power: humans have simply won the animal kingdom's oldest game and are enjoying its spoils. Things wouldn't (and shouldn't) be different if positions were reversed.

This sounds like manifest destiny rhetoric and deserves just as much consideration.

> Meat was important as a calorie source but it has many drawbacks in modern society totally unrelated to animal ethics; cancer risk, inefficient land use, methane production, etc.

I think the most important drawbacks which actually threaten modern society are deforestation and zoonoses. Both can be largely avoided by raising only insects for meat, which reduces water and land use by 80%, and CO2 emissions even more if feed is mostly food waste. It is however a hard sell and has to be hidden in products in order to be accepted by consumers.

So, it is marketing and perception problem and not because insects are objectively terrible as food for people?

In my understanding it is mostly a cultural thing that makes people reject insects. I am unaware of any objective measure by which are insects are terrible foods.

And how many of your meals have included insect food?