You should try dog if you get the chance, Elwood dog farm has a low impact factory farm where you can buy Labrador cuts and some gamier breeds if they're in stock.
I mean I could but I have a nearly limitless supply of rabbits in my yard. Their fur makes great gifts. My plants love the compost I get from everything else. As a bonus the blood compost deters rabbits from eating my cabbage.
Funny thing, I can't seem to find any type of vegan certification that is concerned with the use of animal byproducts or waste in fertilizer. A few specifically say they do not check fertilizer.
I mean, people hardly ever eat carnivores. Even pigs, which are omnivores, are 90% of the time herbivores. I don't even eat meat, but this argument never made sense to me. Yes, there are countries where people eat dogs, but that doesn't mean dogs and cats are equivalent to cattle. You can make an argument for horses though.
I actually respect vegans that are vegan to prevent the suffering of animals.
I get it. Grew up farming. Chicken houses are an industrial horror machine.
We've recently bought a play farm and hope to raise or hunt all our meat. Only the slaughter and butchering of steers will be outsourced. Takes some serious equipment to handle an animal that large.
I'm an omnivore by evolution and enjoy meat and hunting. I'm always a little sad when I kill something, however. I figure that sadness means I'm human and is a good thing. When I eat meat from something I killed, it means more. There is a lot of respect involved in it as well something like religion.
If more people had to kill their meat, we would probably live in a very different world and there would be a lot more vegans.
If more people had to kill their meat, we would probably live in a very different world and there would be a lot more vegans.
I agree with your overall post, but you have the conclusion backwards.
The closer you are to hunting or slaughtering the more it's just a normal part of life. I've never met a vegan when I grew up in a rural area around farms, only after I moved to the city and it's almost exclusivly people that grew up in the city.
If people had to kill their own meat, not only would there be more vegans, but people who did eat meat would probably eat a lot less on average than the average person today does. It would probably make a lot of people healthier too.
Healthier is debatable. Meat is, relatively speaking, pretty good from a health perspective.
Most of what we eat that's "bad for us" is refined carbohydrates. Sugar, fried starches, breads, that kinda shit. The burger patty is far from the worst offender on the plate.
If suddenly everyone is slaughtering their own animals, the foods they turn to to replace this calories aren't going to be leafy greens, they're going to be shitty carbs. Shitty carbs are already most of people's diets.
people would probably eat less meat sure just because of the logistics of it, but did u forget that history is a thing? 150 odd years ago most people regularly slaughtered their own animals a few hundred years further back and basically everyone did, and at the same time almost everyone with very very few exceptions ate meat.
Really, all you need is a small tractor to lift the steer after you've skinned it and to drop the gut. Skin the animal on the ground and roll it from side to side to get it all off, split the chest and cut out the anus, start lifting at the rear legs with chains through the achilles tendon, and pull the anus through, then as you lift more you can free the gut from the backbone and gravity will pull the gut down as you get higher.
Let it all fall on the skin, pull out the bits of organs you want or can feed the dog, and you have the carcass hanging now. Split with a sawsall and a long demolition blade. Make yourself a handhold between the fifth and sixth rib, then cut through the spine and breastbone above the 6th rib.
Leave as much fat on the inside of the cavity as possible so the tenderloin and brisket don't dry out when hanging. Try to hang it at 2-4C for a couple weeks.
This sounds like excellent advice. I don't even have a small tractor yet. Before steers, I'm going to have to string new fence. Next spring, if I'm lucky and have worked real hard, I'll be getting a bottle calve or two.
Did find a cinder block shed with a good roof that wasn't even listed. Has a loading ramp for a pickup. I'm real tempted to just outsource it.
Have a hernia and don't know if I can do it.
Do have a root cellar that will be perfect for hanging.
we used to live in a world were almost every slaughtered their own animals to eat and withing a rounding error everyone ate meat. its only icky to us today BECAUSE we dont interact with it.
I heartily agree. I'm also an omnivore, raised on a farm. The best meat is the meat you raised or hunted yourself, both ethically and taste wise.
The respect I have for the animal I personally kill for sustenance is the closest an atheist like myself will ever get to religion. I respect the lives of animals to sustain mine as a human, and I know if I raised it or hunted it, it had a much better life and will taste better than any meat you'll see at a Wallmart.
Damn skippy. I've learned I'm an atheist with a pagan heart.
I've found that I must be hunting something when I go in the woods or on the water. Animal, vegetable, or something else. Don't care if I actually kill, catch, or find; there just has to be a goal. I love taking other people and helping them get in tune with the world.
This makes me angry. You murder a creature for your pleasure. You do it against her will. If she could talk she'd beg you for her life, if she could fight back she would. Talking about respect in this violent relationship is self-righteous, cynical and speciesist bullshit. Like talking about respect after raping a child. The best pussy is the one you hunted yourself, right?
I can confidently say that I have never raped an animal.
My housecat engages in a lot of torture, but she's a damned good mouser. I put a stop to the torture when I catch it. I don't allow my cats outside because they're so bad on native wildlife, especially ground nesting birds. Cats are obligate predators. I kill cats if I find them in the woods as they are now varmints.
I'm an omnivore, and am at peace with that. I strive to kill in a manner that I find ethical. I kill critters to eat them, varmints to restore balance. I'll eat the varmints if I can.
Pigs (you know, the animal that bacon actually comes from) mostly live off of human waste (aka garbage). They are the origin of the H1N1 virus (also known as the flu) and when not contained they are considered absolute pests.
Hey! I made this content and was made aware of Lemmy by a friend two days ago. I decided to join and wanted to enter with a bang by sharing some of my OC.
Yep, those awful vegans pushing their agenda for their own gains. Make ME aware of MY CHOICE to pay for animal abuse and torture?! Blatant manipulation!
Mosquitos have been causing humans harm since forever. If the vegan idea is too reduce harm then maybe vegans should be obligated to kill the sadistic little fuckers
Just don't grow mushrooms or potatoes in billionaire compost.
They have a tendency to uptake heavy metals from their nutrient source, and no one wants lead in their mushroom soup or mashed potatoes.
I grew up on a farm, I've killed and slaughtered my own food my whole life and I always felt good about eating meat because of that fact.
As I get older I'm really starting to hate killing things, I don't want to end a life at all. My couple of vegetarian days might turn into a whole lifestyle.
You've got this! There are a ton of benefits to going plant-based. Dominion is a great documentary to show how most (~90%) are treated, which emphasizes the importance for us to shift away (it doesn't sound like the way you did it was as bad as this, but this is the info that made me swap away recently).
The trick is not to kill them yourself, but have factories and animal farms do it while deluding yourself into believing that there is a humane way to killing a living being when the reality is there are only less painful ways. Also, from the other side of the aisle, the trick is to delude yourself into thinking that animals would have any problems eating and preying on you. If cattle had no place in human society, their numbers would significantly decrease. What does that say about human societies with large socioeconomic disparity who are treated by cattle by the rich as they get increasingly automated?
There's no point to this comment, it has been released into the wild so that it may be free.
wait... are you suggesting everyone just slaughter their own food? Because the specialization of labor and labor of scale was to blame, not the desire to distance oneself from slaughter. That may be the case nowadays but 150 years ago it was nothing for most families to slaughter their own chickens.
If you can find TVP in the shops, in a steak shape, that stuff is ridiculous. You just cook them in a vegetable broth, press out the water and then sear them like a steak in a pan. The Maillard reaction turns the protein into that typical seared meat taste and it's similarly chewy, too.
Granted I have been vegetarian for a bit too long to really judge it, but I did also immediately gag on my first bite, because my body was convinced I was biting into meat.
Specialisation of labour is literally the basis of our entire civilisation. Everybody does it for almost everything. Comparing that to Putin is definitely some next level stupid.
I really don't see how they are strawmen. The vast majority of people do not need meat, the reason they eat meat is because it tastes good. Taste is merely one of our senses, why is it ok to kill to enjoy the taste, but not ok to enjoy the sound or sight? That's what the meme is getting at.
Nature playing out
Why is this an argument, when it isn't an acceptable reason for anything else? Rape, murder, thievery are all things that most people see as wrong, despite them happening in nature plenty.
One of the things that makes humans unique is our ability to consider logic and mortality beyond what happens in nature, because nature certainly isn't perfect.
Did you really just call stuffing 10 pigs in a cell smaller than my toilet, leaving them unable to even turn around, feeding them with drugs and then killing them without ever having seen the sun 'nature playing out'? Good one.
But... The post is already encouraging people to eat meat. Like this post is literally designed to pester people who don't eat meat, but then the meat eating people got mad anyway
Nah. You'll be pumped full of preservatives so that your funeral and viewing can be held 2 weeks later to give your relatives time to travel. Then you'll be buried in a plastic coffin in a hole filled with cement.
*please talk to a dietitian or your doctor, if possible, before drastically changing your diet
I've already had to drop dairy out of my diet, so I figure that going vegan isn't necessarily that much of a stretch anymore. It's not because of moral or ethical reasons, though: it's entirely because handling raw meat squicks me out. I currently have to keep up the charade because my family are kind of dicks about it...it sucks.
Me too, keeping a box of disposable food service gloves in the kitchen fixed this cheaply. It may not help you the same but it made food prep bearable for me.
... I figure that going vegan isn’t necessarily that much of a stretch anymore. It’s not because of moral or ethical reasons
Then it's not veganism. Veganism is not a diet. It is an ethical position on the treatment of animals. All aspects of our treatment of animals. You cannot be almost vegan or sometimes vegan or partially vegan any more than you can be almost a feminist. Someone who believes women should be allowed to own property, but not his wife, is not almost a feminist.
Except you don't need to eat animals and so it is the same. You're killing animals for your entertainment, just because you eat them after that doesn't change anything.
People have eaten meat for thousands of years. That's been a matter of survival, not entertainment.
But my comment was about people taking joy in killing, which is what the meme is about, not taking joy in eating,. I appreciate your zeal but I'd prefer you to not ascribe to me arguments I didn't make
Imagine I have two choices: end world hunger, or end world hunger and kick a puppy. If I choose to end world hunger but also kick a puppy...well I'm kinda a dick, right? Ultimately I did a very good thing ending word hunger, so on balance, my actions are "net positive." But the choice I actually made was to kick a puppy.
Now, I need to eat. So I have a choice: eat yummy food and don't kill an animal, or eat yummier food and do kill and animal. The choice I'm effectively faced with is, "kill an animal for better taste."
It's totally up to you to decide if that is a good choice for you personally.
If course it's not always so simple, and there are financial, cultural, and health reasons that complicate this. But for some folks (like myself) that's kinda how I view it.
Oh I fully agree that not eating meat is the better alternative. I just thing the meme was stupid. There's plenty of valid reasons to promote eating less meat without making up strawmen
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Taste, is in fact, Nutrition/Taste, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Nutrition plus Taste. Taste is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Nutrition system.
I disagree. None of those other actions serve a purpose. It's not like we can absorb calories through touch, smell or our eyes. No bosy just licks meat and then throws it away like they would if they just touched, smelled, or saw it. We actually eat the meat when we taste it. That's why people enjoy the taste, because they associate it with being fed. Not because of some cognitive dissonance as the meme suggests.
Shrug. It's just not particularly funny. And there's pretty obviously a widespread effort to post vegan stuff to non-vegan subs. People have made their choices and trying to hammer them over it doesn't change anyone's mind. I'm just blocking the people doing it, personally.
There's a lot of vegan propaganda everywhere, and a lot of it has been paid for by the Davos foundation.
All in prep for reserving meat for the financial elite and shuffling off the rest of us to more 'sustainable' food sources like bugs and recycled trash.
Gee I wonder if the wealthy elite have finally realized the long term fallout of their endless greed destroying the planet.
yeah, yummy meat. I like it a lot. Sometimes i salt it than dry it myself, and god, does it taste delicious. I might be bothered by the cruelty of all this meat industry, but guess what, if i were to choose, i'd rather be a farm pig. Anything actually that does not comprehend the cruelty of this reality, and i'm not talking about farms here. Also, unlike most of us they go away quickly.
P.S. fyi, latest studies show that plants might also feel the pain. Sorry to disappoint you guys, but it seems like we are just doomed to bring more suffering in this world. You better find a way to cope with this before it became more researched.
I think most people dont even care about pain. CO2 is rising and we are all going to die. We eat too much meat without thinking either. Its nonsense to eat that much meat. Once a month is perfectly fine.
If you care about CO2 that much, go strangle a billionaire or two, or, i don't know, go change how our whole grocerie system works, because if you didn't know, everything we find at stores is produced with great margin. Most of the product simply being destroyed simply to keep the prices where they are.
I certainly don't care about CO2. Why? "We all die"? No, silly, some of us will (both of us most certainly), but don't underestimate our species' adaptability. And you know what, it's fucking beautiful because eight billion is a bit too much. That's a perfect self regulation kinda thing.
Its nonsense to eat that much meat. Once a month is perfectly fine.
Its nonsence to eat such overprocessed food as some of you vegans do i could say. Not that i would mean it. All I'm saying, the amount of any type of food is a matter of personal preference, And since we both live at the time when we could afford such a luxurious thing as an ability to choose what to eat, and not just consume whatever we were able to find/produce, i would like to try to enjoy this little bliss. Fuck you guys for even attempting to ruin it for me, and then telling me what to do, you brave don quixotes fighting your imaginary windmills.
Note that an estimated 90% of global farm animals are factory farmed, and are fed monocrops like corn and soy that humans can eat. It's about 10 times more efficient to eat the plants directly than the animals due to Trophic Levels, so if you're worried about plants feeling pain you'd reduce their pain by eating them directly instead of their inefficient middlemen.
soy is a great example of how myopic this approach is: about 85% of all soy is pressed for soybean oil. the byproduct is fed to livestock, but if it weren't, it would just be industrial waste. feeding animals soy is by-and-large a conservation of resources.
good point. i don't kill them though, silly, there are people to do it for me.
Also, unlike us, animals eat literal grass which does not require all kinds of fossil fuel machines, tons of earth-polluting pesticides, you know, stuff like that. Also we don't need to exterminate trees in order to be able to herd them, you know, that long things sticking up from the ground, producing oxygen, green all the spring, summer, and even autumn, unlike wheat and stuff.
If you’re suggesting you can get enough b12 purely through a diet without animal products, supplements or fortified food you’ve misunderstood nutritional science.
What I’m railing against is this; vegans say that omnivores eat meat only for taste pleasure and that’s a straw man argument.
No one just eats meat for taste because there is also a nutritional component. In the same way vegans have to supplement with B12 to be healthy so they recognise that things must be eaten beyond just taste pleasure.
Attaching a system of mortality to a diet is just religion
... what? I'm sorry, but this simply doesn't make sense at all. By this logic what is wrong with cannibalism? Attaching a system of morality to that diet would just be a religion right? And I'm sure eating human meat has all kinds of nutrients.
I’m not a moral realist. So I don’t believe in moral facts I.e. that murder is ‘wrong’ or being charitable is ‘right’
It’s kid stuff (IMO) to believe in mystical rights and wrongs of the universe. The universe does not care one iota that you cease to exist tomorrow or if all humans were to become extinct (IMO).
If you disagree please point me to the source of your morals, how do you know what’s right and what’s wrong?
The experiences of animals are real and matter. Their suffering is identical in nature to your own. Your moral perspective demands that you deny or ignore these facts. If you can deny that an animal's experience has any value, you can do the same to a human.
I can deny the importance of human experience (the heat death of the universe will erase all traces of our existence and impact) without wanting to kill humans right now.
How did you conclude the experiences of animals matter?
How do you know animals are having experiences?
How do you know human experiences matter?
I don’t claim to have any answers to the above but I’ve never heard a satisfactory answer to these questions other than ‘I just believe it is so’ and if it boils down to my belief versus your belief I have to conclude that neither one of us actually has any idea.
I've killed deer, chickens, chipmunks, squirrel, and some other small pests. Yes, I did gut and clean the deer and chickens myself. And yes, I did eat their tasty fleshy meat.
I went crabbing and the resources I found said that killing them before cooking them was likely more humane than boiling them alive, so that's what I did.
My old neighbor's cat once left a paralyzed/twitching rat outside my door, which I found in the morning. I quickly realized that the rat was not going to recover (it had already been there for hours), so I had to figure out a way to quickly end its suffering. I did not eat the rat though.
I have butchered squirrels, deer, turkey, snakes, catfish, goats, pigs, and rabbits. Went vegetarian two years ago for ethical reasons though, so I guess I don't get to raise my hand lol
🙋 I've hunted deer, gutted and skinned them myself too. The tenderloins are great sauteed, and the rest of the meat is good ground (just don't cook it as long as hamburger, it's more lean).