Truth is, 99% of any difficulties have been social rather than related to my own appetite.
Giving up meat in itself was much easier than I expected, but I still haven't become comfortable with people quizzing me about my reasons.
Even when people are well-meaning and genuinely curious, they always end up asking these questions just when you're having a meal together. It's hard not to come off as preachy when you're talking about farming practices at the exact moment when steaming plates of meat arrive at the table!
Then there's the thing of going to someone's home and having them make different food for you. Even if they're super nice about it, I still feel like a bit of a burden.
It's reinforced my respect for vegans. Being a vegan while having an active social life takes a strength of character and bloody-mindedness that I don't think I have.
Compare that to store meat and you're looking at things that lived in cramped uncomfortable quarters and spent their lives being pumped full of antibiotic agents just to try to prevent them from becoming too sick before they're sent off a slaughter line where all their senses are going to inform them well ahead of time what's coming. And then enter in things like the growth hormones we use (that have been banned in much of the rest of the developed world) that often result in ongoing pain and other issues for the animals again before they're lined up for slaughter. Then there are straight up sadistic things like foie gras. That involves force feeding animals, generally ducks, to increase their liver to ~10x its normal size by shoving a pipe down their throat and jamming in "food" over a period of many weeks.
Cooking that lobster (or hunting deer or whatever else) is vastly more humane than supporting our meat industry. Like many things that happen on scale, ethics are quickly replaced with an insatiable lust for profit. I enjoy traveling and something I like more than anything else is to go into a chicken and rice shop and see some chickens freely pecking about around the shop. We should understand where our food comes from, and give it the respect it deserves. That doesn't mean not killing it, but it does mean giving it as reasonable a life as possible in the interim.
Good on you for sticking to your morals though. I don't mind vegetarians or vegans or whatever, but the one group that really annoys me is people who eat meat, but get upset seeing animals get butchered.
That said, I'll put a lobster in a pot without hesitation. I like to put a cigarette in their claws beforehand like a last smoke before a firing squad. I appreciate their sacrifice for my butter drenched enjoyment.
The saddest part of the desensitization to killing is the waste. You wouldn't waste much if you had to kill it too. You'd know the value.
He's good at attacking the food bowl, and that's about it.
Then he kinda ignored the corpse for about week because he didn't know what to do with it and then we removed it from the garden (since we found it by then)
The bird was probably sick anyway since my dog is one of the worst hunting dogs I've seen.
I'm pretty sure it's due to the domestic upbringing, if he had grown up on a farm and actually had to hunt small rodents then he'd probably know how to eat them.
Any efficiency gleaned in food production is simply eaten up with billions of new mouths to feed within decades.
I'd prefer an "inefficiently" managed planet with 6B people, versus a "very efficiently" managed planet with 20B vegetarians.
The manure is also applied before seeding, months before harvest. Together with rinsing, and sometimes peeling or boiling, there's really no need for the scaremongering.
If you want to be afraid of faeces, manure is the least of your problems. Foxes and other wild animals shit on every field, and they often carry parasites.
I've wondered about this. Fox tapeworm is very common (30% of all foxes in many areas in North-West Europe carry it last time I checked) and (the scary part) for humans, it can cause lethal liver failure 10 years after infection. Not 'lethal' is in 'flu lethal' - like 'might cause you to die in specific circumstances, when untreated, and when you were unhealthy already anyway' - but rather 'will certainly kill you in a painful way, very difficult to diagnose, no known effective treatment'.
So the advise is 'don't eat berries or mushrooms that grow in the wild below waist height'.
However, many/most fruit farms have fruit growing at that height, and the standard cleaning procedures don't remove worms (e.g. vaccinium isn't washed at all, too fragile). I know for a fact foxes (sometimes) enter these farms, I've seen some with my own eyes. How does this work from an epidemiological point of view? When devising health warnings, are there separate measurements for incidents caused by fruit picked in the wild, and from farms? Or is this just one of those things where everybody shrugs and says 'we don't have a better solution' and hope for the best?
On the off chance anyone doing epidemiology research is reading this, this sort of situation must be common; how is that dealt with?
I used the scare quotes because "organic" food is basically just a giant scam. Plants don't actually care if their nitrogen comes from manure or from anhydrous ammonia. Really.