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Comment by kenneth | Hacker News Reader

This comment is a fantastic example demonstrating why everyone hates vegans[1]. I'm all for everyone being more aware of where and how their food is made. If you come out of it choosing not to consume certain categories, that's fantastic. But the moment you start demonizing others for not making the same choices as you, you become an anti-social and dislikable person, and one that's not conducive to building a better society that moves forward positively. (This applies to politics and the woke movement too)

[1]: generalizing obviously

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The dislikable and anti-social part is, in the end, just because they make feel the rest of us guilty. Very few people would say with a straight face "Yeah, I like that humans farm and kill animals so I can enjoy a juicier dish". All of us omnivores do that, but only few ones will face that reality happily. The rest of us will just blame the messenger.

On the contrary, a lot of people are fine with it. That's why most people don't think about it much.

I don't have any real data to prove my point but I think that many people would not like to watch how a cow is killed and transformed into steak. But nobody has problem watching as someone picks apples from a tree, or how a press creates olive oil.

As long as it's not one of those halal killings, I don't see a problem. Bullet to the head, done. I've rotated spit roast as a child and didn't find it creepy.

This is not at all how it’s done. I encourage you to watch footage of how cows are killed in factory farms.

It often takes several attempts to kill the cow, even with a bullet to the head. Their throats are often slit while they are alive. There is pleeenty of footage of exactly this in Dominion. I suggest you watch it.

Well that sucks, not how we did it when I was a kid.

Actually, most people throughout human history have done just that. Being squeamish about seeing animals getting killed is a pretty modern development, at least outside nobility.

And even today, most people in the world likely still participate occasionally in the slaughter of animals, as this is still routine in all rural areas of the world, even in the US and Europe.

Yeah, I perfectly know. But at the same time we used to beat children (and in some places and some persons still do) to educate them and now this is not welcomed anymore. So, society changes, morality changes over time, things we didn't do, now we do. Things we didn't have the tech to do, now we do have and that can lead to further changes in our morality.

>The dislikable and anti-social part is, in the end, just because they make feel the rest of us guilty.

Speak for yourself. When I hear vegans try to act like I'm a horrible person on par with people that murder humans like someone did elsewhere in this thread, I don't feel guilty. I simply thing its a ridiculous thing for them to say.

I'm going to leave it at that because unlike that person I don't feel the need to say inflammatory things to someone that has made different choices about what they want to eat.

I'm all for ensuring that animals are treated as well as possible and for regulating the industry to ensure that happens. When I hear about people doing abusive things to livestock I get as mad as any vegan. It should be severely punished.

I can also get behind the idea that we should eat less meat. Its healthier and I can easily see the point that eating a large amount of meat for every single meal like a lot of Americans do it needlessly gratuitous.

Some of my favorite meals are vegetarian meals, but I mean like chickpea or lentil curry and stuff like that. Fake/simulated/lab grown/artificial food is going to be a hard pass for me until it gets good enough to be indistinguishable from the real thing.

I'm a vegan and I try to be respectful to non-vegans and their choices but moral decisions implicitly contain moral judgements. If I think eating animals is wrong and you eat animals there is no way around me thinking that you are doing something wrong. I don't need to harangue you about it, which in any case is not at all effective as a method of persuasion, but usually I don't need to for people not to like it. I expect most of the anger towards vegans is because of that implicit (and to be fair in the case of some vegans explicit) moral judgement.

Opposition to an assertion--and make no mistake, it's purely an assertion--of moral superiority isn't anger. Reaction to haranguing born of that same assertion can be anger, but that's a different matter.

I think if the 'campaigning vegan' spent more time trying to espouse the virtues of reducing meat intake than the, frankly, bullying approach I often see, I suspect they'd have a larger impact on the issues they feel are important.

A statement like:

   "Have you thought of eating meat one day less per week?"

Followed by:

   "benefits the climate because..."

or:

    "Have you thought of buying your meat from <insert local farm with good animal welfare>"

followed by:

    "benefits the animal because..."

Is a lot more likely to have a positive impact over:

    "you're the same as a murderer"

Perhaps, just perhaps, the meatatarian would realise that the non-meaty food they have one day per week is pretty good, and worth expanding to more days. Even these small changes could have a positive impact on animal welfare and climate if enough of us did it.

People don't hate vegans. They hate preachy jerks. Hyper bacon eaters are just as annoying. Nobody wants to talk about your religion, no matter what it is.

serious question to consider it from the other side: if a/the holocaust was occurring in your country and people turned a blind eye to it, would you softly ask those propping it up to discontinue or would you be more empassioned about it? This is the view that some vegans have with respect to the current treatment of animals. Whether you choose to acknowledge it that way or not, I can completely understand why some people adopt "bullying" tactics, conciously or not, especially when some people palm them off as "hippies" or the like

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