But why would they be more disturbing than watching a person slaughtering and cutting up an animal? You didn't answer the question, you just said that one was disturbing, not why one was more disturbing than the other.
Anyway my theory for the distinction is 1) the scale of suffering is obviously far far greater than family-scale slaughter and 2) the way in which we do factory farming reflects poorly on us as a species.
If people had to see their livestock suffer, they would make a different calculation of how much meat to eat and how to handle that animal while it’s alive. As someone else mentioned, this isn’t some crazy avant garde hypothesis: this is exactly why mass meat producers don’t want people filming their operations.
The prior argument that “people always killed animals!” is irrelevant. They certainly did not kill animals the way we do today and again, this is evidenced in the belief systems that emerged during times where people couldn’t afford to be hundreds of miles removed from the production of their food.
You brought this up, not me.
> 1) the scale of suffering is obviously far far greater than family-scale slaughter
Not if every family has to slaughter their own meat, the scale is the same just distributed so you don't see it.
> 2) the way in which we do factory farming reflects poorly on us as a species
This isn't inherent to factory farming though, just the ways it is done in some places. And this goes for family farming as well, some families would put animals in small cages and not take care of them to save money and because they are lazy. If you filmed them and their animals I don't think people would feel any different.
Uhhh no, the scale certainly wouldn’t be the same. An average American eats more than a hundred animals per year. You can’t seriously think people would be consuming at that rate, or could even afford to consume at that rate, without factory farming.
> some families [abuse their animals]… people wouldn’t feel any different
We literally put people in jail for abusing their animals, so yes, they actually do feel differently about it.
Most of that are chickens. Have you seen a family farm where people eat their chickens? They just take one and behead it, killing it takes no effort and is just a part of preparing the food no different than peeling the vegetables. Killing a chicken a day per family is very little work.
> We literally put people in jail for abusing their animals, so yes, they actually do feel differently about it.
Those laws also applies to factory farms, unless you do worse than them you are fine.
Only the hyper-industrialized meat producers get even close to that.
It is economically not viable for every American family to produce and kill their own 2lb of (currently, on average) consumed meat per day. That is why we have factory farming and why it dominates our food supply: economies of scale. The lack of these economies is why you objectively and in actual fact do not see the same scale of meat consumption in less industrialized food systems.
It has nothing to do with whether it’s physically or psychologically possible to kill x chickens per day.
> "your kids’ reaction"
Maybe this should be "my reaction as a kid", since you don't know that person's kids.
> "The emotions one feels"
Should be "the emotions I feel"
> "If people had to see their livestock suffer, they would make a different calculation"
Should probably be "seeing it changed how I feel".
People are more than the sum of our experiences, two people raised in the same environment with the same kind of experiences can have completely divergent values. Therefore it's wrong to assume that people would share your values if they had your experiences. In the case of meat eating particularly this should be obvious; the reality is that most people exposed to the industry, either for the first time as adults or as kids, don't turn vegetarian.
I’m putting my bet on what those experiments would show, which is people’s consumption patterns would be adversely impacted by more in-depth knowledge of the food supply chain.
This is also where meat producers place their bets and why they fight tooth and nail against transparency within their industry.