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Jensson

> Why is it relevant whether one can put a finger on the difference?

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.

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No, I pointed out the difference, which is obviously real. The reason for the difference is irrelevant.

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.

> An average American eats more than a hundred animals per year

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.

Yes it is actually hard to kill a chicken per day, which is why societies that have to grow and kill their own food don’t eat a chicken per day.

Only the hyper-industrialized meat producers get even close to that.

Where do you guys come up with this stuff? When I was a teen in Appalachia, I butchered dozens of chickens a day, by hand, during canning season.

I think you lost the thread. The claim was factory farming doesn’t change the volume of meat consumption and production, only the geographic location of it.

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.

I think you've lost track of the difference between other people and yourself. The words you're using seem to talk about how other people feel, but you're actually talking about how you feel and assuming that any difference between the two is rooted in ignorance.

> "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.

Go run the experiments!

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.

I'm sorry -- how expensive do you think chickens are? In fact, if everyone had them, they'd most likely be freely shared. You seem very out of touch with your own species.

Yet just very mysteriously… people don’t all have chickens, nor do they give them away for free… almost as if it’s not worth the time/money/space…

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