Nah, these are the same folks that have never watched earthlings.
If we made it so before one could eat meat of the animal, it had to personally kill and watch the animal die, we’d eat less meat.
It should be a requirement
If we made it so before one could eat meat of the animal, it had to personally kill and watch the animal die, we’d eat less meat.
It should be a requirement
People tend to seek the feeling of blamelessness when they should seek the condition of blamelessness. Often doing the right thing will make a person feel guiltier than doing the wrong one.
If anybody has even the smallest negative thought to eating meat these days, the very first internet search they do will bombard them with pictures of slaughter houses in the most negative light and animal abuse pictures. If that doesn't stop them eating meat itself, very few are going to be turned by a legit farming and slaughter practises.
My sister is vegan and it wasn't our slaughtering of animals that pushed her away from eating meat, it was the internet showing the worst of large corporate practises. For a long while she merely didn't eat corporate meat and only local or home grown or hunted meat.
I do like what they did for example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/world/europe/norway-schoo...
My wife grew up in a country where people would still personally slaughter pigs to roast at major holidays. Didn’t keep her or any of her family from eating meat.
People who kill animals themselves regularly are probably subsistence farmers who consider meat a luxury, and what's more, the way they killed them was probably nothing like the incredibly high volume processing that goes on in a modern slaughterhouse.
I definitely think that if most people had to visit a modern factory farm and see the life cycle of one of these animals, kill it and process it, they would probably be shocked at what is legal.
This statement is thrown around a lot, but it doesn't really check out. Per-capita meat consumption in most of the west is only around 66kg/year (increasing to 100-120kg/year for meat-heavy countries like Spain, Argentina, and the USA).
That's about one pig and a handful of birds - even many peasant populations could afford to raise that much meat each year. The well-off were consuming massively more meat that this throughout history. Not to mention the incredible quantities of fish consumed by coastal populations.
Records from Durham and Westminster cathedrals suggest monks were eating in excess of 400kg/year of meat and fish. Records from Italy in a similar period show labourers and even widows receiving in excess of 80kg/year of meat. And so on...
So the number of dead animals per year needed to sustain a typical human is much greater.
For example someone who is a much more moderate meat eater than most, might eat at least half of their protein intake from vegetables, with the remainder from healthy chicken breast meat, eating around 1 kg of raw chicken breast per week, i.e. from 2 dead chicken.
That means 100 dead chicken per human per year, though it is likely that other less choosy humans would eat the thighs and a few other parts, so the 100 chicken would actually sustain between 2 and 3 humans for a year.
That is not a "handful" of birds.
It sadly doesn't go back further than the 1960s. If you select Western Europe, the number seems to be falling (back from almost 100kg, though). USA, not so much.
Note though that for what your parent describes, you'd want numbers to go even further back, then you could likely see the whole effect of post-WW2 boom; though WW2 itself would obviously also extremely skew the data in the 40s.
I feel like I eat quite a lot of meat. And even I find that number rather suspect. Over a kilo a day? They did also do labour, but still that sounds extremely high even for pure carnivore diet of today... Or then there is some sort of significant waste.
...There's an argument to be made that the average modern human is too cowardly to be capable of butchering their own meat.
Is that true? ...Unfortunately, there's a non-zero proportion of people that will fit that mold. But I hope that it isn't the case for at least 90% of the population.
> It was found that [slaughterhouse workers] have a higher prevalence rate of mental health issues, in particular depression and anxiety, in addition to violence-supportive attitudes. Furthermore, the workers employ a variety of both adaptive and maladaptive strategies to cope with the workplace environment and associated stressors. Finally, there is some evidence that slaughterhouse work is associated with increased crime levels. The research reviewed has shown a link between slaughterhouse work and antisocial behavior generally and sexual offending specifically.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380211030...