Comment by whycome
2 days ago
It’s not the egg industry that will lose out if more people have backyard hens. It’s the poultry industry and the eating general. More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.
People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them.
Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.
It makes sense to me. If you grow up seeing animals slaughtered on the regular you probably won't think much of it, especially when the adults around you treat it as completely normal. You grow up in an environment where you might think meat comes from the magic meat factory, when you see an animal slaughtered for the first time it's likely to be shocking enough to turn a lot of people away.
I grew up buying meat and never seeing farms. About 7 years ago, I helped my sister/BIL raise a flock from hatchling to food. We did everything.
Having actually slaughtered and butchered chickens I raised, I'd rather raise my own. I know the chickens I raised had a better life and death than factory farmed chickens.
Put another way: If 99% of the animals you see on a day to day basis are pets and not livestock, it's hard to not think of all animals as potential pets instead of resources.
Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life. The constant meat eater trolling about how its natural to eat meat and animals do it, ignore the fact that its not natural to keep animals in pens where they cant turn around for their entire life that is basically pure torture from birth to death.
If all meat was produced the way it was farmed 100 years ago, youd see way less vegans.
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Very true. Just like when slaves were commonplace, it was 'normalised' and many people just turned a blind eye.
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Surely this is more a case that it used to be much harder to be vegetarian and almost impossible to be vegan! Now we actually have a clear choice given the development and availability of so many other foods and supplements. Hence for me to value my enjoyment of foods above the life of another animal seems pretty harsh at best.
Even chicken eggs really are not cruelty free - if you truly love animals, you would stop eating all animal products imo. Otherwise you are simply lying to yourself.
Converse opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k
> it used to be much harder to be vegetarian
Millions of Indian people have been vegetarian for hundreds (if not thousands) of years now. I guess there are manufactured meat replacements now, but I prefer to just eat things like legumes over factory made vegan food.
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Thousands of nations, billions of people. If only they knew the gnostic truth you hold in your breath...
To be fair, food was very difficult to come upon historically. Killing an animal and not eating it was equivalent to burning money for fun.
Vegetarianism (voluntary) didn't become more than an edge case until food was heavily commoditized and readily available.
This rings more true for me. Food simply used to be a lot more expensive.
"Between 1960 and 2000, the average share of Americans’ disposable personal income (DPI) spent on food fell from 17.0 percent to 9.9 percent." [1]
I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
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When you’re hungry, you tend to care less about deep ethical questions and more about being fed. There’s the old trope about wealth and food:
Poor people ask if you got enough to eat. Middle class people ask if it tasted good. Wealthy people ask if it looked good.
Which correspond to points on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I think we can use that framework to understand where vegetarianism and veganism fit in. You might say that they are either related to personal feelings of being ethical or status symbols, or both.
This is about when people starting realizing such farms are contributing to planetary environmental harm.
Also, as gruesome as a backyard slaughter might seem, it's nothing compared to the industrial equivalent.
People also have been publicly maiming and killing other people for vengeance and entertainment for millennia. Morality really does evolve. That includes animals as well.
But unless you were nobility, meat wasn't available at every meal, or even every day. It cost too much. Meat for most people was a special occasion kind of thing.
Ever notice how the English words for animals have Germanic roots but the words for their meats have French roots?
Chicken -> poultry
Cow -> beef
Pig -> pork
That's because the peasantry, the ones raising the animals, spoke Old English, and the nobility, the ones eating the meat, spoke French.
I always wondered about that. I thought it was just for euphemistic purposes to create more separation between the food we eat and the animal that it came from.
> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms
As did dental care and cars. Correlation is not causation.
> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms
A classic case of mixing up correlation with causation?
It didn't stop me and my family. (Chicken katsu is still one of my favorites dishes.) To be sure, we did not eat our own chickens (just their eggs). Somehow we were able to still mentally distance ourselves from ours and "the others".
I was living in San Jose in a dense suburban neighborhood. It became legal to have backyard chickens so I jumped at getting three chickens. (We had three young daughters, see.)
One mysteriously died. Of the remaining two, the bossy one decided she was a rooster and started crowing, of a sort, in the morning hours.
So we had one asshole neighbor complain and I was obliged to send them off to live with a friend who had some property in the Santa Cruz mountains. Sad. And afterward, neighbors strolling by said they missed the chicken sounds in the neighborhood.
I'll spare you the unfortunate ends for the two. I'll say the Santa Cruz mountains represent more predators and require someone with a little more responsibility than my friend showed. (I don't blame him. It was really my fault — having more or less dumped them on him.)
Everything loves a chicken dinner. Unless you live in a city where the predator population has already been driven out, you are faced with the decision to either let them free roam (and accept a small but steady rate of predation) or keep them penned when not under direct supervision. There's not a third option.
We had racoons, skunks, and foxes paying nightly visits. Occasionally one would find a way into the coop and there would be a massive kill off. We got a dog, and just the scent of the dog around the coop has been enough to eliminate the skunks and racoons anyway. The fox still does come by from time to time. We had to put a net over the roof of the coop because of hawks.
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Some sort of goat maybe?
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I have grown up with chickens through out my childhood and I strongly disagree with that take. If anything, it makes it more reasonable to eat chicken given that backyard hens are more sustainable and more natural than processed food bought in the store. Chickens reproduce at a very fast pace, and it is not like one is going to eat the oldest and nicest ones.
It does however makes factory farmed animals much less fun to eat, both in term of taste and the knowledge of how much better backyard hens has it. It is like buying clothes manufactured from countries with less-than-stellar working environment.
Some people get used to it. We did some work to prepare our barn for chickens but never quite 'pulled the trigger' because between our tenants and other friends we are swimming in eggs. (It was funny as hell that some of our chicken-keeping friends had a fox family living in a stump in front of their house. Their chicken house was solid but they'd catch the mama fox on the game camera every night bringing home a chicken from somebody else's flock every night.)
Our favorite meat lately has been roadkill deer. Two days ago a friend was traveling to a job site up route 89 on the side of the lake when they hit a deer. He called us on his cell but we didn't want to drive that far that day. The next day my wife was planning to drive out in that direction to help a friend, the friend welched out but she went to see if the deer was still there, it was, so she loaded it into the back of our Honda Fit and I was told, when she picked me up at the bus stop, to stash all my stuff with me in the passenger seat.
Turned out the intestines didn't splatter, it was cold, and there wasn't serious tissue damage from the crash so we're going to get a huge amount of meat out of it. Between roadkill deer and deer my son hunts and deer other people hunt on our land we might need to get a bigger freezer.
I know a guy who does similar. He gives the messed up parts that got damaged to his dog.
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My aunt names all her chickens. She will also grab one and twist its head of with her bare hands while carrying on a casual conversation with you.
I’m from a rural area. I have formative memories of raising caring for and slaughtering animals. Hunting and fishing, literally put food on the table. I don’t remember anyone complaining that the chicken in the gumbo came from the yard.
I told the kids not to name the roosters, but we eat them regardless. Once again, humans excel at holding contradictory thoughts.
The only reason we don't eat dogs or cats is because they don't taste good. Predators don't make for good eating. They have to work too hard physically for their food. It makes their meat tough.
That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.
Speak for yourself. I would never eat a cat or dog because to me they are pets, and I would feel terrible doing it.
Whatever they taste like is very very secondary to that.
I’m speaking as a human looking at the historical context of eating animals. Predators taste terrible because they are high effort, low reward in terms of nutritional value.
I am absolutely not advocating that we start eating pets. I would feel terrible about it too. And if I have an option, besides starving to death, I would take it.
The other reason why predators have become pets is because they had a strong additive value in terms of hunting or protection. Dogs in term protection, and hunting and cats in terms of pest control. Groups with these kind of pets tended to fair better.
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I don’t know, farmers always had dogs on the farm but they didn’t eat them and continued to eat the chickens. Chicken is really great and succulent. Hard to resist frying one of them up and sucking the meat off the bone. Absolutely no desire to do that with a dog.
Almost no culture routinely eats meat-eating animals. It is very easy to determine, even in ancient times, that it is incredibly easy to get sick from eating meat-eating animals. This is because predators often catch and eat diseased prey, and end up having a lot of parasites and such.
Not to mention the meat of such animals tastes much worse.
Yeah plus the whole they eat things I can't and turn it into something I can eat.
Dogs are hard to keep for meat at any scale. We only eat easy animals. Sympathy has very little to do with it.
I say the smartest hunters are the farmers.
I read about these Hawaiians that would use stones to wall in an area of water but leave gaps big enough to let smaller fish in. They’d create an environment that was safe (appeared so to the fish) and provide food. This would keep most of them reliably inside the wall. Eventually the fish mature and can’t escape due to their size. And now you have ocean fish that are easy to harvest.
> More people will start to find...
...that roosters are total assholes.
There's room for exactly one in the flock, and I have no emotional difficulty turning the rest into stew. The "chickens are cute" narrative only works in a carefully curated frame.
> More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.
Why do you think that people abjuring consumption of emotionally observable animals is more likely that the opposite: growing an acceptance of eating other sentient beings as part of the cycle of life?
Have chickens and they are dumber than fish. Have no qualms about eating them.
Considering the bizarro world we're now living it, I wouldn't put it beyond us for it to go the other way.
If people realise they are still comfortable eating intelligent emotional animals like chickens, the dogs and cats of this world should watch their backs!
The only reason we don't eat dogs or cats is because they don't taste good. Predators don't make for good eating.
That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.
Given people grew animals for eating for centuries and generally were more cruel to them then we are , I doubt.
> and generally were more cruel to them then we are
Strongly disagree with this part of your statement. The scale of suffering from industrial animal processing far exceeds anything from past centuries. The one-on-one cruelty of past centuries exists today as well (there are plenty of hidden camera videos to that effect), but what's really different is that now we treat animals as if they are mere inputs to industrial processes, as if they have no feelings or emotions or capacity for suffering.
In past centuries, chickens roamed free, sheep and cattle grazed on fields, etc. It was an idyllic experience compared to today's factory farm hellscape.
That's so keenly true I wonder how we've ended up with a society where it's not only non-obvious, but even dubious, to such a significant percentage of people.
There's not really any human analogue to industrial meat factories, except maybe like Nazi concentration camps, or ... I mean really only that, right? Maybe something Genghis Khan did might occupy that same space.
Like Eazy-E famously said, it's not how you die, it's how the moments from your birth, all the way through to the end of your life in this world, add up. Do you get a positive number?
Chicken/horse born on a ranch? Yeah.
Chicken/horse/cow born in a concrete meat factory? I mean, I don't think so...
We are orders of magnitude more cruel to factory farmed animals than farming at any other point in history.
Those people were a lot more desperate for food than we were too, though.
Wait until we find out how intelligent broccoli is.
I don't eat sunflower-seeds, as sunflowers murder one another by throwing shade.