I had a similar conclusion decades ago; the difference was I wasted a decade or so when Max was alive arguing.
But thankfully, during the last few years of Max, I changed and realized these people don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their goddamn family.
People who eat meat from factory farms pretending that nothing is going to happen to them is clearly a form of infallibilism.
I am not talking about the tragedy of commons in terms of moral and ecological consequences but their diet makes them live a parochial life, what thoughts they can think, how to live a good life, how to make better decisions for themselves and their families.
Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste.
Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark “Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think,” surprise you?
Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.
- Richard Hamming
In other words their diet makes their thinking and life stuck in a small rut of quagmire from which they cannot escape to realize the beauty of life right in front of their noses. Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think - in the spectrum of bandwidth of thoughts humans can think probably becomes even much smaller with their dietary choices which causes immense suffering.
A much better payback happening here and now than some subjective future heaven and hell.
If someone is sad or suffering in your home; there is no way on earth you can jump around and pretend to have "fun". It is psychologically, morally, physically and mentally impossible to do so for normal human beings. But that's exactly what people are doing with this diet. So much suffering on their dinner plate they are inevitably becoming inhuman in their thinking.
So I simply wait for them to die while I keep breathing after Max to make our fellow beings suffering’s a little less.
I am not sure I am trying enough to make a change in this world. But I cannot keep breathing and not try; if one stops the other will automatically stop.
Thank you for writing this immensely powerful short piece:
Imagine that you found out that your friend raised his own chickens. One day, he invited you into his house and you saw how he treated them. Dozens of chickens were chained up in a cage too small to move, inhaling the feces of those above them. Those chickens, you learned, had been debeaked, meaning their beak had been sliced off with a hot knife, without anesthetic. This probably felt like having their nose cut off.
When his egg-laying hens produced a baby male chick, he would drop it into a shredder because it was useless. He’d force the pigs to give birth in a little concrete cell too small to turn around in, and would kill them by forcing them into a gas chamber. Over decades, he’d genetically engineered the chickens to be so large that they could barely move, and the full weight of their bloated bodies was thus constantly pressed against the metal of the cage. And sometimes, to produce more chickens, he’d hold the female chickens down and inject them with semen from male chickens.
It seems like he is doing something evil! He should stop. Probably you would not return to his house of horrors. More likely, you’d call the police.
But here’s a plausible principle: if it’s wrong to do something, then it’s wrong to pay other people to do it. Because it’s wrong to kill, it’s wrong to hire someone else to kill. Because it’s wrong to rob a bank, it’s wrong to hire someone else to rob a bank. So if it’s wrong to treat animals badly, it’s wrong to pay others to treat animals badly.
But that is what you do every time you purchase meat from a typical source. You pay for the product of months of torment and mutilation. Factory farms treat the animals on them every bit as badly as your friend in the above hypothetical. Every one of the practices I described is routine on the factory farms that house more than 99% of animals killed each year. So if it’s immoral to mistreat animals, then it’s also immoral to pay for others to mistreat animals. This would mean nearly all meat consumption is seriously immoral.
And note: nearly all the excuses that you give for your meat consumption could be given by your hypothetical friend. He could note that meat consumption is natural, lions eat meat, the animals wouldn’t have otherwise existed, and so on for all the excuses for meat eating. But no one would buy those excuses when employed by him. They’re no more successful when employed by you.
Most people, after reading this, will not go vegan. They will continue eating animal products, even if convinced by the moral argument, because they enjoy its taste. To such a person, I don’t have much to say, for while it’s easy to give arguments for the immorality of meat consumption, it is much harder to convince people to follow where the arguments lead.
All I can say is that if you continue eating meat after knowing how the animals are raised, then you will have to grapple with a legacy of knowingly supporting the shedding of innocent blood, of supporting gassing, torment, caging, and merciless carnage doled out on the innocent because you were too weak to stop doing what you knew to be wrong. If we one day appear before God and are asked to justify our actions, I wouldn’t want that to be my defense. At the very least offset.
In fact, I don’t think veganism is enough. We can spare thousands of animals from a torturous fate per dollar. We can make animals spend many fewer years in a cage with a single dollar. One who does nothing in the face of this holocaust will have to grapple with a legacy of inaction in the face of unspeakable atrocities; of ignoring the trillions of beings tortured, slaughtered, and dismembered because intervening would require trivial personal sacrifices. If there is a judgment day, I wouldn’t want that to be my defense. Doing something about the population vastly larger than the entire human race being kept in nightmare torture facilities strikes me as a bare minimum.
My fellow beings, my larger family, although we share this blue planet together as our home, I am so sorry that I am not able to stop your suffering. I am trying...
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