Painless Meat. Because simply switching to a vegetarian diet would be such a hardship.
The most sensible comment:
My father, a very mainstream occupational physician, worked on contract for a number of years at a poultry processing plant providing in-factory medical care. Shortly after he started working there, he completely gave up all factory-farmed meat. I suspect if many of us looked closely at where it comes from, we would change our meat consumption patterns. I am not a vegetarian or a vegan, but I certainly believe they have some very excellent points in the debate.
Vegetarians are well aware of the fact that animals on smaller, family-owned farms may well be living decent lives, in the best of cases. It’s the self-interested, philosophical-midget carnivores, who think they’re doing the animals a favor by allowing them to exist at all, who don’t bother to distinguish between factory-farmed meat and free-range … as if a life spent in constant discomfort, with no ability whatsoever to pursue “the other good things [they] enjoy,” was better than one never lived at all.
Lest you forget: My own mother owned/inherited a family chicken farm in southern Manitoba prior to getting married in the ’60s—and even there, the animals spent their entire adult lives in cages. A standard way for guys in high school to make some pocket money was to do “chicken-catching” for other local farmers, i.e., pulling the birds out of the cages by their feet and moving them manually into cages on a transport truck, on their way to the slaughterhouse. I’ve personally watched free-range chickens get their heads hatcheted off in late autumn, and myself plucked the feathers from their bodies after dunking them in scalding water … and then eviscerated them with my bare hands. It’s pretty disgusting, especially the smell of entrails in the cold air. But hey, that’s where our chicken dinners came from.
So, as usual, I’ve done “research” which the “manly,” red-meat-eating dopes in the Steveosphere (etc.) haven’t even dreamed of doing, before coming to my (e.g., animal-rights related) conclusions. Or do you think posturing idiots like Audacious Epigone and Dennis Mangan have any real comprehension of where their high-fat dinners come from?
(For those interested in learning about the details of how animals are treated on factory farms, John Robbins provided many details in Part One of his Diet for a New America.)
