With all my vegan bloggings lately, I’ve been wading through a lot of content that assumes that free-range meat is better. As I mentioned in a previous post I feel like environmentally it’s probably worse but that is not my topic for today. This time, I just want to point out that if you are keeping someone in domesticity for the purpose of making a profit, especially if your plan is to ultimately sell that someone to be slaughtered for meat, you are not being kind. This is in response to videos like this:
…in which people argue that it’s fine to keep livestock because they’re supposedly not actually suffering. And sure, some farmers seem to on some level care emotionally about their animals. For example, a video that primed me for veganism was this one:
The farmer seemed to care about his cows’ wellbeing. But they still were there to make him a profit. He wasn’t just keeping them because he wanted a relationship with them, the way people keep pets, and he wasn’t keeping them to propagate their species, as is the case with good zoos and captive breeding programs. In the end, the cows were his slaves. And throughout human history, some slaveowners have been better to their slaves than others. This does not mean that slavery has ever been okay.
So I’m going to need you to stick with me for a second because I’m going to make a point that might make you think “oh wow I see why she’s a mental patient.” But here we go:
Imagine for a second that a more sophisticated species arrived on earth, and we were no longer the most advanced. Imagine we could talk to them, and they asked us why they shouldn’t keep us on farms and raise us for meat. What would we want to be able to say? Wouldn’t we want to be able to ask them to treat us kindly because we had always treated “lower” species kindly?
It shouldn’t take an alien invasion to convince us to be kind. And if we wouldn’t want to be free-range meat, we shouldn’t treat others that way.
References
Joey Carbstrong. (2018, June 1). Dairy Farmer DESTROYS Vegan Activist! [YouTube video]. Retrieved October 29, 2022 from https://youtu.be/ulsQpeEUxx0
Our Wyoming Life. (2022, March 9). A Life or Death Cow Emergency [YouTube video]. Retrieved October 29, 2022 from https://youtu.be/KJ_oFQTpwRk
WIRED. (2019, July 24). Astronomer Jill Tarter Answers Alien Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED [YouTube video]. Retrieved October 29, 2022 from https://youtu.be/PoL4IlCXDsM
