Draven wrote:One word, however: rice. I don't think Westerners can truly comprehend this
Do you really think so? You're talking to a Western whose in-laws love to do nothing but buy rice, make rice, eat rice, and shit rice.
"It's only animals." and "It has always been like this."
It's only animals and it always has been like this. Other animals do this as well and, yes, I am including humans as animals.
As for me. I don't buy a lot of meat. Just a serving once per week, so this is almost a moot point for me. I don't really buy eggs weekly either and my cooking hardly needs any. I don't go buy fast-food often (just once or twice per month). But I spend $40 per week on food, so it's too much for me to get "ethical" with meat or you'd be asking me to pay twice the amount I pay per week to do so. I'm a low-budget student. You're talking to a guy who lives with a luxury of just an internet and a roof over my head. No TV. No car. I don't go out often. I hate McD, KFC, etc. and I don't see a point of having those.
So I feel happy enough with my life and my eating habits and I have more worries than whatever the first poster is showing in the youtube videos. Didn't watch them because I know what they're going to have. ^^
My point was that slaughtering is unethical in itself.
My teacher told me that they shoot a nail in the cow's head and it dies in a snap. I don't see that being unethical. It's a painless death and most humans don't have that chance when they near their end.
Well, I think of modern humans as sort of like "the animal that broke evolution". Before the rise of civilization, animals had all been part of relatively balanced ecosystems, living in wilderness conditions. But when given the chance, humans - unlike any other animal - were able to develop technology that removed them from the environment and allowed for tremendous exploitation and destruction of the planet. It's as if nature had a pretty good formula for making non-sapient animals, but then when we came around, nature was completely unable to deal with us. So in that sense you could say that it's nature's fault.
You said it so beautifully.
Why do we have to eat eggs at all?
Good source of protein and we don't have to kill chickens for that. If you buy free-range chickens who just die from natural causes, then there you go...eggs are good.