JayMark said:
I understand. I don't think it's "fun" to kill animals per se, but I think it is completely natural and that it is how it works in this 3D STS environment. STS feed from other lifeforms - period. We feed on animals/plants, lizzies feed on us. We are part of the food chain just like everything else. Thinking that we are on top of it is a very dangerous assumption, osit. One of the best way to become a free lunch. Just like animals don't know they are being raised to be eaten, the vast majority of humans don't know they are as well. Same concept, different realms.
I understand. I remember twenty-five years ago when a very wise friend of mine, who died much too young, said we were all being farmed. It was the first time I had heard and/or thought about that kind of concept.
I will take exception with your premise that animals do not know they are being raised for food. I think some of them do and I have some friends in my farming community who agree. One friend in particular, a man who builds barns, told me about a conversation he had with a very fat pig and how the pig told him he knew he was going to be food and he/the pig was okay with it.
I am not okay with is how we raise our food. The pig above was living quite well on a family farm that cared for him well, maybe even respected him for his 'service' but in the end, he was still sent to a slaughter house where he was terrified and experienced pain. He may have been one of the luckier ones that went to a smaller killing factory but regardless he was still scared and bled out with others of his kind bleeding out in fear around him. I understand it is "natural" for their to be fear at death but there is nothing natural about a slaughter house.
The "unlucky" pigs on factory farms can't turn around their entire lives, they are beaten on the head with metal pipes for "fun", day old piglets are thrown up against the factory walls in kill the piglet worker amusement games, they have their ears ripped off by sadistic workers, the list of cruelties is endless and much of this goes on in North Carolina where I have a home, so I am very aware of these atrocities, atrocities that ARE the rule not the exception on factory farms.
I really have come full circle in my intellectual understanding of what is optimal for the health of our species and I have committed to it with my own personal practices, something I never thought I would do. It took me more than twenty-five years to get where I am and I know we have to eat animals but our planet can not support the demand that five billion people have for ethically raised meat and that is a great concern for me.
JayMark said:
The point is that we have to take out life in order to survive and so do animals. So who are we to decide that killing animals is bad while killing plants is ok? Who are we to determine which form of life is more valuable that another?
I don't think killing plants is okay. I loathe hurting trees or plants, although, walking on grass brings me much joy. I don't value one life more than the other, at least intellectually, and I am certainly aware that there are many levels of awareness that we don't have immediate access to, so plants may very well be screaming when they are killed, but the mother cow will certainly defend her baby if she sees you are a threat and that baby will bleed and SCREAM so you
can hear it if you stab it and, with those facts alone, for me, we owe it to them/animals to give them the most ethical, natural life and the most painless death possible.
JayMark said:
Note that this is just a general reflection on the matter.
Noted. ;)
JayMark said:
Peace to you and all.