“making the animal psychologically present, and acknowledged it’s suffering”
What do you mean by this, bc as written Im interpreting it as some sort of Catholic guilt thing but focused on guilt of eating animals.
(Genuinely curious)
@[email protected] can correct me if I’m off-base here, but I think what they’ve said can be simplified to “empathize with the animal.” Addressing land mammals like cows, goats, and pigs, which I think are a gateway for a lot of people, you start with the premise that the animal is sentient – capable of happiness, fear, suffering, anger, excitement, love – and work from there. (Just to clarify, I think that “pain” is where the buck really stops, but sentience is a good bridge.) I think most people will acknowledge that dogs are fully capable of all of these things, and that it’s wrong outside of very extenuating circumstances to hurt them (let alone for personal pleasure or gain). They have rich inner lives, they have fears, they have loves – they have a world, one that starts with them and ends with them.
Consider for a second that every person you’ll ever meet has their own inner world that you’ll never really know or fully understand. You can query them, sure, and humans have remarkable tools to communicate their worlds, but it’s ultimately somewhere you’ll never be. Wordlessly, though, I’m betting that you can assume those people have wants – to be safe, to be comfortable, to be happy, to be loved. Inside their world, what they want at a fundamental level is probably something like what you do. And I’m willing to bet that through empathy, you have some appreciation of and respect for that.
I fundamentally believe based both on the preponderance of the ever-expanding body of scientific evidence and on my own experiences interacting with animals that many of them have the same basic wants as we do too, and that these include animals like cows, goats, sheep, chickens, and pigs. I think a lot of people – myself previously included – simply fail to realize this because we’re raised not to, because it’s just alien enough, and because we have every incentive to keep feeling that way.
I think my first step into cutting out meat began with “if I were there in person, could I bring myself to kill this defenseless animal for food instead of just eating something else?” – because functionally I was doing the same thing by paying someone else to do it. And even as I began to process my feelings more and went from a typical omnivorous Western diet to pescetarian to vegetarian, I always found myself getting stuck on veganism. I was suddenly stuck back where I was when I was omnivorous, where in hindsight I was rationalizing my way out of empathy. I can’t remember when it was, but at some point, I found my way from the vegetarian subreddit onto the vegan one after people would show up there condemning the cheese recipes as cruel. I began to lurk there out of curiosity, and it was basically inevitable – unbeknownst to me – that I would stumble across the 2018 factory farming documentary Dominion. Setting aside some time one evening, I started it…
It took multiple sittings across multiple weeks because I almost couldn’t bear what I was seeing, and from that, something viscerally clicked inside of me: that we’re, on purpose, giving an animal a world, only to make it one where their life is spent like this. (NSFL) One where every waking moment, the world they want and deserve just the same as we do is broken, worn down, drawn further away, and dangled in front of them as something they’ll never have – stealing theirs for some ultimately superfluous part of our own. We’ve given them their one chance at life only to force them to spend it in agony. I realized at that point that the only arguments I ever made for myself that weren’t predicated on outright falsehoods – i.e. not I can’t be vegan; I would be less healthy vegan; they can’t process feelings; nothing I do will impact anything – could all be reduced to “might makes right”, and that to me was no way to live a life.
When people eat meat, they very intentionally do not imagine the animal it came from. They don’t imagine it being born, they don’t imagine it discovering the nature of life on Earth, they don’t imagine it suffering pain and fear at the hands of farmers, they don’t imagine the terror it must have experienced before it died, they don’t imagine the instinctive behaviours they longed to engage in but never had the opportunity. They don’t think about how the individual had the capacity to love, and indeed probably felt love for their mother if they were allowed to spend any time with her. The animal is kept psychologically absent from the meal.
I had this bullshit white boy cliche in my head that native americans spoke to the animal, and thanked them for their sacrifice. That they thought of the animal as an individual who had a life, who had interests, who existed. This is making the animal psychologically present at the time of consumption. I tried doing this. I tried consuming the animals with the idea of them at individuals, not as meat, in my mind. I found it intolerable, but knowing that, I could never go back. I became vegan.
Catholic guilt is about things you never did and have no responsibility for. Vegan guilt is for cruelty and violence that you personally committed and have a great deal of responsibility for. Carnism is the set of psychological defense mechanisms that allow people to commit cruelty and violence every day, and not feel moral responsibility for.
“making the animal psychologically present, and acknowledged it’s suffering” What do you mean by this, bc as written Im interpreting it as some sort of Catholic guilt thing but focused on guilt of eating animals. (Genuinely curious)
@[email protected] can correct me if I’m off-base here, but I think what they’ve said can be simplified to “empathize with the animal.” Addressing land mammals like cows, goats, and pigs, which I think are a gateway for a lot of people, you start with the premise that the animal is sentient – capable of happiness, fear, suffering, anger, excitement, love – and work from there. (Just to clarify, I think that “pain” is where the buck really stops, but sentience is a good bridge.) I think most people will acknowledge that dogs are fully capable of all of these things, and that it’s wrong outside of very extenuating circumstances to hurt them (let alone for personal pleasure or gain). They have rich inner lives, they have fears, they have loves – they have a world, one that starts with them and ends with them.
Consider for a second that every person you’ll ever meet has their own inner world that you’ll never really know or fully understand. You can query them, sure, and humans have remarkable tools to communicate their worlds, but it’s ultimately somewhere you’ll never be. Wordlessly, though, I’m betting that you can assume those people have wants – to be safe, to be comfortable, to be happy, to be loved. Inside their world, what they want at a fundamental level is probably something like what you do. And I’m willing to bet that through empathy, you have some appreciation of and respect for that.
I fundamentally believe based both on the preponderance of the ever-expanding body of scientific evidence and on my own experiences interacting with animals that many of them have the same basic wants as we do too, and that these include animals like cows, goats, sheep, chickens, and pigs. I think a lot of people – myself previously included – simply fail to realize this because we’re raised not to, because it’s just alien enough, and because we have every incentive to keep feeling that way.
I think my first step into cutting out meat began with “if I were there in person, could I bring myself to kill this defenseless animal for food instead of just eating something else?” – because functionally I was doing the same thing by paying someone else to do it. And even as I began to process my feelings more and went from a typical omnivorous Western diet to pescetarian to vegetarian, I always found myself getting stuck on veganism. I was suddenly stuck back where I was when I was omnivorous, where in hindsight I was rationalizing my way out of empathy. I can’t remember when it was, but at some point, I found my way from the vegetarian subreddit onto the vegan one after people would show up there condemning the cheese recipes as cruel. I began to lurk there out of curiosity, and it was basically inevitable – unbeknownst to me – that I would stumble across the 2018 factory farming documentary Dominion. Setting aside some time one evening, I started it…
It took multiple sittings across multiple weeks because I almost couldn’t bear what I was seeing, and from that, something viscerally clicked inside of me: that we’re, on purpose, giving an animal a world, only to make it one where their life is spent like this. (NSFL) One where every waking moment, the world they want and deserve just the same as we do is broken, worn down, drawn further away, and dangled in front of them as something they’ll never have – stealing theirs for some ultimately superfluous part of our own. We’ve given them their one chance at life only to force them to spend it in agony. I realized at that point that the only arguments I ever made for myself that weren’t predicated on outright falsehoods – i.e. not I can’t be vegan; I would be less healthy vegan; they can’t process feelings; nothing I do will impact anything – could all be reduced to “might makes right”, and that to me was no way to live a life.
Thank you!
When people eat meat, they very intentionally do not imagine the animal it came from. They don’t imagine it being born, they don’t imagine it discovering the nature of life on Earth, they don’t imagine it suffering pain and fear at the hands of farmers, they don’t imagine the terror it must have experienced before it died, they don’t imagine the instinctive behaviours they longed to engage in but never had the opportunity. They don’t think about how the individual had the capacity to love, and indeed probably felt love for their mother if they were allowed to spend any time with her. The animal is kept psychologically absent from the meal.
I had this bullshit white boy cliche in my head that native americans spoke to the animal, and thanked them for their sacrifice. That they thought of the animal as an individual who had a life, who had interests, who existed. This is making the animal psychologically present at the time of consumption. I tried doing this. I tried consuming the animals with the idea of them at individuals, not as meat, in my mind. I found it intolerable, but knowing that, I could never go back. I became vegan.
They’re delving into the religious side of it in the reply to you. It is exactly like self delivering catholic guilt.
Catholic guilt is about things you never did and have no responsibility for. Vegan guilt is for cruelty and violence that you personally committed and have a great deal of responsibility for. Carnism is the set of psychological defense mechanisms that allow people to commit cruelty and violence every day, and not feel moral responsibility for.