I mean, you are paying someone else to do those things for you.
That’s not exactly what’s going on. I believe a more apt way to describe it would be paying somebody that has harmed animals. This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but I don’t believe it is. Whether I buy pork at a grocery store or not, they aren’t going to kill any fewer pigs because of it. It’s not like the slaughterhouse is going to butcher exactly one less pig because I stopped buying meat. If I decide not to buy pork chop the next time I go to a store, either somebody else buys the pork, it’s donated to a food bank right before expiry, or it’s just thrown away. The pig is already dead, and the meat goes somewhere regardless.
Unless you’re the type of person that eats meat every day, there is very little change you can make at an individual level. Of course, much like voting, change starts to happen once you get a lot of people to make that individual choice. Get 20 people to stop buying pork, and the store might order less. But at that point, I would argue it is far more of a societal issue. So while we are directly responsible for what happens to farm animals, I don’t think it’s at the level of us literally killing them ourselves.
Pardon me for fighting you on this, but I believe you are incorrect. You’re abdicating your responsibility, in assuming that those animals will always be killed.
Put it this way. If you lived next to a chicken farm, and drove over there any time you needed a chicken, and watched them kill it for you, would you have any qualms about saying it was killed for you? Why does having it go through a grocery store first somehow change this? However you get your meat, those animals were still killed for your benefit.
The average American eats about 250 pounds of meat in a year. That’s a bit over half a cow, or about one and a half pigs, or somewhere north of a hundred chickens. That’s the butcher’s bill, directly attributable to the average American. So to take your own words - yes, if you stop eating meat, exactly one pig will not be killed every year. Around one and half, actually.
That’s not exactly what’s going on. I believe a more apt way to describe it would be paying somebody that has harmed animals. This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but I don’t believe it is. Whether I buy pork at a grocery store or not, they aren’t going to kill any fewer pigs because of it. It’s not like the slaughterhouse is going to butcher exactly one less pig because I stopped buying meat. If I decide not to buy pork chop the next time I go to a store, either somebody else buys the pork, it’s donated to a food bank right before expiry, or it’s just thrown away. The pig is already dead, and the meat goes somewhere regardless.
Unless you’re the type of person that eats meat every day, there is very little change you can make at an individual level. Of course, much like voting, change starts to happen once you get a lot of people to make that individual choice. Get 20 people to stop buying pork, and the store might order less. But at that point, I would argue it is far more of a societal issue. So while we are directly responsible for what happens to farm animals, I don’t think it’s at the level of us literally killing them ourselves.
Pardon me for fighting you on this, but I believe you are incorrect. You’re abdicating your responsibility, in assuming that those animals will always be killed.
Put it this way. If you lived next to a chicken farm, and drove over there any time you needed a chicken, and watched them kill it for you, would you have any qualms about saying it was killed for you? Why does having it go through a grocery store first somehow change this? However you get your meat, those animals were still killed for your benefit.
The average American eats about 250 pounds of meat in a year. That’s a bit over half a cow, or about one and a half pigs, or somewhere north of a hundred chickens. That’s the butcher’s bill, directly attributable to the average American. So to take your own words - yes, if you stop eating meat, exactly one pig will not be killed every year. Around one and half, actually.