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I beg to differ. The spite I feel towards vegans improves the pleasure from eating meat. Also the suffering is a bulwark against becoming like that girl featured here recently, who had turned her apartment into a breeding colony for pest insects.
Maybe I’m just squeamish but I didn’t find my visit to a slaughterhouse to be very pleasant (though the actual farmers I was with thought it was nasty business too).
The suffering of the worker in doing an extremely bloody and dirty job is something I don’t think we’d lose much in getting rid of, there’s no self-reliance or virtue of the hunt in a series of bolt gun shots.
I once again find the solution to be localizing the matter. There is something that is vaguely grotesque about industrial-scale slaughter, even for those of us that don't find anything morally objectionable about. Nonetheless, I know farmers and butchers, and they aren't particularly bothered by their work, and I think it's precisely because they're sufficiently close to it and doing it on a sufficiently small-scale that they're confident that the animals were humanely raised and slaughtered. Yeah, it's quite literally bloody and grisly work, but no worse than the same operation conducted on a deer that you've shot and killed. I wouldn't go so far as saying that I like gutting and skinning an animal, but you get on with it and it's not that big of a deal. I've done worse to mice as a research scientist, I did feel bad about that, and the marginal number of ruminants required to feed a family is a hell of a lot lower than the number of cute fuzzy animals necessary to do immunology.
Well, industrial scale makes it vastly more efficient. That's the perverse thing.
Some ag scientist once got fired, or into hot water for saying "cows eat grass" because.. it's no longer entirely true. A lot of them are fed other stuff, namely, and they don't take too well to it.
Pasturing them on grass which is the humane way requires either engineering better grass or would increase cost by a fair bit. Americans could afford it, eastern Europe or such places, half of the people who eat beef couldn't eat it anymore.
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If vegans were nicer to you, would this reduce your happiness on account of feeling less spite towards vegans and therefore enjoying meat less? If I'm extra douchey to you, will this increase your happiness on net, on account of you getting more out of your next burger?
I'm 90% sure you're 50/50 [being facetious] / [saying this because it gives you that same warm spiteful feeling you describe.] But I'm sure you'd find other culture wars to get your warm fuzzies from if this one went the way of the dodo.
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Shame about those dodos... historical accounts imply that they would have made for excellent farm animals and/or pets.
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