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[John Sandoval]

2. Through democratic means.

something like this has happened before, during the prohibition of the 1920s

except instead of meat, it was alcohol

needless to say, it was a failure

:<

[Dacke]

Something similar happened in USA in during the abolition period in the 1700s/1800s. It worked out fairly good, even if many problems still remain. It's a long road, but if enough people get properly educated about the suffering of others and alternative food sources, I think can work good in the long run.

[TheLastBanana]

Banning meat altogether sounds like just a wee bit of an overreaction. There are other ways of solving these problems (e.g. regulating how animals are treated), and that would cause massive starvation issues unless there was a way to feasibly make up for the lack of meat.
Anyway, as C.A. Sinclair said, this is probably the wrong place for this. If you want to start a topic elsewhere we could certainly continue discussing this.

[BlueSweatshirt]

@Sinclair

Feel like making a split?

@Matter at hand

Government strong-handing or whatnot is generally a pretty undesirable way of taking care of these issues. If people want something they will seek it out. Back to the prohibition era, a huge black market arose because people were still crazy for alcohol.
If you want to actually solve this issue you need to make people stop wanting meat. Economies are driven by demand, not by supply. If people no longer buy meat then slaughterhouses will go out of business. In fact, it doesn't even require "everyone". You need only drive away a certain slice of their business until they're forced to downsize. When they do that their supply will go down and their prices will go up. People will be continually less inclined to buy meat due to the downward momentum gained, presumably. This along with social reform movements encouraging people to give up meat, of course.

I strongly doubt that in a place like the US, though, that it'll be possible to ween many people away from meat. We're an extremely meat-centric country, particularly with cows. Not that it's not worth trying, but I believe most americans are simply far too stubborn to want to change their diet after being raised on it.

[C.A. Sinner]

@Sinclair

Feel like making a split?

i guess

[TheLastBanana]

If you want to actually solve this issue you need to make people stop wanting meat. Economies are driven by demand, not by supply. If people no longer buy meat then slaughterhouses will go out of business. In fact, it doesn't even require "everyone". You need only drive away a certain slice of their business until they're forced to downsize. When they do that their supply will go down and their prices will go up. People will be continually less inclined to buy meat due to the downward momentum gained, presumably. This along with social reform movements encouraging people to give up meat, of course.

There are massive problems with this approach, too. As it is, there isn't enough food worldwide, and the economy is in a pretty crappy state. By completely cutting meat out of people's diets, you would pretty much assuredly be guaranteeing more deaths by starvation in countries where they don't get the choice of whether they want to be humane, and you'd also be removing a significant portion of many countries' exports, not to mention restaurants and the slaughterers themselves. This isn't entirely a problem of "meat is bad, people are too stupid to eat other things."

[BlueSweatshirt]

Yeah, totally. Any abrupt change in an economy(especially its food supply) tends to have massive consequences.
So naturally the only desirable way would be to phase it out slowly over time. However that is quite difficult. One possibly viable method would be to incentivize farmers to convert their dying livestock farms into plantations, however that of course also comes with a host of other concerns, the least of which being the fertility of the soil in question and the suitability of the climate for farming. Advances in farming technology could also help cope with this issues, such as the aforementioned prospect of vertical farming. However, relying on such things when they're mostly conceptual is pretty much a gamble.

I'm just trying to spitball ways that it could be viable, whether people "should" do it or not is beyond me.

[Blademasterbobo]

Dacke, thoughts on animal testing?

[TheLastBanana]

It seems like incentivizing people into converting every single livestock farm into a plantation is just about equally feasible to, if not less feasible than, encouraging companies to treat their animals more humanely, no?

[allen]

With the risk of being that guy, I feel I must point out that one guy choking a dog is a very small thing compared to what billions of farm animals and fishes are subjected to every day. If you aren't vegan, you are almost guaranteed to cause more animals to suffer much worse. It is sound and human to react strongly to the suffering of a single individual, but I just wish that people could see the bigger picture at times. Here is a video of chickens being ground to death while conscious, in a normal chicken hatchery.

dum. dogs have souls, chickens don't. so who gives a fuck about a chicken. no soul plus they taste good? kill them all who cares.

[Radix]

I was reading Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man recently. It's pretty cool; the character is an everyman with a family who takes up superheroing again pretty much just to pay the bills. He's kind of a lame hero, at least at first, so it's an unusual take written by a great author. This version of Animal Man becomes an animal rights activist (although in his case it's not just out of infantile animism or pathological anthropomorphism; it's because he can literally feel the pain of all animals), but it's not really preachy and it's used mainly to make him an offbeat hero with a different focus, and to dredge up some forgotten african-themed baddies.

And then the author has to go and literally say that it's not worth it for one labratory mouse to die even if it helps save thousands of children with leukemia.

So, yeah, good thing that was the last issue anyway.

[rob]

I eat meat because the universe eats itself. Plants are living things as well and no one has a problem eating and destroying them. Fuck, we kill them to make the front of our homes look more boring.

[Radix]

Something similar happened in USA in during the abolition period in the 1700s/1800s. It worked out fairly good, even if many problems still remain. It's a long road, but if enough people get properly educated about the suffering of others and alternative food sources, I think can work good in the long run.

Just to be clear, you think domestic animal farming is comparable to human slavery?

And did you just refer to animals as "others"? As in "other people"? Or was that unintentional?

[Bones]

I just ended a three year relationship with a vegan.
Choosing a place to eat was annoying as shit.

[Castle]

I just ended a three year relationship with a vegan.
Choosing a place to eat was annoying as shit.

As someone who's been in a three year relationship with a vegan before:

AMEN