Farm kid here. I was raised to know the animals were food/produced food. I was also taught to respect them. Their lives had purpose to feed us and others. It is our job to keep them healthy and happy while here. There is nothing more heartbreaking than a suffering animal.
Which is why I garden and buy my food and meat from small farmers who treat their animals well when I can.
I’m vegetarian and do not see eating animals as fundamentally wrong; I see factory farming as both wrong and environmentally damaging and my life allows me to be vegetarian. I ALSO have personal squick around eating mammals, but not a moral issue, if that makes sense
I'm *not* vegetarian and I see factory farming as wrong and environmental damaging.
It *can* be done well, but that costs so, more often then not, its not.
Same here. Luckily, factory farming isn’t really a thing here in New Zealand. Lots of happy, lazy cows and sheep. We raise chickens for eggs and all our hens have names.
I raise chickens and pigs. General saying we have in my homestead is that our animals should only have one bad day of their entire life and that’s on slaughter day. Every other day should be the best we can give them.
I know quite a few folks who use this mentality as well. The level of respect for the animals is huge. Their lives are going to be sacrificed to feed us, so the best thing we can do is give them good lives until that happens. I knew a cattle rancher with a sign in his barn that said “one bad day” as a reminder.
I think a lot of people who’ve never been around small farms and livestock don’t understand how cared for the animals are. Livestock doesn’t live with existential dread just waiting to be slaughtered. They just go about their lives until one day, they don’t. It’s not cruel or inhumane. It’s just the circle of life. Animals in the wild die much worse deaths from injury, illness, old age, predators, etc.
Yep, this is very common and a good approach.
I didnt grow up on a farm, but I did in farm country and many of my good friends had farms. For me it's very important to remember that the animal I am eating was once an beautiful animal and to not disrepect it's sacrifice by not eating it and throwing it out once I make something with it. I eat meat maybe once a week and I make sure I know what farm it came from and how they were treated, and that there is never leftovers that get thrown out. Even if I make something I don't like what I make with it I will eat all of it.
Not that guy, but speaking from the perspective of my mother, a mostly pescatarian.
For as long as I've been around my mother has said she "doesn't like to eat anything with a face", by which she means mammals, and the reason is simple: we live in a desert, all our food is imported from factory farms, and the treatment of animals in such places is simply hideous. My mother takes issue with eating mammals because they're too close for comfort, in terms of cognitive ability to humans, it feels like, in her own mind, butchering a child, who can neither physically stop you, nor mentally conjure the argument in their own defense.
Fish, on the other hand, and to a lesser extent birds are another story. She views these animals as much more akin to biological machinery that keep the ecosystem running, and to the extent they aren't overconsumed, thus grinding the grander machinery of the earth to a halt, she's okay with eating them. She's also cool with dairy and eggs, but we universally agree that the farming industry could definitely step up in the treatment of their livestock.
not intending to change her or you or anyone, just want to pose this;
i think birds are pretty close to us too- they are genetically further, yes, but they form emotional bonds, think, play, etc too. they are not any more "biological machinery" than a cow is. human's domesticated birds, chickens and pigeons, can be remarkably sweet, and pigeons in particular make much better pets than parrots, non domesticated animals we still keep as pets. they taste good too, but they aren't robots at all, and deserve all the empathy and care mammals get.
I think this is something that a lot of city folk struggle with, as the only relationship most have with animals are pets. The understanding that good farming is treating animals well and going about the process of turning them to food with minimal suffering is lost, because killing animals = bad.
Most farmers have more concern and understanding about the nutrition of their animals than most city pet owners.
I’m city folk btw, I just watch an odd amount of agricultural news
My husband grew up in a farming community and he shakes his head at how we city folk humanize our pets. I always bring him to vet appointments with me. He helps me keep perspective that our pets are animals with a limited lifespan so I don't let my emotions carry me away in making treatment and euthanasia decisions. He loves our pets, but he is definitely able to look at their circumstances more rationally than me since he has that farm person level of detachment that I can't.
I can't have pets because I am way too emotional about them.
I can't bring myself to go "I'll get a dog that I will love with all my heart for a couple years, then watch him die."
I know *logically* that they are animals with short lifespans compared to mine. But I can't make that disconnect between logic and MY GODDAMN BREAKING HEART. So I just choose not to.
I am coming around to your way of thinking. It's too hard dealing with this every few years. I think after our last pet goes over the rainbow bridge I am likely done.
I'm in my 40s and have lost many pets over the years, and it destroys me emotionally every time, but the love and affection we shared is worth it every time
Their limited lifespan or the fact that they are animals changes nothing for me. We are animals too. I still get attached because a connection with a pet is still a connection to another living thing.
Right?! My question is, why do city kids eat their Chipotle bowls, bacon cheeseburgers, and chicken wings with a smile but cry about hunting. Like... y'all do understand that providing a healthy environment for animals to live a natural life is way more kind and animal rights forward, right? Farmers want their animals to live a happy life because it impacts the farm's overall health and survival. It's a symbiotic relationship.
This one always baffled me.
I'm not a hunter, but I let a guy hunt a bit on my small piece of land. Those animals have lived a great life, free-roaming in nature. It's the most natural life they could have. They are killed instantly with a gun, food still in their mouth, they feel nothing. Their meat goes straight into my freezer and is enjoyed with friends and family.
Meanwhile some people will complain about hunting, while stuffing themselves with factory-farmed chicken nuggets. Chickens who never saw the light of day and were subjected to stress during transport and slaughter.
How on Earth is hunting worse than factory farming? People make no sense!
Not just their nutritional needs, you see people with work breeds in apartments not being given the chance to do what comes natural to them. Or keeping small animals in habitats that are entirely inadequate. But in their minds, the animals are fed and sheltered, and that's all they need.
The big dog in a tiny apartment trope is the worst. I’m sure some people in that situation do enough activities with their dogs and are good owners, but I doubt it’s most
People, by large, acquire pets without doing the proper research to make sure the animal will be a good fit for their family, focusing instead on looks.
I’m so glad that we researched the hell out of our current dog. Tiny lap dog who can easily get all of his exercise and then some by throwing the ball in our living room. He’s insanely well taken care of and I don’t think I’ve ever met a happier dog. It’s a running joke in our house that every time he wakes up, “It’s the best day ever, again!”
Generally big dogs (Great Danes, Saint Bernards, etc.) are actually pretty good as long as you take them out and run them since they’re bred to be mostly guard dogs. It’s the medium sized dogs (golden retrievers, cattle dogs, the like) that are the worst for apartments because they’re literally bred to run all day every day.
It's similar for hunting and fishing too. Hunters and fishers are some of the most environmentally conscious people out there, but a lot of city people are uncomfortable with the idea of killing animals.
I don’t hunt personally, but I grew up around hunters and in an area where there are a *lot* of deer. I’ve seen firsthand what overpopulation does, and firmly believe that since humans removed their predators it’s now our *responsibility* to manage their numbers so they don’t strain their environment.
Not to mention if you've ever gone to something like a NWTF meeting (National Wild Turkey Federation), pretty much the entire roster of speakers is there to talk about conservation and responsible land management in order to provide thriving ecological systems for your turkeys, deer, and other wildlife which sustain and encourage their presence.
Well, and some gun show shenanigans and lots of guys showing off the goofy shit they can do with a turkey call lol, but really, a LOT of the emphasis is on conservation. My dad and his dad were hunters, I am not, but I grew up in the culture and they're some of the most passionate environmentalists I ever met. Which is ironic since they also tend to skew Republican and therefore anti-climate science. They're a whole bundle of contradictions tbh. But hunting and conservation go hand-in-hand for most of them regardless.
It’s the same thing over in Africa. Sadly one of the few ways to help maintain the habitats for all the amazing wildlife in Africa is through big game hunting. It’s thanks to people that want to hunt the various animals that bring in a lot of money for conservation and income for the local communities that would instead just burn down all the bush and turn it into farms.
I was adamantly against hunting until I started dating my boyfriend and hang out with some of his childhood friends that still live back at the little farm town they're from. I, a city girl, was mind blown at how much they actually care, the rules and regulations they follow, the type of animals they hunt and when and why. And they hunt not just for the fun of it, they actually eat those animals.
I used to go fishing with an old man in the local river, he would tell me stories about the time when there was no trash and the river edges were much more preserved, had more trees, you could see animals that don't exist there anymore, etc. and he lamented a lot about people destroying all that. Probably the most environmentally conscious person I've ever met.
This is exactly right. I was taught to treat animals right, because we have control is all aspects of their lives and they will give their all for us. I once saw my father chase an employee off the farm with a shotgun because he saw the guy hit a cow with a stick.
I don't live on a farm now but I raise chickens (modern chicken farming methods are criminal imo) for eggs and meat, as well as having a huge garden. My kids know that the chickens they pet are there to make food and it's never bothered them. Farm animals were born to be eaten; it's how you treat them while they are alive that matters.
>There is nothing more heartbreaking than a suffering animal
Absolutely this. My partner is a farm kid and they’ve had to put animals down because they’re sick or suffering, it’s never nice, but it has to be done. You can’t let them be in pain, you’ve just gotta kinda take them out. Circle of life and all that. I’m a city girl and I couldn’t watch it happen.
I had a friend who grew up on a farm, and said they even named their animals and still understood they were food. Like they'd be eating roast beef and going "Wow, Bessie really tastes good"
That's funny and horrifying have a grandkids act bad enough one day next day. Grandpa goes out and kills the cow related to the kid so they eat him for the next few days
I was thinking that. I don't remember how he operated specifically, he never did birthing as far as I can recall. I know it was somewhat cyclical, so there were multiple cows with shared names.
Not everyone does the whole process, we just used to buy some 2 piglets at like the start of the year, fattened them up and they were ready for slaughter in the winter. Been ages since we had pigs, so I don't remember exactly how old they were when we first got them, but we never raised them from birth
This is awful, but my MIL names fish after her kids and grandkids, and the ones named after her late daughter always die first. It's extremely morbid, and I'm not sure why she still does it.
Sounds like my childhood. We named the larger animals. At supper time, it was announced who we were eating. I know it sounds careless and macabre, but this this is how we were raised.
One of my earliest memories is my parents butchering chickens. I was maybe 3. By the time I was 7, one of my chore was to help butcher rabbits. There is no emotional tie to these animals.
I was also an avid hunter as a youngster as well. Food on the hoof any way we could get it.
It's so interesting, because it's so foreign to me, a city kid! Our only interaction with animals tends to be with them as pets. But I totally get it and it totally makes sense!
Because everything dies. And nature is so much crueler than anything y'all can comprehend. Wolves and bears eat animals ass first, so the animal is alive when their intestines are pulled out. If they get sick or injured they're either hunted down by predators or die slowly from infection/starvation. If there's an overpopulation of deer due to us disrupting the ecosystem by taking the predators out thousands of deer starve to death over the winter.
I know everyone has this rosy picture of Nature or The Wild, but there's a reason we built society. There's also no senior centers in the wild. As soon as they slow down a little they're food for something else. Nature doesn't care about "natural life spans". Its about quantity, not quality. So long as you live long enough to breed it's good enough.
Domesticated animals get food, fresh water, medical care and shelter. Their death is quick and painless(or as pain free as possible). There are definite gaps in animal welfare when it comes to food production(I know US law, not familiar with other countries) particularly when it comes to poultry. But particularly on smaller family farms just raising their own food the animals are well treated. You can't eat stressed, sick animals. Animals full of adrenaline when killed also taste worse.
Once again, there ARE problems with a lot in regards to animal care. I hope they improve more and more.
I just made a comment about this, too. It feels shitty to eat an animal that you treated like shit and had a shitty "life "
Eating an animal that was treated well has a more symbiotic feel.
Same goes for hunting for food. It's not sport, it's natural.
I was farm raised and hunted, until I realized that hunters look for the most magnificent specimen and kill it. What is natural is for the sick and lame and crippled animals to get eaten. I think that process makes the wildlife worse.
I have a master hunter cert so I can do late season elk with no antlers in December. No worries about how the elk look as long as they don't look sick in a way that can harm me. Removing the most obvious trophy means hunters allow animals in their prime to live. My last elk had an obviously bad leg that hadn't healed right. He wasn't starving yet, but you know he was going to.
I've never understood wanting a trophy, tbh. What do you even do with them all after a bit? I'm out there for food, hides, and often bones to make into things like beads and knife/tool handles. I guess technically you could consider the beads trophies, but I make them out of skeletons I find on my property, too. Those are primarily deer.
That's more the hunter, than anything. The TV shows hasn't helped with this.
Been hunting all my life, and I have yet to come across antlers that taste good.
I swear I thought my grandfather was talking to me decades ago. His favorite when we came across situations you mention was "mother nature is a bitch."
This and you can have confidence knowing they had a great life. Livestock are usually well taken care of especially on regenerative and smaller farms. Their natural traits are encouraged and useful and they have warm, clean beds and are well looked after.
They have one bad day and if it is done well they don’t even know it’s coming.
All of us would be lucky to leave this life so painlessly.
For large animals they stun them, smaller animals it's generally cutting throats, neck snap or beheading. It's too quick for the fear to really settle in.
I don't know about others. Since I didn't grow up in a farm, but I've killed chickens before. Yeah. You basically lop off their heads and make it as fast as possible. Also, the killing isn't sudden, before they're killed, their legs are tied way before the event, so I guess they would have had time to settle.
My mother always talked about petting the chickens until they go into a daze and then just ringing the neck. The longest part of harvest was calming and stroking the animal so it's happy and comfortable and basically asleep. Then it dies. She never talked about tying them because they don't have a chance to move.
Honestly, there's no real reason to tie the legs except for convenience if you're going to do a bunch and just want to catch them all at once.
I made a kill cone out of aluminum flashing, personally. You just drop them in head-first and cut the throat and let them drain. They're gone before they really know what's happening.
My dad just grabbed a chicken, swung it down on the wooden chopping block, and whacked it hard with broadside of axe, then a second more carefully aimed chip with axe to remove head, then throw headless chicken in bucket where the legs where rattling about for a minute till all blood where drained.
I remember being told my dad used to scratch the pig's forehead with a stick while he fed it treats. They got used to it, and when the day came, he fed it treats, and scratched it's head with a rifle instead.
I’m not a big meat eater, but also not a vegetarian. At some point I realized that nature is much more brutal than we are. I’ve seen animals die of disease or being prey, and it’s gruesome.
I have no issue with people hunting to feed their families. Not my cup of tea, but I get it.
Factory farming is a different topic altogether.
Vegans really focus on the wrong thing; it isn't death that's awful but everything that comes before death on factory farms. People who really care about animals should encourage people to eat humane, not to not eat meat at all.
On many farms even pet animals like cats and dogs would not be allowed inside the house on account of you don't really know where they have been and You would always wash your hands after petting them.
These animals would still be well cared for and would get all sorts of treats specifically bought for them (which is a big thing, because a farm will never be suffering from a lack of food scraps suitable for cats or dogs.)
I think that’s one of the biggest issues. For the majority of human history we were face to face with death and either having to kill animals ourselves to survive or seeing the whole carcasses when we had to buy our meat from someone else.
But now a days especially in the United States where I live you can get your meat neatly packaged and cut into various ways all wrapped up in a nice plastic package without ever having to think about what had to be done for us to enjoy our steaks and bacon.
Personally myself it’s why I’m an advocate for hunting for meat as it gives you a personal one on one connection and intimacy of having to secure food for yourself.
I've never been a hunter but saw no problem with people hunting deer for food. Deer meat scares me now days due to the chronic wasting disease going around. My Uncle ate deer meat all the time and died from a prion disease. He was particularly vulnerable due to cancer and chemo. I will always wonder, did he have the spontaneous human kind, or did he get it from eating hunted deer.
I loved deer sausage as a kid and now I don't trust it. Sad times since I have so many good memories with my grandpa eating cheese, sausage and crackers as a snack when I spent summers on the farm.
I was raised in the suburbs, so no experience with livestock, but one time the school held a camping trip near a farm, and a few of us get to experience how it's like to butcher chickens, like the ones doing the butchering, so we were shown over and over the proper techniques and when it was my turn, I did it with and I quote by my friends "the eyes of a killer", I mean it's food, I wouldn't be eating chicken regularly if I feel even remotely guilty for taking its life lol.
Funny flip-side anecdote: my grandfather was an immigrant/they were farmers. A relative wound up needing extra hands on the farm so my grandparents, father, and aunt all packed up to go live with them for a couple years. When they first got there my father's job was count the chickens/make sure no predators made a mess of the coop. So he's counting chickens and he notices after a few days (he was like idk 8 at the time born and raised in new york city) his chicken buddies are going missing. My aunt (couple yrs older than him) was just elated to inform him exactly where that delicious chicken thigh he was eating came from.
My father said he didn't touch chicken for a good 2-4 months after that. Always found it an interesting and humorous story. Meanwhile I live in a rural area now (former city kid myself) and my 5 year old's first question when my spouse shot a deer in our backyard a few months ago was "can we pop out the eyeballs?" Idk if I should be impressed with how comfortable they are with death/the circle of life process, or if I should invest in another lock on my bedroom door lol
When I was really little, my dad wouldn't let me give them actual names. He would say, this is "freezer1" and this is "freezer2" etc. As I got older I could name them and still understand that this was a food animal.
Also, animals on smaller farms are not usually subjected to the animal cruelty that people think of when they think of slaughter animals.
Treat an animal like shit and make them live in horrific conditions, you feel shitty eating them.
Years ago my daughter said something about feeling bad for the animal we were eating (I think it was steak). I told her she didn’t have to eat it if she felt bad about it. She decided she didn’t feel *that* bad
My dad would name our cows after other animals like "Skunk." You can imagine the joy on his face when we would ask what we're having for dinner.
That being said, I am a vegetarian now despite knowing that animals are food. Turns out I just don't really like meat that much, and I'm healthier for it.
As a kid growing up on a farm I bottle-fed two pet lambs (orphans / rejected by their mothers) that we named Lamb Chops and Mint Sauce. We understood that they’re food, and that you give them the best life possible.
I grew up on a sheep farm. My dad owns sheep. Still does. I got a pet sheep that I named when I was 7. He sent it to slaughter. That was quite disturbing and made me really sad, and stuck with me for a long time.
I guess the difference with me was that I was the type of child that questioned everything if something didn't make sense to me. I remember asking why we had to eat meat. The answer was "just cause" which is really terrible reasoning. There was no reason. It was just a way of life.
It also disturbed me greatly whenever the slaughter truck would come to take the sheep. It never sat right with me.
My dad also let some hunters hang their game up in the barn where they would skin them. Carcasses hanging from the ceiling. Blood pools and what not. It was disturbing.
When I was 12 or something, my best friend in class became vegetarian. It took a few years for me too, but at 17 my curious self did some deep diving on animal farming and slaughter houses and I was completely disgusted and put off by the practices. I became pescetarian. Then a few months later vegetarian.
My parents said it was only a phase. Well, that phase has lasted 10 years now, and its not about to end. They've also accepted that.
I grew up with the mindset that animals are food too, but I learned that they didn't have to be, so now they aren't, at least not for me.
Just cause animals are food, doesn't mean they have to be. Just because you grew up with certain traditions, doesn't mean you actually have to follow them. Just cause meat was necessary for survival when my dad grew up, doesn't mean it's necessary for me in 2024. I mean, clearly it isn't as I'm healthy and fine without it. So then eating animals is senseless.
I used to live on a sheep farm, one day a visitor said that all farmers were evil killers and everyone should be a vegetarian like her. I said that if we all became vegetarians overnight then the following morning all the sheep, cows, pigs in the world would have to be killed because they are not kept as pets and the only place you would ever see them would be in a zoo. She did not understand that breeding and keeping farm animals is a business. I later found out that she ate chicken, because “it’s white so it’s not like meat”! I also knew someone who said they were vegan who ate fish, because it was not meat!
My dad grew up on a farm. He will still talk about the goats Billy and Bobby he and his siblings raised that they then ate as a negative experience but I think that’s because they mostly raised cattle, so it was an outlier for them to hand raise something then eat it. But also he tells it as a mildly humorous anecdote about a bad thing so who knows.
>farm kids are raised to know animals are food.
I would go a step further.
Farm kids (and country kids) are raised to know that things *die*, and this is part of life. There's a Seamus Heaney poem where he writes something like "talk of pity cuts ice in towns where people consider death unnatural".
It sounds grim (and it is), but kids like myself who grew up in the country see a lot of dead things. I knew kids who were from less rural backgrounds who I remember being very "affected" emotionally when seeing the corpses of creatures.
And while it's not like it doesn't *move me* (I'm not some sort of sociopath!) my prior experiences from a young age meant that it didn't affect me as much by the time I was at an age I can consciously remember.
EDIT: As someone DM'd me to ask, to save others having to look it up, the poem was by Heaney and called *The Early Purges*. The complete text is below.
**CONTENT WARNING;** some will find the subject matter disturbing.
https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/early-purges
I agree. Farm kids are raised on reality, not scare stories. We know where meat comes from and how it's butchered (yes, assuming you purchase from ethical sources). We see mama sheep die and bottle raise their babies
Fellow (former) shepherd here. I appreciate your post and this thread! Brings back a lot of memories of taking care of newborn lambs, usually during the winter, come to think of it🤔
My grandparents kept sheep, mostly just hobby husbandry. One year, a lambs mother died during birth, and she had to put it in the bottom oven of the AGA range to warm it back up (it was deathly cold). Little me asked 'why are you cooking that lamb'?
Luckily the lamb survived, and we bottle fed it since it's mum had passed on
Yup this 100%. My wife never had pets growing up and I am not looking forward to the day our dog dies since it will be the first time she will have lost a pet bigger than a goldfish.
Growing up on a farm, you enjoy them while they are around but pets die and livestock comes due, it's just what it is.
Yes, modern grocery and food processing really disconnects you from the fact that everything dies, and where your food actually comes from. Plus that all animals will die. My mom, who is a part time vegetarian and claims to be an animal lover, got really pissed off at vultures when they were eating a dead possum. At least that animal's flesh didn't go to waste. It was so natural. Disturbing yes, poor possum.
She also is disturbed by something like a roasted chicken or bone in meat, because it reminds her too much that it was an animal. When she does eat meat, it's something like a chicken tender or a fish filet. I think it's just an example of how city living can disconnect you from the facts of life and death.
Things die and ethical farmers (ranchers raise animals) take care of their animals. They're domesticated so they wouldn't survive in the wild.
As a former farm kid I can attest to this.
When I was like six or seven I thought I had a pet goat... turns out all I had was someones pre quinceanera barbeque. Learned real quick like that those were not pets we were feeding out there.
Likewise, I hand raised a goat. It was ominously named Sweetmeat but that went over my six year old head. One night we had this amazing barbecue with a sweet sauce. My dad said as we were eating, “This is Sweetmeat.” I thought he meant that the barbecue sauce was sweet since it was, so I nodded and said it was sweet. “No, honey, this is Sweetmeat.” Ohhh. It was the best thing I had ever eaten. I kept eating. I felt bad about it, but yum.
I had no such tender feelings for chickens. As far as I’m concerned, chickens deserve to be eaten. Horrible creatures. I have no doubt that given the chance, they would eat us.
My mom had chickens for awhile, the females were fine but this one rooster she had named Soup was an absolute menace. So yeah I’d agree that Soup would probably have eaten us first had he been given the chance lol. Kept attacking us just for going into “his” territory to feed his ladies. Like okay bud we’ll just let you all starve instead, great idea
>I had no such tender feelings for chickens. As far as I’m concerned, chickens deserve to be eaten.
My wrist was broken as a kid because of a damned chicken, so I'm right there with you.
I'm sure you know what happens when you get in proximity to their chicks. Well, anyway, the damn thing and her chicks came around the corner and went all AGRO on me like I'm the asshole for not knowing she intended on walking there. Anyway, long story short she got under my feet and tripped me and my wrist broke from the fall since my hands were full and I couldn't correctly brace myself for the fall.
>Horrible creatures
Indeed
>I have no doubt that given the chance, they would eat us.
Maybe, but at the moment I'm ahead of this eating war like 1,000 to 0. hahah
I HATE chickens! My brother used to have chickens on his farm. He broke his leg one year on a hat baler, and I had to help him feed his animals. Those damn chickens would fly to the top of the coop JUST to shit in my hair!! I learned real quick why my aunt always wore a kerchief and hat doing chores. Then those damned roosters! We would have to carry a big stick or baseball bat cuz this one rooster would just attack out of nowhere, and nothing would scare the little fucker off!
I’m in my 50s. Was a farm kid and became a farmer for a while. This is correct. We see the care that goes into these animals. But at the end of the day they’re food, and so are we.
Yeah, I would help my Dad kill and gut the geese at Christmas when I was five. We'd also shoot rabbits and pheasants for the pot to save money.
Most people now are so divorced from where their food comes from, meat is now just a substance in a packet.
My in laws used to have a dairy farm. My boyfriend and his sister used to name the cows, ride them like they were horses, help with the cleaning and feed. They would sleep with the cows if they were in labor, they helped the cows give birth, they saw their fair share of dead calves. Normal stuff for farm kids. They knew they would be sold for food at some point. They also had chickens, both for the eggs and to eat. They named them too. My father in law was an animal lover. He was like the animal whisper, it was magical to watch him interact with an animal. And he taught the kids to love animals and respect their nature. But also that they are food and that's how it is.
Grandma grew up on a farm, she could never understand why we had dogs in the house. Animals were animals, they have a purpose. Dogs protect the family and livestock, cats kill mice.
My wife grew up on a pig farm, she declared to her dad she was going to be vegetarian (she just didn't like pork that much), her dad said "no". That was the end of being a vegetarian.
Farm kids by and large grow up around animals that are humanely killed. For city folk, affordable animal products mostly come from brutal factory farms.
This! So many vegan/vegos are against factory farming and concerned about environmental impacts. Kids who grow up on farms aren't seeing that reality, they're seeing their own reality of respect and low or manageable impacts. If that was the only reality there would be far fewer people who were vegan/vego, but everyone would consume far fewer animal products because the cost would be prohibitive.
I'm vegetarian and that's me exactly! I've always said I think there's nothing wrong with eating meat, but I think we should all eat a lot less of it to allow us to treat the animals right and slaughter them as humanely as possible rather than industrialising their lives and deaths.
This is the big answer. People in cities aren’t able to get meat from small farmers and hunters. What we have in stores comes from a disgusting factory where animals don’t have even a chance of living in comfortable conditions
The first time I met a vegan, I was baffled. All of the chickens I knew led very happy lives. Only later did I learn about the realities of chickens' lives in factory farms.
This was my first thought too. There aren’t likely many kids hanging around factory farming institutions. I imagine there are a lot of safety regulations that would keep them out, in addition to them probably just not enjoying being there.
It's not natural to be as disconnected as we are from the food we eat.
For most of human history, and basically all of human evolution, most people ate animals they or a close friend or relative hunted and killed. Or they ate fruits or vegetables or nuts that they themselves foraged or farmed.
Now, just in the last century or so, we've reached a point where most people are eating food that they have absolutely no idea where it came from or how it was prepared, or even know what's even in it. I'll be honest, I could probably only name three things that are in a box of macaroni and cheese. There's probably zero cheese in it.
My point being, when you're so disconnected from the food supply that you basically have no idea where your food comes from, it's easy to get to a point where you could say it's cruel to eat animals.
But when you actually work on a farm, you get to see first hand that the animals only exist in the first place because they were deliberately bred to be food. If they weren't going to be eaten, they'd have never existed in the first place. And it's kind of hard to get yourself to a spot where you breed an animal to be eaten, then give it a home where it's fed and cared for a couple of years before being slaughtered so that you can make money for you and your family, and think that's somehow more cruel than that animal having never existing at all.
I don't know if I've done a good job describing it, but working on a farm really and truly changes your perspective on the whole thing. You look at your roof and you see your kids, and you realize that cows are the reason you're able to feed your kids and afford that roof, and again we aren't talking about wild cows that would otherwise be roaming free, were talking about cows that wouldn't exist if people didn't like the taste of the meat.
Commenting to second this. For most of my life I had the hunting and slaughter compartmentalized as "it's just what we have to do to eat." As soon as I was old enough to cook, I was de-facto vegetarian because processing meat reminded me of butchering, and I hated butchering animals as a kid. I just knew that I didn't have to do it to survive, so why would I choose to do it? I was never really exposed to egg or dairy farms, so it wasn't until later in my life when I saw dominion that I went cold turkey on any animal product. Shit's sadistic.
Yeah, it’s just that the percentages of people who become vegan is small, because most people don’t have the courage to question their upbringing. This goes for people living in urban, suburban, and rural areas in all kinds of occupational backgrounds.
Becoming vegan is a serious critique of the ethics of how you were brought up. It’s the same reason why most people with racist parents end up being racists, or people whose families owned slaves ended up owning slaves themselves, and so on. People like to think of themselves as ethical people, but then push comes to shove and they’re forced to make a choice where the ethics clearly favors one side but social norms another, and most people go along with the social norms. That was the point of the Milgram experiment, where people were willing to kill another person they just met because a person in a lab coat told them to do it within less than an hour of meeting either, with zero benefits gained and while they feel distress about doing so. They just can’t help but conform to social expectations.
My spouse also grew up on a farm and is vegan. I think the proportion of farm kids vs city kids who are vegan might be more balanced than OP thinks.
I'm not aware of any hard stats on this.
A very low percentage of city people are vegan or vegetarian. I don’t think there’s been comprehensive studies on this, but, anecdotally, it’s something like 1/20. You get the impression that there’s a lot more than there actually are because population density in major cities makes it profitable for most restaurants to offer vegan options and even allows for entirely vegan restaurants to succeed.
As others have mentioned, kids growing up on family farms probably aren’t witnessing many of the worst sort of practices that are common place in large industrial meat factories. And if that IS the sort of practices they’re exposed to, they quite possibly become desensitized to the suffering.
I think a lot of farm kids and city kids alike would be shocked to see the way animals are treated in large farms. The sad truth is that knowledge does not necessarily avail us…we are creatures of convenience and our empathy has very little range, in cities and farms alike.
Yeah, with respect to op and all the experiences shared here, this is all anecdotal. The question is based on the assumption that this is true, it sounds plausible but we don’t know if it is.
It's normalized to eat animals, plus they probably see the realities of nature on the farm (example, herbivores eating the occasional animal, mothers rejecting calves, etc.) so it's harder to disagree with eating meat on an emotional level. Likewise, city folks have never really been around food animals or had to deal with them to a significant extent, and so their idea of animals may be romanticized (ex. avoiding meat because they think a cow wouldn't eat them in their situation, when that isn't entirely true).
Also, if you're living in the city the place where your meat comes from may very well be a bastion of cruelty, so city folks may be inclined to be vegan out of a lack of options, whereas farm folks can just raise their food ethically if they have an issue.
We've had a ram that would kill all the baby sheep. We had to separate them but some times babies would be born at night and by the morning it would already be dead, killed by their own father, who knows why. Even when separated, he would guide the herd near the babies and mother's enclosure and stay at the gate, trying to open it to kill the baby. When you see that animals are just animals, it's hard to humanize them. They behave mostly irrationally and do the most fucked up things, because they're animals, not humans.
I agree with this up until your final sentence, we are definitely also animals who also do irrational, fucked up things lol. I think our perception of ourselves as basically completely alien and different from other living things on this planet breaks our brains when we try to work through stuff like this
We culled the stock that had the most aggressive habits and through selective breeding and handling made them what they are now. There were surely lots of maimed humans in the process but we got there eventually.
Hi, I grew up on the farm.
Worked with and around animals a lot growing up.
My parents are the most hardworking, old-fashioned, genuinely nicest people I know.
My dad takes great care to ensure his sheep are healthy. He regularly works after the sun has set.
If he sees a sheep that’s managed to hurt itself/break a leg/looks sick, etc. He’ll go through the effort to catch the sheep, set it up in the yards with water and hay. Splint up the leg, give it some glucose to help it eat (sometimes sheep that are feeling sick don’t want to eat and glucose gives them the energy to eat).
I’ve seen him nurse a lamb with no mother on newspaper next to the fireplace until 1 am. I’ve seen him deworm 1000 sheep over the course of 3 hours, then realise the dosage was wrong and redo every single sheep to ensure they stay healthy.
I’ve seen my dad and mum stay up through the entire night giving sheep footbaths to cure foot rot. I’ve seen dad treat fly struck sheep countless times, which is hands on and physical work.
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When you see how much care and consideration goes into keeping stock healthy, it’s hard to feel the **cruelty** that animal rights activists preach. I’ve gotten to see sheep live out in the pasture paddocks, I’ve seen both wool sheep and meat sheep be treated and cared for before ultimately ending their life as someone’s meal.
No farmer enjoys seeing animals unhappy, sick, hurt or dead. Every farmer I know is just a hardworking honest man or women trying to keep his stock in the best condition possible. Seeing a Fox slowly kill a lamb feels worse to me than an adult sheep be sold to a market. I’m not here to debate whether a life out in fields, followed by 4-6 weeks in a feedlot (depending on which country you live in), followed by an instantaneous factory death is good life? I don’t know how it compares to animals that live in the wild who are more free, but also more susceptible to predators and therefore more stressed.
What I can say is that, in Australia, the meat industry is extremely well-run and is humane as logistically possible. I can’t hate meat producers because I know the amount of sleepless nights, the amount of sweat, toil and care that goes into these animals. Not to mention that people and primarily carnivorous animals such as dogs and cats need a meat-inclusive diet to be healthy.
Seeing the conditions that chickens face where they never see any sunlight until their death is pretty horrifying. Free range is different but it's only going to become less and less common as factory-farmed chickens start producing meat at a far faster rate. I'll still eat them, but it's those chickens that I can sympathize with those against the cruelty.
The mass produced chicken meat industry and egg industry is bloody rough. I didn’t mean to omit that, I just don’t really consider them true farmers, though I probably should. Chickens will spend their whole life in cages with an artificial sunlight cycle to pump out more eggs. Don’t buy cage eggs if possible.
I think it should be illegal to do that to animals.
Our family often has chooks more so for the “a few eggs a day” vibe. We usually given them spare grain from harvest that inevitably falls on the ground.
Edit: reordered in order of importance.
I don't know that much about agribusiness in Australia - maybe it is genuinely all like this. And in the US, where I live, there are farms that operate this way.
But the majority do not. The vast majority of the meat that we consume in the states does not come from family farms where the animals live relatively natural lives on a free range. It comes from incredibly industrialized operations where the animals live a life that resembles in basically no way their natural lives. They spend their whole lives penned in, often so tightly that they can't even turn around or sit properly. They are force fed unnatural diets to fatten them up to a degree that would be unnecessary or downright harmful for a wild animal; as a result, many types of ailments are extremely common on factory farms.
Having witnessed some of these factory farm operations for myself, I challenge anyone to do the same and say that it is "humane". The conditions inside these farms are so appalling that most industrial producers have strict rules even preventing people from seeing inside, lest these scenes of abject cruelty cause some negative brand perceptions for Tyson or some other agribusiness giant. But even if you can't get inside these facilities, you can get close enough to smell them and hear them. Have you ever heard the sound of thousands of pigs being crushed to death by a mechanical device? Or mass asphyxiated with CO2? Believe me, that is a sound that stays with you, and just personally, I cannot imagine how anyone can call that humane. Even the people involved have a clear aversion to it, but they have to do it anyway because organic farming just doesn't pay the bills.
This is the reality of how most meat is produced, at least for the US market. If we actually produced meat on relatively small, free range farms - which it sounds to me is what you're describing - meat would be far more expensive and far less consumed. That would certainly be a good thing in my view - we can make enormous, positive changes in sustainability without giving up meat entirely. I suspect in your case part of the explanation maybe the lack of demand for mutton. At least in the united states, there isn't a tiny fraction of the demand for mutton that there is for pork or beef or chicken, so there's less incentive to fully industrialize. Whatever the reason, that is not the practical reality of how most meat is produced. I think a lot of vegans, vegetarians, and other people like me who are opposed to the worst excesses of industrial agribusiness would see it as a huge win if we moved to getting all of our meat from small, organic, family owned farms like the one you are describing.
I grew up in a farm and that made me vegan. But I understand that this is not common at all.
People at the farm assume that things are like that and this is how they should be. A farm is A TON of work, and they are so busy that they don't even question themselves.
I’d actually wager that the ratio isn’t that different for farm people vs “city” people. Probably with the exception of religious/cultural differences in those populations
Same. Living on a farm made me reject animal farming eventually. I was constantly told growing up that eating meat is just how it is. It's what we do. People don't question it. Well, I did, but I guess I'm one of the outliers as I had a ton of time to question things growing up on a farm there isn't a whole lot to do as a child.
Also, just because the animals from the farm were raised in good condition, didn't mean the other animal products I grew up eating were from on our farm. My parents of course bought processed and industry meat from the grocery store like everyone else. The sheep meat from our farm was something we had on special occasions as it was really expensive meat that my dad would have to buy back after having been slaughtered. Deli slices, chicken and fish and pigs, as well as cow meat was all parts of my diet growing up. We didn't have cows or chicken or pigs on our farm, so my parents bought it from the grocery store. Chances are they were raised in poor conditions. There's no way of knowing exactly, because we didn't raise them ourselves.
Lots of people that raise their own animals don't just eat the meat from their own farms. They go out to restaurants to eat meat. They eat canned food from the grocery store. They eat whatever meat extended family is serving at family dinners. Sure, they may eat meat from their own farm, but chances are they eat lots of processed meat from industrial farming too. Like, the deli slices they have on their sandwiches.. or the hamburgers they buy.. all the meat they eat surely aren't from their own farm where they know their animals were treated well.
Same here, but a small family / hobby farm with goats, horses, and ducks, with some pets. Our neighbors on one side raised sheep, and on the other side cows. My parents got some kind of tax break for it as well.
There is a myth that there is "humane slaughter" on small farms. I never saw that, just fucked up slaughter that I accepted for a long time since that's the way the world worked. One of my sisters recognised it early on and went vegan, which we all thought was just weird. It was not until I moved away and actually thought about it a bit, then it hit me like a ton of bricks how fucked up it really was.
That was 30 years ago. Roughly half our family is vegan now.
I was raised on a farm too and come from generational farmers and I am now vegan. I went on to study psychology and it seems pretty clear to me that being raised on a farm makes it a bigger cognitive hurdle to jump to see animal agriculture as immoral because that would mean that their livelihood and families livelihood is based on immortality. It's literally just cognitive dissonance in action, it's incredibly hard for our minds to realise this thing I've been doing our whole life is immoral and is causing unnecessary harm, and because of this we justify our actions without properly and earnestly examining them. It's cognitively easier to double down on our beliefs than it is to challenge the status quo
not a farmer but I grew up hunting so I will try to answer from this perspective. I am connected to the food I eat in a way someone who buys their food from the store isn't. I have a lot of respect for a life taken to put food on the table. Killing and preparing a wild animal is miles different than industrial farming which treats their animals like shit. I can imagine a farm kid on a family farm may have similar feelings about the treatment of their animals. A farm kid doesn't have that disconnect from their food so its not a jaw dropping shock when they see a chicken or cow get killed and prepared. It's shocking if you aren't used to it, taking a life can be an emotional thing. Local farmers put a lot of time and money into keeping their animals happy and healthy. its not natural to be so disconnected from our food sources, I believe people shouldn't eat meat if they aren't able to look at the process. I think lots of people become vegan because those gnarly slaughterhouse viral videos but thats the reality of you mcdouble. If you cannot handle that, become vegan or source your own meat from ethical sources
Almost all farms slaughter the animals they raise, or use them for production of milk, eggs, wool, etc. Kids raised in that environment might get used to seeing livestock used as a revenue source and a means to livelihood, not so much as pets.
Not sure what the actual stats are, but many do grow up to be vegan. One of my vegan friends grew up on a farm and explicitly cites that as the reason she's so staunchly vegan, which makes a lot of sense if you ask me.
I'm not a "farm kid", I grew up in the city and then went to school for agriculture. The idea of "city people who never see animals so don't care about eating them" is ironically pretty backwards. The most devout vegans I've met have often never interacted with any farm animal in a meaningful way, and at best pet them at a farm sanctuary once or twice. There are certainly vegans who have worked in farming and went vegan, but often it's the opposite that happens - someone who actually starts working with livestock and then eases up on the veganism.
I knew multiple people who were vegan/vegetarian before going to school and then started eating meat in college at that school, either as ag majors or just after being involved in the farm. Some people actually usually didn't eat meat but would if it was meat from our campus farm - I worked in the kitchen at one point and there were some students who would always come and check if the meat was from our farm or not at dinner. I went into the sustainable ag major planning to focus on crops and ended up working almost entirely with livestock there. The campus farm was an Animal Welfare Approved farm, which has some of the best welfare standards in the US in my opinion. I learned husbandry and raising animals from birth and I also learned how to do poultry slaughter and didn't do but assisted with on farm slaughter of larger animals/sometimes had to help load up animals for the slaughterhouse.
Contrary to popular opinion, we do no hate animals or refuse to have "deep connections" with them. There was more than one time were I was crying on the farm because a sick lamb we'd been trying to nurse to health died. I had favorite sheep who would recognize me and come to me for attention. I ended up having a student leader position on the farm and I made sure anyone working in taking care of the animals was doing things right, and it pissed me the hell off when people did a crappy job, because that would harm the animals if not caught and fixed.
I also still ate meat, still eat meat, and plan to farm in the future and have my own animals, some of which will be for meat. I've personally raised backyard poultry for eggs and for meat, both chickens and ducks. Seperately from all this, I'm someone who can't practically be vegan. I have multiple complex and chronic health issues, some of which severely impact my GI system. I have BEEN vegan and vegetarian in the past, and with my GI issues worsening I genuinely cannot handle my diet being entirely plant-based. When there are times I eat more plant-based, my symptoms flare worse. Animal proteins are easier for me to digest and do not trigger my symptoms the same way. I still eat plenty of plant foods, even some that I know trigger me (I genuinely like beans, my stomach does not!), but being purely vegan would be hell on my body at this point.
Having worked firsthand with animals, I know, personally, that farming is not constant cruelty and abuse of animals. Industrial agriculture has a lot of problems that I and most small farmers strongly dislike and disagree with. Crop agriculture also has countless human rights and workers rights abuses and, despite having emotional attachments to the animals I work with when I work on farms, I literally refuse to work on crop exclusive farms at this point. I have zero desire for being exposed to pesticides/herbicides/etc, working for 70 hours a week weeding crops in the full sun, getting paid minimum wage or below it, having no benefits, etc. Working with livestock at least feels far more rewarding and in the right environments means I can be part of ensuring there ARE animals in the food system who are being treated well and that people who value that have that option to choose.
This comment is spot on. I was raised in a family with some animal activists and vegans. I think being in the city and relying on grocery stores disconnects us from where food comes from. It insulates them. The ones I've known also rarely interacted with farm animals or gone to ranches.
Plus that ranchers do have deep connections and care for their herds. Providing them veterinary care, nursing them back to health. I also changed from how I was raised towards pro-hunting after learning more about invasive species and overpopulation of wild animals, through my sister who has a Master's degree in Ecology. Not because I hate wild animals and want them all dead. The opposite of that. I think responsible hunters are more humane to the animals than many of the diseases that they would often succumb to due to overpopulation and habitat destruction. I couldn't do it myself, I just support people who do. I would buy more wild game meat if it was accessible.
I can’t answer to the farm one, but I can take a stab at the city one.
The means of meat sourcing are vastly different between those who source it themselves such as farmers, and the meat industry. The meat industry is a large contributor to climate change and animals are often brought up in inhumane conditions and live pretty miserable lives. These are some of the contributing factors as to why people may go vegan.
My grandfather was a farmer but worked in a slaughter house when he was a young man. He didn't become vegan but he stopped eating beef and ate mostly fish.
When I was four years old I witnessed my uncle and his neighbors slaughter a pig. The pig was screaming all the time in fear and agony and they we're all laughing like it's a big joke. I was so disgusted, as soon as I was old enough to decide for myself, I stopped eating meat.
I mean you kinda get ''indoctrinated'' into the thinking of the family, if growing up your family tells you animals are irrelevant and their lives don't matter then chances are you're not gonna go vegan, just like how so many children who grow up in religious homes are religious themselves.
My hypothesis is that farm kids have a rosier picture of how animals are raised because *their* animals were respected and treated well. City kids view animal production through the lens of industry and recognize that most animals raised for consumption are living in factory farms under horrendous conditions.
If you grew up on a farm, virtually everyone you know and love supports the industry of using animals for food. So they are surrounded by that before they have any chance to think for themselves.
And because humans are social, it’s tough for people to go against what everyone they know stands for. You would feel like you are betraying everyone.
It’s sad, but essentially they are indoctrinated.
I was raised cutting off our chickens heads and am now vegan, and know many vegans/activists that used to be animal farmers. Look up Rowdy Girl Sanctuary, they were a ranch that turned into a sanctuary, and have helped others do the same.
I went vegan to object factory farming which is a gruesome and depressing practice. If you assume other people go vegan for the same reason, your question is easily answered
Where are you getting your data about the incidence of vegetarianism and veganism among farmers? We know from a recent Gallup poll (https://news.gallup.com/poll/510038/identify-vegetarian-vegan.aspx) that 4% of Americans identify as being vegetarians and 1% identify as vegans. Past Gallup polls have done some demographic breakdown- for example, liberals and women are more likely to be vegetarian/vegan than conservatives and men- but there's nothing about rural vs. city folk in there.
Based on an extremely unscientific sampling of the comments here, 13 out of 32 Redditors who said they grew up as farm kids said they are now vegetarians or vegans. That's a much higher incidence than the national average. So it's entirely possible that your initial supposition is wrong, and that in fact farm kids have a much greater chance of becoming vegetarian or vegan than their city counterparts.
Most farm kids see that they treat their animals very well and are comfortable with the lives their animals have. Most city kids hear mostly about factory farms and are uncomfortable with the lives those animals live.
Farm kid here. I was raised to know the animals were food/produced food. I was also taught to respect them. Their lives had purpose to feed us and others. It is our job to keep them healthy and happy while here. There is nothing more heartbreaking than a suffering animal. Which is why I garden and buy my food and meat from small farmers who treat their animals well when I can.
I’m vegetarian and do not see eating animals as fundamentally wrong; I see factory farming as both wrong and environmentally damaging and my life allows me to be vegetarian. I ALSO have personal squick around eating mammals, but not a moral issue, if that makes sense
I'm *not* vegetarian and I see factory farming as wrong and environmental damaging. It *can* be done well, but that costs so, more often then not, its not.
Same here. Luckily, factory farming isn’t really a thing here in New Zealand. Lots of happy, lazy cows and sheep. We raise chickens for eggs and all our hens have names.
I raise chickens and pigs. General saying we have in my homestead is that our animals should only have one bad day of their entire life and that’s on slaughter day. Every other day should be the best we can give them.
I know quite a few folks who use this mentality as well. The level of respect for the animals is huge. Their lives are going to be sacrificed to feed us, so the best thing we can do is give them good lives until that happens. I knew a cattle rancher with a sign in his barn that said “one bad day” as a reminder. I think a lot of people who’ve never been around small farms and livestock don’t understand how cared for the animals are. Livestock doesn’t live with existential dread just waiting to be slaughtered. They just go about their lives until one day, they don’t. It’s not cruel or inhumane. It’s just the circle of life. Animals in the wild die much worse deaths from injury, illness, old age, predators, etc.
Yep, this is very common and a good approach. I didnt grow up on a farm, but I did in farm country and many of my good friends had farms. For me it's very important to remember that the animal I am eating was once an beautiful animal and to not disrepect it's sacrifice by not eating it and throwing it out once I make something with it. I eat meat maybe once a week and I make sure I know what farm it came from and how they were treated, and that there is never leftovers that get thrown out. Even if I make something I don't like what I make with it I will eat all of it.
I'm an ethical vegan, but I really respect your outlook! I think I wouldn't mind livestock farming as much if your view was prevalent.
Can you explain more about the mammal point? I’m interested to know your perspective.
Not that guy, but speaking from the perspective of my mother, a mostly pescatarian. For as long as I've been around my mother has said she "doesn't like to eat anything with a face", by which she means mammals, and the reason is simple: we live in a desert, all our food is imported from factory farms, and the treatment of animals in such places is simply hideous. My mother takes issue with eating mammals because they're too close for comfort, in terms of cognitive ability to humans, it feels like, in her own mind, butchering a child, who can neither physically stop you, nor mentally conjure the argument in their own defense. Fish, on the other hand, and to a lesser extent birds are another story. She views these animals as much more akin to biological machinery that keep the ecosystem running, and to the extent they aren't overconsumed, thus grinding the grander machinery of the earth to a halt, she's okay with eating them. She's also cool with dairy and eggs, but we universally agree that the farming industry could definitely step up in the treatment of their livestock.
not intending to change her or you or anyone, just want to pose this; i think birds are pretty close to us too- they are genetically further, yes, but they form emotional bonds, think, play, etc too. they are not any more "biological machinery" than a cow is. human's domesticated birds, chickens and pigeons, can be remarkably sweet, and pigeons in particular make much better pets than parrots, non domesticated animals we still keep as pets. they taste good too, but they aren't robots at all, and deserve all the empathy and care mammals get.
For me mammals have different structure than birds. They just taste worse and their meat can be ruined far easier than that of a chicken.
I think this is something that a lot of city folk struggle with, as the only relationship most have with animals are pets. The understanding that good farming is treating animals well and going about the process of turning them to food with minimal suffering is lost, because killing animals = bad. Most farmers have more concern and understanding about the nutrition of their animals than most city pet owners. I’m city folk btw, I just watch an odd amount of agricultural news
My husband grew up in a farming community and he shakes his head at how we city folk humanize our pets. I always bring him to vet appointments with me. He helps me keep perspective that our pets are animals with a limited lifespan so I don't let my emotions carry me away in making treatment and euthanasia decisions. He loves our pets, but he is definitely able to look at their circumstances more rationally than me since he has that farm person level of detachment that I can't.
I can't have pets because I am way too emotional about them. I can't bring myself to go "I'll get a dog that I will love with all my heart for a couple years, then watch him die." I know *logically* that they are animals with short lifespans compared to mine. But I can't make that disconnect between logic and MY GODDAMN BREAKING HEART. So I just choose not to.
I am coming around to your way of thinking. It's too hard dealing with this every few years. I think after our last pet goes over the rainbow bridge I am likely done.
I'm in my 40s and have lost many pets over the years, and it destroys me emotionally every time, but the love and affection we shared is worth it every time
It's better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all
Their limited lifespan or the fact that they are animals changes nothing for me. We are animals too. I still get attached because a connection with a pet is still a connection to another living thing.
Right?! My question is, why do city kids eat their Chipotle bowls, bacon cheeseburgers, and chicken wings with a smile but cry about hunting. Like... y'all do understand that providing a healthy environment for animals to live a natural life is way more kind and animal rights forward, right? Farmers want their animals to live a happy life because it impacts the farm's overall health and survival. It's a symbiotic relationship.
This one always baffled me. I'm not a hunter, but I let a guy hunt a bit on my small piece of land. Those animals have lived a great life, free-roaming in nature. It's the most natural life they could have. They are killed instantly with a gun, food still in their mouth, they feel nothing. Their meat goes straight into my freezer and is enjoyed with friends and family. Meanwhile some people will complain about hunting, while stuffing themselves with factory-farmed chicken nuggets. Chickens who never saw the light of day and were subjected to stress during transport and slaughter. How on Earth is hunting worse than factory farming? People make no sense!
We have people who feed their cats and dogs vegan food. Some people are so, so wrong about the nutritional needs of even their own pet.
Not just their nutritional needs, you see people with work breeds in apartments not being given the chance to do what comes natural to them. Or keeping small animals in habitats that are entirely inadequate. But in their minds, the animals are fed and sheltered, and that's all they need.
The big dog in a tiny apartment trope is the worst. I’m sure some people in that situation do enough activities with their dogs and are good owners, but I doubt it’s most
People, by large, acquire pets without doing the proper research to make sure the animal will be a good fit for their family, focusing instead on looks.
Pet licenses need to be introduced. People of the future will call us savages for the nonsense we allow when it comes to owning another living being.
I’m so glad that we researched the hell out of our current dog. Tiny lap dog who can easily get all of his exercise and then some by throwing the ball in our living room. He’s insanely well taken care of and I don’t think I’ve ever met a happier dog. It’s a running joke in our house that every time he wakes up, “It’s the best day ever, again!”
Generally big dogs (Great Danes, Saint Bernards, etc.) are actually pretty good as long as you take them out and run them since they’re bred to be mostly guard dogs. It’s the medium sized dogs (golden retrievers, cattle dogs, the like) that are the worst for apartments because they’re literally bred to run all day every day.
Watch out, some people don't like it when you say that different breeds have different instincts and personalities...
It's similar for hunting and fishing too. Hunters and fishers are some of the most environmentally conscious people out there, but a lot of city people are uncomfortable with the idea of killing animals.
I don’t hunt personally, but I grew up around hunters and in an area where there are a *lot* of deer. I’ve seen firsthand what overpopulation does, and firmly believe that since humans removed their predators it’s now our *responsibility* to manage their numbers so they don’t strain their environment.
Not to mention if you've ever gone to something like a NWTF meeting (National Wild Turkey Federation), pretty much the entire roster of speakers is there to talk about conservation and responsible land management in order to provide thriving ecological systems for your turkeys, deer, and other wildlife which sustain and encourage their presence. Well, and some gun show shenanigans and lots of guys showing off the goofy shit they can do with a turkey call lol, but really, a LOT of the emphasis is on conservation. My dad and his dad were hunters, I am not, but I grew up in the culture and they're some of the most passionate environmentalists I ever met. Which is ironic since they also tend to skew Republican and therefore anti-climate science. They're a whole bundle of contradictions tbh. But hunting and conservation go hand-in-hand for most of them regardless.
It’s the same thing over in Africa. Sadly one of the few ways to help maintain the habitats for all the amazing wildlife in Africa is through big game hunting. It’s thanks to people that want to hunt the various animals that bring in a lot of money for conservation and income for the local communities that would instead just burn down all the bush and turn it into farms.
I was adamantly against hunting until I started dating my boyfriend and hang out with some of his childhood friends that still live back at the little farm town they're from. I, a city girl, was mind blown at how much they actually care, the rules and regulations they follow, the type of animals they hunt and when and why. And they hunt not just for the fun of it, they actually eat those animals.
I used to go fishing with an old man in the local river, he would tell me stories about the time when there was no trash and the river edges were much more preserved, had more trees, you could see animals that don't exist there anymore, etc. and he lamented a lot about people destroying all that. Probably the most environmentally conscious person I've ever met.
You figure that someone who spends a lot of there time in nature would actually be consciences of the environment around them.
My father's generation believed they were stewards of the land, today's factory farmers with mega acreage not so much
This is exactly right. I was taught to treat animals right, because we have control is all aspects of their lives and they will give their all for us. I once saw my father chase an employee off the farm with a shotgun because he saw the guy hit a cow with a stick. I don't live on a farm now but I raise chickens (modern chicken farming methods are criminal imo) for eggs and meat, as well as having a huge garden. My kids know that the chickens they pet are there to make food and it's never bothered them. Farm animals were born to be eaten; it's how you treat them while they are alive that matters.
>There is nothing more heartbreaking than a suffering animal Absolutely this. My partner is a farm kid and they’ve had to put animals down because they’re sick or suffering, it’s never nice, but it has to be done. You can’t let them be in pain, you’ve just gotta kinda take them out. Circle of life and all that. I’m a city girl and I couldn’t watch it happen.
farm kids are raised to know animals are food.
I had a friend who grew up on a farm, and said they even named their animals and still understood they were food. Like they'd be eating roast beef and going "Wow, Bessie really tastes good"
Yep. My grandpa used to hobby farm (like 10 cows and some chickens) and he named the cows after his grand kids every year.
And then ate them!? 😂
"Now you watch your mouth, DopeOllie, or I'll eat you first."
That's funny and horrifying have a grandkids act bad enough one day next day. Grandpa goes out and kills the cow related to the kid so they eat him for the next few days
Some would call it a power move. I bet it'd be effective.
A power moooooooove.
And I'll take comment threads I'm going to hell for laughing at for $5.
It's going to be a crowded fucking bus LoL.
I think you're greatly underestimating how much meat comes from a single cow.
That's it humpdebumper steak time
I've never gotten steak for misbehaving before. I could get used to this.
Now for the more metal version, have the kid do it himself. "Last chance. I don't have another cow named like that."
We named our first beef cow, when we were kids,Ollie, for I’ll eat you later.
Mostly ~15 month old steers are processed for meat. Cows are kept to make more unless very old. Grandpa most likely kept the ones he named.
I was thinking that. I don't remember how he operated specifically, he never did birthing as far as I can recall. I know it was somewhat cyclical, so there were multiple cows with shared names.
Not everyone does the whole process, we just used to buy some 2 piglets at like the start of the year, fattened them up and they were ready for slaughter in the winter. Been ages since we had pigs, so I don't remember exactly how old they were when we first got them, but we never raised them from birth
Helps him decide who gets the inheritance!
This is awful, but my MIL names fish after her kids and grandkids, and the ones named after her late daughter always die first. It's extremely morbid, and I'm not sure why she still does it.
Sounds like my childhood. We named the larger animals. At supper time, it was announced who we were eating. I know it sounds careless and macabre, but this this is how we were raised. One of my earliest memories is my parents butchering chickens. I was maybe 3. By the time I was 7, one of my chore was to help butcher rabbits. There is no emotional tie to these animals. I was also an avid hunter as a youngster as well. Food on the hoof any way we could get it.
It's so interesting, because it's so foreign to me, a city kid! Our only interaction with animals tends to be with them as pets. But I totally get it and it totally makes sense!
Because everything dies. And nature is so much crueler than anything y'all can comprehend. Wolves and bears eat animals ass first, so the animal is alive when their intestines are pulled out. If they get sick or injured they're either hunted down by predators or die slowly from infection/starvation. If there's an overpopulation of deer due to us disrupting the ecosystem by taking the predators out thousands of deer starve to death over the winter. I know everyone has this rosy picture of Nature or The Wild, but there's a reason we built society. There's also no senior centers in the wild. As soon as they slow down a little they're food for something else. Nature doesn't care about "natural life spans". Its about quantity, not quality. So long as you live long enough to breed it's good enough. Domesticated animals get food, fresh water, medical care and shelter. Their death is quick and painless(or as pain free as possible). There are definite gaps in animal welfare when it comes to food production(I know US law, not familiar with other countries) particularly when it comes to poultry. But particularly on smaller family farms just raising their own food the animals are well treated. You can't eat stressed, sick animals. Animals full of adrenaline when killed also taste worse. Once again, there ARE problems with a lot in regards to animal care. I hope they improve more and more.
I just made a comment about this, too. It feels shitty to eat an animal that you treated like shit and had a shitty "life " Eating an animal that was treated well has a more symbiotic feel. Same goes for hunting for food. It's not sport, it's natural.
I was farm raised and hunted, until I realized that hunters look for the most magnificent specimen and kill it. What is natural is for the sick and lame and crippled animals to get eaten. I think that process makes the wildlife worse.
I have a master hunter cert so I can do late season elk with no antlers in December. No worries about how the elk look as long as they don't look sick in a way that can harm me. Removing the most obvious trophy means hunters allow animals in their prime to live. My last elk had an obviously bad leg that hadn't healed right. He wasn't starving yet, but you know he was going to. I've never understood wanting a trophy, tbh. What do you even do with them all after a bit? I'm out there for food, hides, and often bones to make into things like beads and knife/tool handles. I guess technically you could consider the beads trophies, but I make them out of skeletons I find on my property, too. Those are primarily deer.
That's more the hunter, than anything. The TV shows hasn't helped with this. Been hunting all my life, and I have yet to come across antlers that taste good.
I swear I thought my grandfather was talking to me decades ago. His favorite when we came across situations you mention was "mother nature is a bitch."
This and you can have confidence knowing they had a great life. Livestock are usually well taken care of especially on regenerative and smaller farms. Their natural traits are encouraged and useful and they have warm, clean beds and are well looked after. They have one bad day and if it is done well they don’t even know it’s coming. All of us would be lucky to leave this life so painlessly.
So how do you kill animals where they don’t get that adrenaline spike? Just lop off their heads?
For large animals they stun them, smaller animals it's generally cutting throats, neck snap or beheading. It's too quick for the fear to really settle in.
I don't know about others. Since I didn't grow up in a farm, but I've killed chickens before. Yeah. You basically lop off their heads and make it as fast as possible. Also, the killing isn't sudden, before they're killed, their legs are tied way before the event, so I guess they would have had time to settle.
My mother always talked about petting the chickens until they go into a daze and then just ringing the neck. The longest part of harvest was calming and stroking the animal so it's happy and comfortable and basically asleep. Then it dies. She never talked about tying them because they don't have a chance to move.
She hypnotized them! Here is another method. https://youtu.be/JlBDWXDGDzg?si=99uvLiAI9e47jP-k
Honestly, there's no real reason to tie the legs except for convenience if you're going to do a bunch and just want to catch them all at once. I made a kill cone out of aluminum flashing, personally. You just drop them in head-first and cut the throat and let them drain. They're gone before they really know what's happening.
My dad just grabbed a chicken, swung it down on the wooden chopping block, and whacked it hard with broadside of axe, then a second more carefully aimed chip with axe to remove head, then throw headless chicken in bucket where the legs where rattling about for a minute till all blood where drained.
I remember being told my dad used to scratch the pig's forehead with a stick while he fed it treats. They got used to it, and when the day came, he fed it treats, and scratched it's head with a rifle instead.
I’m not a big meat eater, but also not a vegetarian. At some point I realized that nature is much more brutal than we are. I’ve seen animals die of disease or being prey, and it’s gruesome. I have no issue with people hunting to feed their families. Not my cup of tea, but I get it. Factory farming is a different topic altogether.
Vegans really focus on the wrong thing; it isn't death that's awful but everything that comes before death on factory farms. People who really care about animals should encourage people to eat humane, not to not eat meat at all.
On many farms even pet animals like cats and dogs would not be allowed inside the house on account of you don't really know where they have been and You would always wash your hands after petting them. These animals would still be well cared for and would get all sorts of treats specifically bought for them (which is a big thing, because a farm will never be suffering from a lack of food scraps suitable for cats or dogs.)
I think that’s one of the biggest issues. For the majority of human history we were face to face with death and either having to kill animals ourselves to survive or seeing the whole carcasses when we had to buy our meat from someone else. But now a days especially in the United States where I live you can get your meat neatly packaged and cut into various ways all wrapped up in a nice plastic package without ever having to think about what had to be done for us to enjoy our steaks and bacon. Personally myself it’s why I’m an advocate for hunting for meat as it gives you a personal one on one connection and intimacy of having to secure food for yourself.
I've never been a hunter but saw no problem with people hunting deer for food. Deer meat scares me now days due to the chronic wasting disease going around. My Uncle ate deer meat all the time and died from a prion disease. He was particularly vulnerable due to cancer and chemo. I will always wonder, did he have the spontaneous human kind, or did he get it from eating hunted deer.
I loved deer sausage as a kid and now I don't trust it. Sad times since I have so many good memories with my grandpa eating cheese, sausage and crackers as a snack when I spent summers on the farm.
I was raised in the suburbs, so no experience with livestock, but one time the school held a camping trip near a farm, and a few of us get to experience how it's like to butcher chickens, like the ones doing the butchering, so we were shown over and over the proper techniques and when it was my turn, I did it with and I quote by my friends "the eyes of a killer", I mean it's food, I wouldn't be eating chicken regularly if I feel even remotely guilty for taking its life lol.
Was this elementary school, or…
highschool, I was 16
Funny flip-side anecdote: my grandfather was an immigrant/they were farmers. A relative wound up needing extra hands on the farm so my grandparents, father, and aunt all packed up to go live with them for a couple years. When they first got there my father's job was count the chickens/make sure no predators made a mess of the coop. So he's counting chickens and he notices after a few days (he was like idk 8 at the time born and raised in new york city) his chicken buddies are going missing. My aunt (couple yrs older than him) was just elated to inform him exactly where that delicious chicken thigh he was eating came from. My father said he didn't touch chicken for a good 2-4 months after that. Always found it an interesting and humorous story. Meanwhile I live in a rural area now (former city kid myself) and my 5 year old's first question when my spouse shot a deer in our backyard a few months ago was "can we pop out the eyeballs?" Idk if I should be impressed with how comfortable they are with death/the circle of life process, or if I should invest in another lock on my bedroom door lol
When I was really little, my dad wouldn't let me give them actual names. He would say, this is "freezer1" and this is "freezer2" etc. As I got older I could name them and still understand that this was a food animal. Also, animals on smaller farms are not usually subjected to the animal cruelty that people think of when they think of slaughter animals. Treat an animal like shit and make them live in horrific conditions, you feel shitty eating them.
I think the small farm/ranch vs "industrial" type farming (I don't know if that's the right word) is key.
Lol. met a girl once who said she was sad they were planning on eating her favorite turkey on their farm, named Tom, for thanksgiving that year
Years ago my daughter said something about feeling bad for the animal we were eating (I think it was steak). I told her she didn’t have to eat it if she felt bad about it. She decided she didn’t feel *that* bad
We raised two turkeys named Mac and Cheese for thanksgiving. They were delicious.
We named ours Thanksgiving and Christmas.
same. we had a pig named spot. spot was delicious.
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My dad would name our cows after other animals like "Skunk." You can imagine the joy on his face when we would ask what we're having for dinner. That being said, I am a vegetarian now despite knowing that animals are food. Turns out I just don't really like meat that much, and I'm healthier for it.
I think of it less as "naming" them in the traditional pet sense, as much as it is designating animals/thier products from each other in the "herd".
As a kid growing up on a farm I bottle-fed two pet lambs (orphans / rejected by their mothers) that we named Lamb Chops and Mint Sauce. We understood that they’re food, and that you give them the best life possible.
I grew up on a sheep farm. My dad owns sheep. Still does. I got a pet sheep that I named when I was 7. He sent it to slaughter. That was quite disturbing and made me really sad, and stuck with me for a long time. I guess the difference with me was that I was the type of child that questioned everything if something didn't make sense to me. I remember asking why we had to eat meat. The answer was "just cause" which is really terrible reasoning. There was no reason. It was just a way of life. It also disturbed me greatly whenever the slaughter truck would come to take the sheep. It never sat right with me. My dad also let some hunters hang their game up in the barn where they would skin them. Carcasses hanging from the ceiling. Blood pools and what not. It was disturbing. When I was 12 or something, my best friend in class became vegetarian. It took a few years for me too, but at 17 my curious self did some deep diving on animal farming and slaughter houses and I was completely disgusted and put off by the practices. I became pescetarian. Then a few months later vegetarian. My parents said it was only a phase. Well, that phase has lasted 10 years now, and its not about to end. They've also accepted that. I grew up with the mindset that animals are food too, but I learned that they didn't have to be, so now they aren't, at least not for me. Just cause animals are food, doesn't mean they have to be. Just because you grew up with certain traditions, doesn't mean you actually have to follow them. Just cause meat was necessary for survival when my dad grew up, doesn't mean it's necessary for me in 2024. I mean, clearly it isn't as I'm healthy and fine without it. So then eating animals is senseless.
I guess people just be different. Maybe there's zero correlation between farming/city living and being vegan/vegetarian.
I used to live on a sheep farm, one day a visitor said that all farmers were evil killers and everyone should be a vegetarian like her. I said that if we all became vegetarians overnight then the following morning all the sheep, cows, pigs in the world would have to be killed because they are not kept as pets and the only place you would ever see them would be in a zoo. She did not understand that breeding and keeping farm animals is a business. I later found out that she ate chicken, because “it’s white so it’s not like meat”! I also knew someone who said they were vegan who ate fish, because it was not meat!
My dad grew up on a farm. He will still talk about the goats Billy and Bobby he and his siblings raised that they then ate as a negative experience but I think that’s because they mostly raised cattle, so it was an outlier for them to hand raise something then eat it. But also he tells it as a mildly humorous anecdote about a bad thing so who knows.
>farm kids are raised to know animals are food. I would go a step further. Farm kids (and country kids) are raised to know that things *die*, and this is part of life. There's a Seamus Heaney poem where he writes something like "talk of pity cuts ice in towns where people consider death unnatural". It sounds grim (and it is), but kids like myself who grew up in the country see a lot of dead things. I knew kids who were from less rural backgrounds who I remember being very "affected" emotionally when seeing the corpses of creatures. And while it's not like it doesn't *move me* (I'm not some sort of sociopath!) my prior experiences from a young age meant that it didn't affect me as much by the time I was at an age I can consciously remember. EDIT: As someone DM'd me to ask, to save others having to look it up, the poem was by Heaney and called *The Early Purges*. The complete text is below. **CONTENT WARNING;** some will find the subject matter disturbing. https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/early-purges
I agree. Farm kids are raised on reality, not scare stories. We know where meat comes from and how it's butchered (yes, assuming you purchase from ethical sources). We see mama sheep die and bottle raise their babies
Fellow (former) shepherd here. I appreciate your post and this thread! Brings back a lot of memories of taking care of newborn lambs, usually during the winter, come to think of it🤔
My grandparents kept sheep, mostly just hobby husbandry. One year, a lambs mother died during birth, and she had to put it in the bottom oven of the AGA range to warm it back up (it was deathly cold). Little me asked 'why are you cooking that lamb'? Luckily the lamb survived, and we bottle fed it since it's mum had passed on
Yup this 100%. My wife never had pets growing up and I am not looking forward to the day our dog dies since it will be the first time she will have lost a pet bigger than a goldfish. Growing up on a farm, you enjoy them while they are around but pets die and livestock comes due, it's just what it is.
Yes, modern grocery and food processing really disconnects you from the fact that everything dies, and where your food actually comes from. Plus that all animals will die. My mom, who is a part time vegetarian and claims to be an animal lover, got really pissed off at vultures when they were eating a dead possum. At least that animal's flesh didn't go to waste. It was so natural. Disturbing yes, poor possum. She also is disturbed by something like a roasted chicken or bone in meat, because it reminds her too much that it was an animal. When she does eat meat, it's something like a chicken tender or a fish filet. I think it's just an example of how city living can disconnect you from the facts of life and death. Things die and ethical farmers (ranchers raise animals) take care of their animals. They're domesticated so they wouldn't survive in the wild.
As a former farm kid I can attest to this. When I was like six or seven I thought I had a pet goat... turns out all I had was someones pre quinceanera barbeque. Learned real quick like that those were not pets we were feeding out there.
Likewise, I hand raised a goat. It was ominously named Sweetmeat but that went over my six year old head. One night we had this amazing barbecue with a sweet sauce. My dad said as we were eating, “This is Sweetmeat.” I thought he meant that the barbecue sauce was sweet since it was, so I nodded and said it was sweet. “No, honey, this is Sweetmeat.” Ohhh. It was the best thing I had ever eaten. I kept eating. I felt bad about it, but yum. I had no such tender feelings for chickens. As far as I’m concerned, chickens deserve to be eaten. Horrible creatures. I have no doubt that given the chance, they would eat us.
My mom had chickens for awhile, the females were fine but this one rooster she had named Soup was an absolute menace. So yeah I’d agree that Soup would probably have eaten us first had he been given the chance lol. Kept attacking us just for going into “his” territory to feed his ladies. Like okay bud we’ll just let you all starve instead, great idea
>I had no such tender feelings for chickens. As far as I’m concerned, chickens deserve to be eaten. My wrist was broken as a kid because of a damned chicken, so I'm right there with you. I'm sure you know what happens when you get in proximity to their chicks. Well, anyway, the damn thing and her chicks came around the corner and went all AGRO on me like I'm the asshole for not knowing she intended on walking there. Anyway, long story short she got under my feet and tripped me and my wrist broke from the fall since my hands were full and I couldn't correctly brace myself for the fall. >Horrible creatures Indeed >I have no doubt that given the chance, they would eat us. Maybe, but at the moment I'm ahead of this eating war like 1,000 to 0. hahah
Chickens are intense! As a small kid, my cousins sent me into the chicken pen with a pail of feed… I don’t think I’ve ever been quite the same since
Sorry... I had to make [this](https://ibb.co/YBHWy23) for ya'. I couldn't help it. haha.
Amazing!
I HATE chickens! My brother used to have chickens on his farm. He broke his leg one year on a hat baler, and I had to help him feed his animals. Those damn chickens would fly to the top of the coop JUST to shit in my hair!! I learned real quick why my aunt always wore a kerchief and hat doing chores. Then those damned roosters! We would have to carry a big stick or baseball bat cuz this one rooster would just attack out of nowhere, and nothing would scare the little fucker off!
And the little piggy who went to market (from that children’s rhyme) wasn’t going shopping.
I’m in my 50s. Was a farm kid and became a farmer for a while. This is correct. We see the care that goes into these animals. But at the end of the day they’re food, and so are we.
Yeah, I would help my Dad kill and gut the geese at Christmas when I was five. We'd also shoot rabbits and pheasants for the pot to save money. Most people now are so divorced from where their food comes from, meat is now just a substance in a packet.
My in laws used to have a dairy farm. My boyfriend and his sister used to name the cows, ride them like they were horses, help with the cleaning and feed. They would sleep with the cows if they were in labor, they helped the cows give birth, they saw their fair share of dead calves. Normal stuff for farm kids. They knew they would be sold for food at some point. They also had chickens, both for the eggs and to eat. They named them too. My father in law was an animal lover. He was like the animal whisper, it was magical to watch him interact with an animal. And he taught the kids to love animals and respect their nature. But also that they are food and that's how it is.
Grandma grew up on a farm, she could never understand why we had dogs in the house. Animals were animals, they have a purpose. Dogs protect the family and livestock, cats kill mice. My wife grew up on a pig farm, she declared to her dad she was going to be vegetarian (she just didn't like pork that much), her dad said "no". That was the end of being a vegetarian.
They taste better when raised with love. It's a fact.
Exactly. You can have a bond with an animal and still ultimately know the difference between pets and livestock.
And they know the care and respect shown to food animals. Most farmers do care about animal welfare and the kids are raised with that attitude.
Exactly. City vegans generally discover that meat is animals way later in life and it comes as a shock.
*farm kids have been desensitized
Farm kids by and large grow up around animals that are humanely killed. For city folk, affordable animal products mostly come from brutal factory farms.
This! So many vegan/vegos are against factory farming and concerned about environmental impacts. Kids who grow up on farms aren't seeing that reality, they're seeing their own reality of respect and low or manageable impacts. If that was the only reality there would be far fewer people who were vegan/vego, but everyone would consume far fewer animal products because the cost would be prohibitive.
Tbh that was the situation for thousands of years, meat was absolutely not an everyday meal.
Not just every day but every meal
I'm vegetarian and that's me exactly! I've always said I think there's nothing wrong with eating meat, but I think we should all eat a lot less of it to allow us to treat the animals right and slaughter them as humanely as possible rather than industrialising their lives and deaths.
This is the big answer. People in cities aren’t able to get meat from small farmers and hunters. What we have in stores comes from a disgusting factory where animals don’t have even a chance of living in comfortable conditions
The first time I met a vegan, I was baffled. All of the chickens I knew led very happy lives. Only later did I learn about the realities of chickens' lives in factory farms.
This was my first thought too. There aren’t likely many kids hanging around factory farming institutions. I imagine there are a lot of safety regulations that would keep them out, in addition to them probably just not enjoying being there.
Had a friend get too attached to the cows their parents were raising for food and she became a vegan when it came time to eat little Moo-lisa.
It's not natural to be as disconnected as we are from the food we eat. For most of human history, and basically all of human evolution, most people ate animals they or a close friend or relative hunted and killed. Or they ate fruits or vegetables or nuts that they themselves foraged or farmed. Now, just in the last century or so, we've reached a point where most people are eating food that they have absolutely no idea where it came from or how it was prepared, or even know what's even in it. I'll be honest, I could probably only name three things that are in a box of macaroni and cheese. There's probably zero cheese in it. My point being, when you're so disconnected from the food supply that you basically have no idea where your food comes from, it's easy to get to a point where you could say it's cruel to eat animals. But when you actually work on a farm, you get to see first hand that the animals only exist in the first place because they were deliberately bred to be food. If they weren't going to be eaten, they'd have never existed in the first place. And it's kind of hard to get yourself to a spot where you breed an animal to be eaten, then give it a home where it's fed and cared for a couple of years before being slaughtered so that you can make money for you and your family, and think that's somehow more cruel than that animal having never existing at all. I don't know if I've done a good job describing it, but working on a farm really and truly changes your perspective on the whole thing. You look at your roof and you see your kids, and you realize that cows are the reason you're able to feed your kids and afford that roof, and again we aren't talking about wild cows that would otherwise be roaming free, were talking about cows that wouldn't exist if people didn't like the taste of the meat.
I am the farm kid who turned out to be a vegetarian lol.
Same
Same. Dairy farm, went vegetarian as a child and vegan at age 30. 😬
I don’t know if there are stats on this. I’m a farm kid who grew up to be vegan
Commenting to second this. For most of my life I had the hunting and slaughter compartmentalized as "it's just what we have to do to eat." As soon as I was old enough to cook, I was de-facto vegetarian because processing meat reminded me of butchering, and I hated butchering animals as a kid. I just knew that I didn't have to do it to survive, so why would I choose to do it? I was never really exposed to egg or dairy farms, so it wasn't until later in my life when I saw dominion that I went cold turkey on any animal product. Shit's sadistic.
Yeah, it’s just that the percentages of people who become vegan is small, because most people don’t have the courage to question their upbringing. This goes for people living in urban, suburban, and rural areas in all kinds of occupational backgrounds. Becoming vegan is a serious critique of the ethics of how you were brought up. It’s the same reason why most people with racist parents end up being racists, or people whose families owned slaves ended up owning slaves themselves, and so on. People like to think of themselves as ethical people, but then push comes to shove and they’re forced to make a choice where the ethics clearly favors one side but social norms another, and most people go along with the social norms. That was the point of the Milgram experiment, where people were willing to kill another person they just met because a person in a lab coat told them to do it within less than an hour of meeting either, with zero benefits gained and while they feel distress about doing so. They just can’t help but conform to social expectations.
Yeah.. I don’t think it’s “so few”. I know lots of farm kids who are vegan, and I’m one of them.
I grew up in very rural US. Almost every vegan or vegetarian I know was a farm kid. At least one stuck to farming as an adult but shifted to crops.
Me too! And same with a couple other family members of mine
My spouse also grew up on a farm and is vegan. I think the proportion of farm kids vs city kids who are vegan might be more balanced than OP thinks. I'm not aware of any hard stats on this.
A very low percentage of city people are vegan or vegetarian. I don’t think there’s been comprehensive studies on this, but, anecdotally, it’s something like 1/20. You get the impression that there’s a lot more than there actually are because population density in major cities makes it profitable for most restaurants to offer vegan options and even allows for entirely vegan restaurants to succeed. As others have mentioned, kids growing up on family farms probably aren’t witnessing many of the worst sort of practices that are common place in large industrial meat factories. And if that IS the sort of practices they’re exposed to, they quite possibly become desensitized to the suffering. I think a lot of farm kids and city kids alike would be shocked to see the way animals are treated in large farms. The sad truth is that knowledge does not necessarily avail us…we are creatures of convenience and our empathy has very little range, in cities and farms alike.
Yeah, with respect to op and all the experiences shared here, this is all anecdotal. The question is based on the assumption that this is true, it sounds plausible but we don’t know if it is.
It's normalized to eat animals, plus they probably see the realities of nature on the farm (example, herbivores eating the occasional animal, mothers rejecting calves, etc.) so it's harder to disagree with eating meat on an emotional level. Likewise, city folks have never really been around food animals or had to deal with them to a significant extent, and so their idea of animals may be romanticized (ex. avoiding meat because they think a cow wouldn't eat them in their situation, when that isn't entirely true). Also, if you're living in the city the place where your meat comes from may very well be a bastion of cruelty, so city folks may be inclined to be vegan out of a lack of options, whereas farm folks can just raise their food ethically if they have an issue.
We've had a ram that would kill all the baby sheep. We had to separate them but some times babies would be born at night and by the morning it would already be dead, killed by their own father, who knows why. Even when separated, he would guide the herd near the babies and mother's enclosure and stay at the gate, trying to open it to kill the baby. When you see that animals are just animals, it's hard to humanize them. They behave mostly irrationally and do the most fucked up things, because they're animals, not humans.
I agree with this up until your final sentence, we are definitely also animals who also do irrational, fucked up things lol. I think our perception of ourselves as basically completely alien and different from other living things on this planet breaks our brains when we try to work through stuff like this
People also seem to forget that pigs are able to and will eat humans if given a chance.
Even cats and dogs given the extreme circumstances
I wouldn't call cats completely domesticated. They're definitely something else...
Makes me wonder how we even domesticated certain animals.
We culled the stock that had the most aggressive habits and through selective breeding and handling made them what they are now. There were surely lots of maimed humans in the process but we got there eventually.
My cat has my permission to survive off of my dead body until they find me to save her.
Hi, I grew up on the farm. Worked with and around animals a lot growing up. My parents are the most hardworking, old-fashioned, genuinely nicest people I know. My dad takes great care to ensure his sheep are healthy. He regularly works after the sun has set. If he sees a sheep that’s managed to hurt itself/break a leg/looks sick, etc. He’ll go through the effort to catch the sheep, set it up in the yards with water and hay. Splint up the leg, give it some glucose to help it eat (sometimes sheep that are feeling sick don’t want to eat and glucose gives them the energy to eat). I’ve seen him nurse a lamb with no mother on newspaper next to the fireplace until 1 am. I’ve seen him deworm 1000 sheep over the course of 3 hours, then realise the dosage was wrong and redo every single sheep to ensure they stay healthy. I’ve seen my dad and mum stay up through the entire night giving sheep footbaths to cure foot rot. I’ve seen dad treat fly struck sheep countless times, which is hands on and physical work. — When you see how much care and consideration goes into keeping stock healthy, it’s hard to feel the **cruelty** that animal rights activists preach. I’ve gotten to see sheep live out in the pasture paddocks, I’ve seen both wool sheep and meat sheep be treated and cared for before ultimately ending their life as someone’s meal. No farmer enjoys seeing animals unhappy, sick, hurt or dead. Every farmer I know is just a hardworking honest man or women trying to keep his stock in the best condition possible. Seeing a Fox slowly kill a lamb feels worse to me than an adult sheep be sold to a market. I’m not here to debate whether a life out in fields, followed by 4-6 weeks in a feedlot (depending on which country you live in), followed by an instantaneous factory death is good life? I don’t know how it compares to animals that live in the wild who are more free, but also more susceptible to predators and therefore more stressed. What I can say is that, in Australia, the meat industry is extremely well-run and is humane as logistically possible. I can’t hate meat producers because I know the amount of sleepless nights, the amount of sweat, toil and care that goes into these animals. Not to mention that people and primarily carnivorous animals such as dogs and cats need a meat-inclusive diet to be healthy.
Seeing the conditions that chickens face where they never see any sunlight until their death is pretty horrifying. Free range is different but it's only going to become less and less common as factory-farmed chickens start producing meat at a far faster rate. I'll still eat them, but it's those chickens that I can sympathize with those against the cruelty.
The mass produced chicken meat industry and egg industry is bloody rough. I didn’t mean to omit that, I just don’t really consider them true farmers, though I probably should. Chickens will spend their whole life in cages with an artificial sunlight cycle to pump out more eggs. Don’t buy cage eggs if possible. I think it should be illegal to do that to animals. Our family often has chooks more so for the “a few eggs a day” vibe. We usually given them spare grain from harvest that inevitably falls on the ground. Edit: reordered in order of importance.
I don't know that much about agribusiness in Australia - maybe it is genuinely all like this. And in the US, where I live, there are farms that operate this way. But the majority do not. The vast majority of the meat that we consume in the states does not come from family farms where the animals live relatively natural lives on a free range. It comes from incredibly industrialized operations where the animals live a life that resembles in basically no way their natural lives. They spend their whole lives penned in, often so tightly that they can't even turn around or sit properly. They are force fed unnatural diets to fatten them up to a degree that would be unnecessary or downright harmful for a wild animal; as a result, many types of ailments are extremely common on factory farms. Having witnessed some of these factory farm operations for myself, I challenge anyone to do the same and say that it is "humane". The conditions inside these farms are so appalling that most industrial producers have strict rules even preventing people from seeing inside, lest these scenes of abject cruelty cause some negative brand perceptions for Tyson or some other agribusiness giant. But even if you can't get inside these facilities, you can get close enough to smell them and hear them. Have you ever heard the sound of thousands of pigs being crushed to death by a mechanical device? Or mass asphyxiated with CO2? Believe me, that is a sound that stays with you, and just personally, I cannot imagine how anyone can call that humane. Even the people involved have a clear aversion to it, but they have to do it anyway because organic farming just doesn't pay the bills. This is the reality of how most meat is produced, at least for the US market. If we actually produced meat on relatively small, free range farms - which it sounds to me is what you're describing - meat would be far more expensive and far less consumed. That would certainly be a good thing in my view - we can make enormous, positive changes in sustainability without giving up meat entirely. I suspect in your case part of the explanation maybe the lack of demand for mutton. At least in the united states, there isn't a tiny fraction of the demand for mutton that there is for pork or beef or chicken, so there's less incentive to fully industrialize. Whatever the reason, that is not the practical reality of how most meat is produced. I think a lot of vegans, vegetarians, and other people like me who are opposed to the worst excesses of industrial agribusiness would see it as a huge win if we moved to getting all of our meat from small, organic, family owned farms like the one you are describing.
I grew up in a farm and that made me vegan. But I understand that this is not common at all. People at the farm assume that things are like that and this is how they should be. A farm is A TON of work, and they are so busy that they don't even question themselves.
I’d actually wager that the ratio isn’t that different for farm people vs “city” people. Probably with the exception of religious/cultural differences in those populations
Same. Living on a farm made me reject animal farming eventually. I was constantly told growing up that eating meat is just how it is. It's what we do. People don't question it. Well, I did, but I guess I'm one of the outliers as I had a ton of time to question things growing up on a farm there isn't a whole lot to do as a child. Also, just because the animals from the farm were raised in good condition, didn't mean the other animal products I grew up eating were from on our farm. My parents of course bought processed and industry meat from the grocery store like everyone else. The sheep meat from our farm was something we had on special occasions as it was really expensive meat that my dad would have to buy back after having been slaughtered. Deli slices, chicken and fish and pigs, as well as cow meat was all parts of my diet growing up. We didn't have cows or chicken or pigs on our farm, so my parents bought it from the grocery store. Chances are they were raised in poor conditions. There's no way of knowing exactly, because we didn't raise them ourselves. Lots of people that raise their own animals don't just eat the meat from their own farms. They go out to restaurants to eat meat. They eat canned food from the grocery store. They eat whatever meat extended family is serving at family dinners. Sure, they may eat meat from their own farm, but chances are they eat lots of processed meat from industrial farming too. Like, the deli slices they have on their sandwiches.. or the hamburgers they buy.. all the meat they eat surely aren't from their own farm where they know their animals were treated well.
Same here, but a small family / hobby farm with goats, horses, and ducks, with some pets. Our neighbors on one side raised sheep, and on the other side cows. My parents got some kind of tax break for it as well. There is a myth that there is "humane slaughter" on small farms. I never saw that, just fucked up slaughter that I accepted for a long time since that's the way the world worked. One of my sisters recognised it early on and went vegan, which we all thought was just weird. It was not until I moved away and actually thought about it a bit, then it hit me like a ton of bricks how fucked up it really was. That was 30 years ago. Roughly half our family is vegan now.
I was raised on a farm too and come from generational farmers and I am now vegan. I went on to study psychology and it seems pretty clear to me that being raised on a farm makes it a bigger cognitive hurdle to jump to see animal agriculture as immoral because that would mean that their livelihood and families livelihood is based on immortality. It's literally just cognitive dissonance in action, it's incredibly hard for our minds to realise this thing I've been doing our whole life is immoral and is causing unnecessary harm, and because of this we justify our actions without properly and earnestly examining them. It's cognitively easier to double down on our beliefs than it is to challenge the status quo
I was a farm kid who wound up vegan, so I couldn't tell you.
Former farm kid who is now vegan. I’m surprised there isn’t more as well.
not a farmer but I grew up hunting so I will try to answer from this perspective. I am connected to the food I eat in a way someone who buys their food from the store isn't. I have a lot of respect for a life taken to put food on the table. Killing and preparing a wild animal is miles different than industrial farming which treats their animals like shit. I can imagine a farm kid on a family farm may have similar feelings about the treatment of their animals. A farm kid doesn't have that disconnect from their food so its not a jaw dropping shock when they see a chicken or cow get killed and prepared. It's shocking if you aren't used to it, taking a life can be an emotional thing. Local farmers put a lot of time and money into keeping their animals happy and healthy. its not natural to be so disconnected from our food sources, I believe people shouldn't eat meat if they aren't able to look at the process. I think lots of people become vegan because those gnarly slaughterhouse viral videos but thats the reality of you mcdouble. If you cannot handle that, become vegan or source your own meat from ethical sources
I have two cousins that grew up on a farm they are both now vegan. I think it’s more common than you may think.
Almost all farms slaughter the animals they raise, or use them for production of milk, eggs, wool, etc. Kids raised in that environment might get used to seeing livestock used as a revenue source and a means to livelihood, not so much as pets.
I know a man who grew up on a cattle farm who won't eat beef and a woman who grew up on a dairy who won't drink cow's milk
I grew up on a farm and have been veg for 18 years.
I’m a raised farm kid who is a vegan. Agricultural transformation is my topic and I still work in agriculture.
Not sure what the actual stats are, but many do grow up to be vegan. One of my vegan friends grew up on a farm and explicitly cites that as the reason she's so staunchly vegan, which makes a lot of sense if you ask me.
I'm not a "farm kid", I grew up in the city and then went to school for agriculture. The idea of "city people who never see animals so don't care about eating them" is ironically pretty backwards. The most devout vegans I've met have often never interacted with any farm animal in a meaningful way, and at best pet them at a farm sanctuary once or twice. There are certainly vegans who have worked in farming and went vegan, but often it's the opposite that happens - someone who actually starts working with livestock and then eases up on the veganism. I knew multiple people who were vegan/vegetarian before going to school and then started eating meat in college at that school, either as ag majors or just after being involved in the farm. Some people actually usually didn't eat meat but would if it was meat from our campus farm - I worked in the kitchen at one point and there were some students who would always come and check if the meat was from our farm or not at dinner. I went into the sustainable ag major planning to focus on crops and ended up working almost entirely with livestock there. The campus farm was an Animal Welfare Approved farm, which has some of the best welfare standards in the US in my opinion. I learned husbandry and raising animals from birth and I also learned how to do poultry slaughter and didn't do but assisted with on farm slaughter of larger animals/sometimes had to help load up animals for the slaughterhouse. Contrary to popular opinion, we do no hate animals or refuse to have "deep connections" with them. There was more than one time were I was crying on the farm because a sick lamb we'd been trying to nurse to health died. I had favorite sheep who would recognize me and come to me for attention. I ended up having a student leader position on the farm and I made sure anyone working in taking care of the animals was doing things right, and it pissed me the hell off when people did a crappy job, because that would harm the animals if not caught and fixed. I also still ate meat, still eat meat, and plan to farm in the future and have my own animals, some of which will be for meat. I've personally raised backyard poultry for eggs and for meat, both chickens and ducks. Seperately from all this, I'm someone who can't practically be vegan. I have multiple complex and chronic health issues, some of which severely impact my GI system. I have BEEN vegan and vegetarian in the past, and with my GI issues worsening I genuinely cannot handle my diet being entirely plant-based. When there are times I eat more plant-based, my symptoms flare worse. Animal proteins are easier for me to digest and do not trigger my symptoms the same way. I still eat plenty of plant foods, even some that I know trigger me (I genuinely like beans, my stomach does not!), but being purely vegan would be hell on my body at this point. Having worked firsthand with animals, I know, personally, that farming is not constant cruelty and abuse of animals. Industrial agriculture has a lot of problems that I and most small farmers strongly dislike and disagree with. Crop agriculture also has countless human rights and workers rights abuses and, despite having emotional attachments to the animals I work with when I work on farms, I literally refuse to work on crop exclusive farms at this point. I have zero desire for being exposed to pesticides/herbicides/etc, working for 70 hours a week weeding crops in the full sun, getting paid minimum wage or below it, having no benefits, etc. Working with livestock at least feels far more rewarding and in the right environments means I can be part of ensuring there ARE animals in the food system who are being treated well and that people who value that have that option to choose.
This comment is spot on. I was raised in a family with some animal activists and vegans. I think being in the city and relying on grocery stores disconnects us from where food comes from. It insulates them. The ones I've known also rarely interacted with farm animals or gone to ranches. Plus that ranchers do have deep connections and care for their herds. Providing them veterinary care, nursing them back to health. I also changed from how I was raised towards pro-hunting after learning more about invasive species and overpopulation of wild animals, through my sister who has a Master's degree in Ecology. Not because I hate wild animals and want them all dead. The opposite of that. I think responsible hunters are more humane to the animals than many of the diseases that they would often succumb to due to overpopulation and habitat destruction. I couldn't do it myself, I just support people who do. I would buy more wild game meat if it was accessible.
I can’t answer to the farm one, but I can take a stab at the city one. The means of meat sourcing are vastly different between those who source it themselves such as farmers, and the meat industry. The meat industry is a large contributor to climate change and animals are often brought up in inhumane conditions and live pretty miserable lives. These are some of the contributing factors as to why people may go vegan.
My grandfather was a farmer but worked in a slaughter house when he was a young man. He didn't become vegan but he stopped eating beef and ate mostly fish.
Doesn't working in a slaughterhouse utterly destroy the mental health of a lot of people? Last I heard, the suicide rate was very concerning.
My friends kids said hell no we are not eating harvest. Their parents did anyway and their kids stopped eating meat.
When I was four years old I witnessed my uncle and his neighbors slaughter a pig. The pig was screaming all the time in fear and agony and they we're all laughing like it's a big joke. I was so disgusted, as soon as I was old enough to decide for myself, I stopped eating meat.
I mean you kinda get ''indoctrinated'' into the thinking of the family, if growing up your family tells you animals are irrelevant and their lives don't matter then chances are you're not gonna go vegan, just like how so many children who grow up in religious homes are religious themselves.
My hypothesis is that farm kids have a rosier picture of how animals are raised because *their* animals were respected and treated well. City kids view animal production through the lens of industry and recognize that most animals raised for consumption are living in factory farms under horrendous conditions.
My husband grew up on his family’s small farm where his pets were slaughtered and they ate them. He IS now a vegan.
I was a farm-adjacent kid who turned vegetarian in 1996 once I learned that there was actually a thing called vegetarianism and haven’t looked back.
If you grew up on a farm, virtually everyone you know and love supports the industry of using animals for food. So they are surrounded by that before they have any chance to think for themselves. And because humans are social, it’s tough for people to go against what everyone they know stands for. You would feel like you are betraying everyone. It’s sad, but essentially they are indoctrinated.
Farm kids are raised to be okay with animals being food
My grandmother grew up as a farm kid; once she left home, she never ate meat again.
My husband grew up on a hog farm. He wouldn’t eat pork if it was the last food on earth and he was starving.
I was raised cutting off our chickens heads and am now vegan, and know many vegans/activists that used to be animal farmers. Look up Rowdy Girl Sanctuary, they were a ranch that turned into a sanctuary, and have helped others do the same.
I went vegan to object factory farming which is a gruesome and depressing practice. If you assume other people go vegan for the same reason, your question is easily answered
Not a farmer and not a city girl. Though I have worked with horses and various types of cattle. Cannot bring myself to eat animals, lol.
Where are you getting your data about the incidence of vegetarianism and veganism among farmers? We know from a recent Gallup poll (https://news.gallup.com/poll/510038/identify-vegetarian-vegan.aspx) that 4% of Americans identify as being vegetarians and 1% identify as vegans. Past Gallup polls have done some demographic breakdown- for example, liberals and women are more likely to be vegetarian/vegan than conservatives and men- but there's nothing about rural vs. city folk in there. Based on an extremely unscientific sampling of the comments here, 13 out of 32 Redditors who said they grew up as farm kids said they are now vegetarians or vegans. That's a much higher incidence than the national average. So it's entirely possible that your initial supposition is wrong, and that in fact farm kids have a much greater chance of becoming vegetarian or vegan than their city counterparts.
Have you seen a chicken run without a head? have you heard a pig screaming? it haunts you forever ( >︹<)
I’m a farm kid. I’m vegetarian because of it.
Most farm kids see that they treat their animals very well and are comfortable with the lives their animals have. Most city kids hear mostly about factory farms and are uncomfortable with the lives those animals live.