I am going to speak as someone that has been a meat-eater for about 36 years of their life and actually remains rather divided on whether to remain one or not.
I will tell my vegan friends precisely why I have never actually been bothered by the fact that furry animals had to die horribly for my meat.
The fact of the matter is that I did not give a happy fuck about them, either way.
This might come as a shock to you, but you must understand that there is a distinctive reason why I treat both my non-human pets and my fellow human being differently, or rather, there are several.
For one thing, my fellow human beings and I have a sort of peace treaty between each other. In fact, it is most incredibly unnatural for a human male to survive for very long after having reached adulthood, assuming that he got to adulthood in one piece at all. Prior to what came to be thought of as "civilized warfare," in which inter-tribal warfare in some parts of the world ceased to be entirely a bloody massacre and became merely a risky endeavor in which one was merely in grave danger of getting killed rather than having a rather laughable probability of surviving, especially after one's own tribe had been defeated, humans did not really take kindly to encountering humans that they were not actually related to, and as a matter of fact, they saw any human being that they were not related to in a similar light to how one might see a goblin or an orc from out of an AD&D game or a mutated virus zombie from out of one of those Survivor games. They saw their fellow human being as a hideous parody of a proper sapient creature that ought to be destroyed violently before they spread their disease existence to others, although their women were often regarded as just barely acceptable to take as concubines and therefore violently rape and exploit for menial labor. This might have gone on right up until the present, but they came up with this clever idea where they would try doing this "war" thing according to a set of rules with certain limitations on how many of each other they were really allowed to murder and how ruthlessly they were allowed to commit such murders and what sorts of tactics were regarded as sufficiently "honorable" to warrant those using them not being exterminated as expeditiously as possible. In other words, they developed the raw tissue of what eventually was transformed into a system of law, and those that were prepared to abide by such laws tended to have fatter offspring and fatter wives than those that did not, resulting in them vastly outnumbering their relatively lawless rivals.
Well, I tend to follow the laws that say that I am not allowed to murder people for the same reasons why dogs do not often prefer to shit where they are also inclined to sleep: it is sort of an instinct that I am compelled to follow. Do not get me wrong, by the way: there have been times when I have heard about rampage shootings and thought wistfully about how amazingly effective such behavior is at gloriously driving home the point that, as a matter of fact, one actually is not satisfied with present conditions and frankly has the most profound possible contempt toward those that have participated in keeping them that way, not really any sort of lofty sense of respect or esteem at all and certainly not jealousy. This type of behavior is simply handily intercepted by the fact that that type of behavior is not really allowed.
In fact, it takes quite a lot for me to say that I should do something that is not really allowed. A law or a rule or a guideline must be borne out of the most hideous possible malfeasance and misconception and brazen unabashed hypocrisy that the human mind can possibly dwell upon without coming down with a sense of adequately morbid disgust to induce explosive emetic expulsion in even the most seasoned mountebankerous buffoon. The sodomy laws and, by extension, the anti-zooey laws are a prime example: although I do, in fact, absolutely and profoundly reject them with unbridled and hostile contempt, I do not do so either lightly or comfortably, and if I have reached such a point, then one must truly be certain that I am inclined to subject anybody that attempts to shame me over it to violent pugilistic bombardment until such point as they either shut up for a while or are driven into a long-term coma. In general, I am a very lawful person, which is based on my trust in society to at least try to be at least somewhat tolerable in terms of what sorts of laws it chooses to author, and when that trust is betrayed, suffice it to say that I am rather pissed.
However, there is a deep cultural context to why I do not go around murdering my fellow man for any reason at all.
When I adopt an animal as a pet, you could say that I am adopting that animal, on an individual basis, as a member of my tribe. As such, I think that, due to my relationship with that animal, I have the hope that human laws will be somewhat applicable to this, my adoptive family member.
On the other hand, if I have not adopted an animal as a pet and that animal does not somewhat resemble animals that I have as pets or have adopted as pets in the past, you are asking quite a lot more out of me than you might logically think that you are by asking me to care a flying purple two-dicked fuck about it.
In fact, the sheer fact that
@SkawdtDawg shares with me a common identity as a zoo and, in spite of what I perceive as slowness of metacognition (although swifter than some others on this person's side of the discussion), is not, as far as I can tell, an outright punk, is really a large contributor to the fact that I am willing to care a flying purple two-dicked fuck about the welfare of an even-toed ungulate. It is apparently important to this person that I adopt all ungulates into my tribe, be they odd-toed or even-toed, so in the spirit of relatively even-tempered acquaintance, I am willing to go along with the idea.
What has started to gradually sway me on that was that I already cared somewhat more than a flying purple two-dicked fuck about
@SkawdtDawg, and it seemed to deeply distress him that I was perfectly alright with eating his animal friends.
For better or for worse, though, I actually am swayed considerably more by personal drives than I am by abstract ethics. I am not a robot that just runs a script that is based on a particular meta-ethic and spits a feed from out of a slot in its face bearing the output. I am as much of an animal as a wild wolf, a moose, a seagull, or a mouse. Regardless of the fact that I actually do have substantially higher than ordinary intellectual capability, that is only a very small part of what motivates my morality.
Therefore, I would suggest to my friend (assuming that I may call this person a friend)
@SkawdtDawg that it would be prudent to try to step back from staying engrossed so in conflict with those that are on the other side of the discussion, and instead of focusing on winning battles of syllogisms with them, he should focus on polishing off his skills at, firstly, finding potential friends he might have something in common with and, secondly, building up such friendships. This might not result in miraculous and sudden conversion experiences, but it just might result in getting individuals such as myself and
@Tailo to view their way of thinking with more open minds.
Humans are still just animals. If we zoos aim to succeed at winning society over to our side, then it would serve us well to make peace with that fact. We do not attempt to win over the trust of a dog by telling him a stream of syllogisms that demonstrate precisely why it is to his benefit to trust us and then rage at the animal for not comprehending the simple and easy to understand logic of such syllogisms, but we make friends with a dog by making one small gesture of friendship at a time and steadily building up a sense of trust. Humans really love to pretend that they are, on this level, different from dogs (and horses, for that matter), but they are quite frankly fooling themselves. Patience and courtesy does a lot more than a syllogism.
I would ask that @SkawdDawg, in the interest of creating one more person that has the capability of changing the minds of skeptical non-zoos, actually start watching lectures on persuasion itself. There is an entire psychology that is behind how it is properly done and how to go about doing it successfully with results that can be replicated.
@SkawdtDawg, I humbly request that you watch this or any other high quality educational video on persuasion and then start directly applying its lessons to this discussion. I am going to set you a goal to spend at least five solid pages of this discussion concentrating on sticking to such rules for persuasion as fastidiously as you possibly can. I can guarantee that if you chose one apparently wavering (or at least not devoutly pig-headed) individual, here, and made a concerted effort to apply soundly advised persuasion techniques to that person, then you would find yourself to be substantially less frustrated with how this discussion is going. I am asking for this as a gesture of friendship toward me and as a zoo to whom it is deeply beneficial if other zoos are highly skilled at changing people's minds about things at all.
Human beings are considerably less frustrating when we make up our minds to put their natural psychology, which is not principally all that much different from that of a dog or a horse, on our team.
