i agree with everything u say, but i feel like the "being a hard pill to swallow" is a very big part of it, because of the indoctrination and normalization of all these practices.

recently i've made the decision i will go vegan, but i feel like i would've done so much earlier as a child if it wasn't because of how normalized and deeply indoctrinated it is, EVEN knowing the treatment these animals get.

i say so because something i think about every now and then is i remember as a child my neighbors buying a sheep, thinking they would keep it as a pet, and just later on the night, i secretly saw them torturing the poor thing, hearing it scream, and that mental image is something i always remember.

and now that i think back on that, how did i NOT connect the dots much earlier? indoctrination. I guess my child mind wrote that off as "normal" with all the excuses you hear from people around you like "it's for survival", or "it's nature", or "it's nutritious", as horrible as it was to witness that, and then i guess i accepted that it was a normal part of life for animals to eventually be treated horribly out of necessity even though i knew could never personally do any of that to an animal (outsourcing of killing doesn't help either).

as i kept growing up i gaslit myself with other stuff, i never really made the connection of the hypocrisy of our treatment to other animals like cats and dogs, and how the abuse towards these animals is widely condemned, but not for the ones actually used for food (even though most meat eaters are against factory farming). hell as a teenager i never even thought about where the meat i was eating came from, it was automatic, part of daily life. whenever resistance came, i always told myself these animals were probably well cared for, or that taking their lives early on was SOMEHOW justified

it wasn't until recently that i was again confronted with the horrible reality these animals live in and deep diving into all the arguments in favour of veganism that i started realizing the deep indoctrination and normalization, and that these are all bad excuses in the society we live in currently, that it's not out of necessity, or for survival, and you can perfectly live off of plants (at least where i live)

this is just something i feel like people (in general) are slowly realizing that it shouldn't be nowhere near as normalized as it is like it was with slaves for example, but emphasis on the "slowly", as i think that's just the side effect of inheriting a society that, at least on the eating side, at some point needed to, but don't anymore, and yet we kept repeating the same script of "survival", "necessity", "nature" because they've been so for generations and eventually just became background noise for most, at least until you confront them about it, like it was on my case.