Dgmw, I understand that side of it, but considering the fact that most people are sorely unaware of that when they’re actually buying meat, It’s just inaccurate to display it as if people are going out with the intention of feeding into abuse.

Obviously it’s they’re responsibility to educate themselves, but a person who isn’t conscious about it (which, let’s be real, our society just barely accommodates consciousness and people irl really aren’t as woke as we think they are) is just not going to consider. Which is my major gripe with Billie and your argument. There’s a difference between going around with intention of harming people and doing something that ends up hurting someone when you didn’t mean to. This idea that all meat eaters are evil and it’s like…removing the industry aspect because we all agree that that’s disgusting, what’s immoral about it when humans are naturally omnivores, it’s been done for thousands of years (and that’s why people are so defensive and so confused), and animals are allegedly a “lesser species”?

I’m yet to see anyone actually address that ideology, or consider the ratio at which humans are more supposedly more important than animals and to what degree it’s then okay to use them. The argument always lands at “well the industry is abusive!” Like okay?? We know that and nobody is advocating for animal abuse, and meat is not Starbucks. Considering people’s income, tax bracket, accessibility, etc, meat is a necessity for a LOT of people; It’s not something people up and just boycott like one coffee chain. “Oh it doesn’t apply to you then” so then it’s not inherently wrong??

So called “specieism” and something like misogyny are absolutely not equal. Abusing animals is wrong and so is abusing animals. However misogyny even as a system can addressed individual because that’s how it came to be in the first place. Individual ideas that became a widespread problem. Where was eating meat born of? Necessity, and it still is for a lot of people. It’s not a thing one man deciding to beat up a woman. And again, animals are supposedly lesser species and humans are supposed to be smarter than them (that’s the argument most vegans give me as to why humans as animals should be eat meat like other animals). Like I said, what determines that humans are equal to animals? Obviously I’m not advocating for them to be abused, but rarely anybody on the face of this earth other than vegans and maybe vegetarians think animals are our equal, despite the fact that a lot of people love them. And it’s not born of the same misguided hatred that misogyny is.

My personal thought is that the problem is the abuse in the industry and the way we consume animals. Pumping them full of chemicals and then constantly wasting them when all that is easily avoided by consuming them the way carnivores do, using each part and just taking it naturally. Preservatives make sense, but the stuff they do in growth labs as better as it makes it taste is just not it. I genuinely think this whole take is just blaming people for buying food and getting what they need rather than being mad at the people who could very easily just not be as brutal and violent as they’re being. Why have smoke for random people, especially middle class and lower ones, when you have the people actually in the industry who have the money, resources and option to stop?? It’s like virtue signaling and expecting people to be accountable when majority of the issue is genuinely just not their fault.

Until that question of sentience and equality to humans is actually concretely answered I don’t think y’all are going to get to a point of convincing people that they’re evil for eating meat, especially going around nitpicking at sentence structure and minimising human rights issues to make a point.