Ethics3w ago · 109 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
Most of us love a steak but couldn't face the slaughterhouse. Honest answer: is your diet a real choice, or just one you outsource the hard part of?
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Add your comment- Quinn2w ago
I'm 67. I grew up helping my uncle on his farm in Kentucky. Killing animals was just part of the calendar — spring planting, fall slaughter. I eat meat. I always will. But I'll tell you what I don't do: I don't pretend it's nothing. I think a lot of modern meat eaters want the meat AND the clean conscience AND to be left alone about it. You can have any two of those, not all three.
- Priya2w ago
I've been vegan for six years and honestly I'm tired of this framing. The question 'could you kill it yourself' isn't even the right moral test. Factory farming isn't wrong because it's distant — it's wrong because of the CONDITIONS. A hunter who kills one deer humanely is doing less harm than someone who eats factory pork every day. But that deer hunter gets credit in this conversation and the pork eater doesn't. Address the actual ethics, not the squeamishness.
- Drew1d ago
I work in a slaughterhouse. Have for six years. I don't know what to say in these conversations because I'm never the person people imagine when they're having them. I'm not a villain. I'm not a saint. I'm just someone doing a legal job that most people need to exist before they decide how they feel about it.
- Sam5d ago
I'm a livestock farmer and I want to complicate something: the animals I raise have genuinely good lives until they don't. Compare that to the cognitive torture of factory farming. The conversation shouldn't be 'meat vs no meat' — it should be 'what kind of animal life did this require.' That's the real moral dial.
- Ravi5d ago
Nope. Hard disagree. Dead is dead. A 'good life' doesn't un-end a life that didn't need to end.
- Elena R.4d ago
By that logic every death is equally wrong regardless of context. Predators in nature don't give moral weight to suffering either. You're applying a framework exclusively to humans that biology never asked us to follow.
- Hana4d ago
We're not predators. We're moral agents with grocery stores and alternatives. The 'nature does it too' defense stopped working when we invented refrigerators.
- Feli5d ago
This is the comment that actually moved the needle for me. Quality of life before death matters enormously and we've basically stopped asking.
- Iris1w ago
The real question nobody's asking: why do we treat this as purely an individual moral question when individual choices are shaped entirely by systems, subsidies, cultural norms, and corporate lobbying? You can't guilt your way to a more ethical food system one consumer at a time. You need policy. Shaming the individual eater is the fossil fuel company playbook — make it personal so nobody looks at the structure.
- Diego1w ago
My seven-year-old asked me last week where chicken nuggets come from. I told her the truth, gently but honestly. She cried for about fifteen minutes. Then she asked if we could still have them for dinner. She said yes. I think that's actually a very human response and I'm not going to feel ashamed of either of us for it.
- Hana1w ago
that story is going to haunt me. in a good way. kids cutting straight to the core of it.
- Theo3w ago
Yes. 100%. Already have. Deer hunting since I was 14. Field dressing an animal is not fun, it is not pretty, and I do it anyway because I believe if you are going to eat meat you should be able to face what that means. This is actually the most honest relationship with food that exists.
- Sam T.2w ago
I actually tried this. Took a 'slaughter your own chicken' class at a sustainable farm two years ago. I did it. I ate it. It was one of the most psychologically significant meals of my life. Not traumatic, but serious. Like a meal that demanded you be present for it. I eat less meat now — not zero, but much less, and I think about it differently every time.
- Liam 922w ago
no offense but this feels like ethical tourism. you kill ONE chicken in a 'class' with guidance and feel absolved. the guy working an industrial slaughterhouse kills hundreds a day in conditions that destroy his mental health. if anything that class should make you angrier about the system, not more comfortable with your steak.
- Hana2w ago
Wait there are classes for this?? This is genuinely interesting. Not sure I could do it but I respect the people who go seeking that kind of accountability.
- Taylor2w ago
Yeah, lots of small farms offer them. Usually framed as 'know your food' experiences. Worth looking up if you're curious. Most people who go already eat meat — they're just trying to close the gap between consumption and reality.
- Omar1w ago
Yes. Absolutely yes. I've done it. Deer hunting since I was 14. There's a kind of honesty in it that a shrink-wrapped tray at Kroger completely erases. You feel the weight of the decision in a way that changes how you eat — you waste nothing, you're grateful, you slow down. I'm not saying everyone has to hunt. I'm saying the disconnect is real and it costs us something as a culture.
- Feli3w ago
It never fully goes away, and I'd argue it shouldn't. The day it feels like nothing is probably the day something has gone wrong inside you.
- Marco2w ago
Yes. Without hesitation. I hunt. I fish. I field dress my own kills. Every person who thinks they couldn't handle it just hasn't been put in the situation with proper guidance. You adapt fast when you're hungry.
- Yuki M.2w ago
the 'you'd adapt' argument drives me insane. you can adapt to a lot of terrible things. that doesn't make them right. people adapt to war. adaptation is not moral justification.
- Casey2w ago
I became a vegetarian at 19 because of a philosophy class, not because of emotion. Stayed vegetarian for 11 years. Then got diagnosed with severe anemia and my doctor and I agreed I needed to reintroduce red meat. I cried the first time. Still feel weird about it. Ethics lived in a body is messier than ethics on a whiteboard.
- Iris T.4d ago
Asked my 7-year-old this question at dinner last week, not to traumatize her, just curious. She thought about it for a full minute and said 'only if the animal was very old and had a good life.' Didn't even hesitate on the moral framework. Seven. Years. Old.
- Diego4d ago
Children also think the moon follows their car. Moral intuition in kids is sweet but it isn't philosophy.
- Casey4d ago
sometimes the pre-rationalized answer is the honest one though. before we learn to argue ourselves out of discomfort.
- Kofi M.2w ago
The mental health impacts on slaughterhouse workers is one of the most underreported aspects of this whole debate. There's solid peer-reviewed research linking that kind of work to elevated rates of PTSD, domestic violence, and substance abuse in those communities. We outsource the psychological cost too, not just the physical act.
- Jordan3w ago
I actually tried this. Took a class at a small farm specifically designed to walk you through the whole process from live animal to meal. Chickens. I cried a little, felt grateful, ate the best roasted chicken of my life that evening. Changed my relationship with food permanently — I buy less, buy better, waste nothing.
- Kofi R.1w ago
I'm a butcher. People romanticize hunting and demonize what I do, but we're all doing the same thing. The animal is just as dead whether a 'noble hunter' killed it in the woods or I broke it down in a shop. The moral hierarchy some people have constructed here is entirely about aesthetics and cultural association, not actual outcomes for the animal.
- Nina2w ago
This exact question was put to my entire college ethics seminar. Professor went around the room. 22 out of 24 said no, they couldn't. The other two were from rural farming communities. Professor said: 'note that this comfort with mortality correlates almost perfectly with proximity to where food actually comes from, not with deeper moral thinking.' That's lived with me ever since.
- Alex2w ago
so the conclusion is that city people are more moral? that's incredibly condescending lol
- Reese2w ago
That's literally the opposite of what the professor said. Proximity made the rural students MORE comfortable with it, not less. The people who couldn't do it didn't get a moral gold star — the point was that comfort vs discomfort doesn't track with ethics at all. Read again.
- Yuki K.3w ago
The fact that most meat-eaters couldn't do the killing themselves doesn't make them hypocrites, it makes them human. We specialize. You couldn't build your phone either.
- Elena2w ago
I keep seeing 'could you kill it' as if that's the test. My grandmother lived through actual famine. Real starvation. She would have killed anything with her bare hands to feed her children and she was one of the kindest people I've ever known. Moral philosophy built on the assumption of abundance is a luxury good.
- Diego2w ago
Nobody is arguing about famine conditions. We're talking about people in wealthy countries making discretionary dietary choices with full supermarkets available. Invoking starvation to defend everyday habits is a rhetorical sleight of hand.
- Ravi L.1w ago
Actually, billions of people globally still don't have access to abundant plant-based protein options. The 'wealthy country' framing is also a luxury position that not everyone debating this question occupies.
- Alex1w ago
yes and the wealthy country crowd can afford to change. so your point about global poverty actually strengthens the case for THEM changing, it doesn't let them off the hook
- Maya3w ago
My grandfather was a butcher. His father was a butcher. I grew up watching this and eating meat my whole life. Now I'm vegan. Not because watching slaughter traumatized me — I was desensitized, honestly — but because when I finally sat down and read the environmental numbers I couldn't justify it. The killing was never my problem. The planet is.
- Theo1w ago
I tried going vegan twice. Both times my iron dropped so badly I could barely get out of bed. I'm not a moral failure, I'm a person with a body that apparently needs heme iron. Not everything is a choice some of us can just make.
- Marco1w ago
Iron deficiency from veganism is almost always a supplementation or planning issue, not a biological inevitability. I say this as a hematologist. Please don't spread the idea that humans biologically *need* meat — that's medically inaccurate for the vast majority of people.
- Reese1w ago
Whether or not he's actually a doctor the information is correct. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has stated that well-planned vegan diets are nutritionally adequate. It's publicly available. Google it before dismissing it.
- Elena M.2w ago
My grandfather slaughtered pigs every winter in rural Portugal. He said grace before every meal and thanked the animal sincerely. There was something profoundly dignified about it that I don't see in any of our sanitized modern food culture. I'm not romanticizing it — it was brutal and loud — but the honesty of it was real.
- Sam K.2w ago
Spent two years in rural Kenya. Goat slaughter at celebrations was communal, joyful, deeply meaningful. Children participated. Nobody had an identity crisis about it. Our relationship with death — human or animal — is what's broken in wealthy Western cultures, not the eating of meat.
- Jamie _x2w ago
I think the more honest version of this question is: would you still eat factory-farmed meat if you had to spend one full shift working in the facility? The killing is one thing. The conditions are another. The smell, the machinery, the pace. Most people wouldn't last two hours.
- Theo 212w ago
I've worked in construction, commercial fishing, and logging. They're all brutal in their own way. Difficulty and unpleasantness of labor doesn't determine whether the product is moral. Coal miners work in hellish conditions. That doesn't make burning coal ethical OR unethical — those are separate questions.
- Ravi B.2w ago
fair point but coal is actually relevant here — most people DO think burning coal is becoming increasingly indefensible precisely BECAUSE of the downstream harm it causes to others, not just the workers. so maybe that analogy cuts the other way
- Hana T.3w ago
I am a surgeon. I cut into human bodies routinely. I am absolutely certain I could not slit an animal's throat for dinner. These are genuinely different psychological tasks. Capability has nothing to do with moral consistency.
- Alex M.3w ago
Actually fish don't scream and most people don't find fishing particularly troubling, so the emotional response is doing moral work that the philosophical argument isn't. We're pattern-matching on cute faces and sounds, not on a coherent ethical framework.
- Liam M.2d ago
I've been vegetarian for 11 years. Not because I think I'm morally superior — I genuinely don't — but because every time I examined the question directly, meat lost. That's it. No crusade, no judgment. I just kept asking the question and kept getting the same answer.
- Yuki2d ago
that's a bit unfair. people can arrive at a personal position without imposing it. not every stated choice is a stealth moral lecture.
- Sam2d ago
Completely agree. Disgust told generations of people that interracial relationships were wrong. It told people homosexuality was unnatural. Disgust is not a reliable moral compass. It's a feeling, not an argument.
- Hana K.2d ago
No one compared veganism to civil rights. They made a point about the *unreliability of disgust as moral evidence*. You're attacking a comparison that wasn't made. Read slower.
- Riley2d ago
Thank you for saying this. Slaughterhouse workers are statistically some of the most economically vulnerable people in the labor force. The industry exploits them nearly as much as the animals. Anyone serious about food ethics has to hold that too.
- Zara3w ago
The question assumes killing is the hard part. For indigenous communities who have hunted for thousands of years, the hard part was the reverence — doing it with gratitude and ceremony, taking only what you need. We've lost that entirely. Factory farming is the moral failure, not the act of killing itself.
- Hana3w ago
the phone analogy that keeps getting trotted out is so bad lol. building a phone doesnt involve causing suffering. thats literally the entire distinction. nobody argues phones have feelings
- Theo M.1w ago
honestly the question itself is a little manipulative. lots of things involve processes i couldn't personally do. i couldn't perform the surgery that saved my dad's life either. doesn't mean he should've refused it.
- Morgan T.1w ago
Surgery saves a life. Killing a cow ends one for a sandwich. Those aren't remotely the same category of thing and you know it.
- Iris2w ago
There's something almost cowardly about building an entire food system specifically designed to make killing invisible so that people don't have to confront what they're participating in. Not saying every meat eater is a coward. Saying the SYSTEM is designed around moral cowardice. There's a difference.
- Elena1w ago
The question assumes killing = wrong. But Indigenous food traditions globally have involved killing animals for tens of thousands of years within deeply ethical and spiritual frameworks. The discomfort isn't universal — it's a specific product of modern industrial alienation. Don't universalize your cultural nausea.
- Jamie1w ago
Nobody said killing = wrong inherently. But those Indigenous traditions also involved reverence, limitation, ritual, and zero waste — the exact opposite of factory farming. You can't invoke them to defend a Big Mac.
- Theo2d ago
What bothers me about this whole debate is the implied premise that disgust = ethical signal. Lots of people are disgusted by things that are completely fine. Disgust is one of the most easily manipulated emotions we have. Using 'but could you watch it?' as a moral litmus test is incredibly weak epistemically.
- Zara3w ago
Okay but the question is framed sneakily. 'Would you STILL eat meat' implies that killing it yourself would make you stop. For a huge number of humans throughout history the answer has always been: yes, you kill it, you eat it, that's just Tuesday. The squeamishness is the modern anomaly, not the baseline.
- Nina2w ago
My daughter asked me last year where chicken nuggets come from. Like, really asked. She was seven. I told her the truth because I refuse to raise her in that illusion. She cried for a day. Now she eats chicken nuggets again. Kids are actually more resilient about moral truth than adults give them credit for.
- Zara2w ago
Genuine complexity that conveniently always lands on 'keep eating meat' somehow. amazing how that works
- Priya1w ago
My grandfather was a butcher. He fed a whole neighborhood for decades. I watched him work as a kid and he treated every animal like it mattered. He'd be baffled by this debate — not because the ethics don't matter but because he never separated the eating from the killing. That separation is new. That separation is the problem.
- Feli R.3d ago
The framing of 'outsourcing the hard part' is clever but I think it's actually backwards. The hard part isn't the kill — it's the years of care, the relationships with animals, the weather, the debt, the physical labor. Farmers outsource NONE of that. The kill is maybe 5 minutes of a years-long relationship. We've fetishized the moment of death and ignored the entire life around it.
- Diego3d ago
This is a genuinely good reframe and I say that as someone who doesn't eat meat. The romanticization of 'just kill it yourself' ignores the full complexity of food production.
- Quinn3w ago
Engineer the question all you want, the emotional no is data. That reaction is information about what you actually believe, and explaining it away doesn't make it go away.
- Noah M.2w ago
Nobody said 'therefore it is fine.' They said our relationship with death is broken. That's a diagnosis, not a justification. Try reading what's actually there.
- Taylor3w ago
The framing of 'outsourcing' is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here. I also outsource my garbage disposal, my sewage treatment, my electricity generation. The fact that I don't personally manage something doesn't mean I haven't morally considered it. I have considered it. I choose to eat meat. That's a complete sentence.
- Drew1w ago
I genuinely don't know what I'd do and I find that uncertainty more honest than people who are absolutely certain either way. Humans have been eating meat for all of recorded history AND we have the capacity to choose not to. Sitting with both of those facts feels more truthful than resolving the tension too quickly.
- Kofi1w ago
Okay but sitting with tension indefinitely is also just... not changing anything. At some point the uncertainty is a decision by inaction.
- Ravi3w ago
I think about this more than I'd like to admit. I eat chicken basically every day and I know in my bones I could not do what happens in those processing facilities. I'm not proud of that gap. I'm also not changing my diet tomorrow. That tension is just... where I live now.
- Omar1w ago
The policy argument (comment 10) is correct AND the individual ethics argument is correct. These aren't mutually exclusive. Saying 'focus on systems not individuals' can absolutely be a dodge. Do both. Vote, advocate, AND examine what's on your plate.
- Elena2w ago
Ask yourself this: if tomorrow it became legal and normal to watch your food be killed at the restaurant before serving — like a live station — would you do it? Would your appetite survive that? Because if not, you already know the answer you're avoiding.
- Morgan2w ago
OR your seven year old doesn't have the cognitive framework to fully process that information yet and moved on because children process trauma through compartmentalization. Not sure 'she went back to eating nuggets' is the triumphant conclusion you think it is here.
- Omar3w ago
No. Absolutely not. And I own that. I'm not going to pretend I have some higher tolerance for it. I like food that used to be an animal and I am not capable of being the one who makes it stop being an animal. That's my honest answer and I'm aware it implicates me in something I'd rather not look at.
- Morgan1w ago
I eat meat. I probably couldn't do the killing. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't mean something. But I'm also not about to let anonymous strangers on the internet guilt me into a dietary overhaul based on a hypothetical. I'll make my choices on my own timeline, thanks.
- Elena _x1w ago
lmao 'anonymous strangers on the internet' is a wild thing to say on a public debate forum you chose to participate in
- Maya3w ago
respectfully disagree with the farm commenter already on here. growing up knowing how to kill doesnt make it more ethical, it just makes it more normalized. normalized ≠ right
- Leo3d ago
Yes I would. I've actually done it — backyard chickens. First time was hard, not gonna lie. Second time less so. By the fifth time I understood something I couldn't have from the outside: that the transaction between humans and animals is ancient and real and doing it consciously is more respectful than doing it blindly.
- Diego2d ago
That's an interesting instinct but think about it — doctors, surgeons, soldiers, emergency responders all describe difficult things getting easier with exposure. That's not desensitization to wrongness, it's competence. You're pattern-matching 'became comfortable with X' to 'X is bad' without examining the assumption.
- Iris _x2d ago
There's a reason we don't want judges to stop being disturbed by sentencing. Some discomfort signals something real. Not all habituation is competence.
- Hana2d ago
Okay but the 'I don't judge anyone' caveat in these posts always comes with an asterisk the size of a billboard. The entire structure of the comment judges. Own it or don't say it.
- Marco 923w ago
Grew up on a farm, raised and killed our own. I eat meat with full knowledge of the cost. It's the supermarket crowd who've never met their dinner that get squeamish.
- Leo2w ago
The system is also designed around scale, efficiency, and feeding 8 billion people. Calling it moral cowardice flattens genuine complexity into a bumper sticker.
- Morgan3w ago
ok so genuine question for the hunters and farmers here: does the discomfort ever go away completely or is there always something there? asking sincerely, not to score points
- Morgan2w ago
Honest answer? No. I'd probably become vegetarian. But I'm also aware that my inability to do something unpleasant doesn't make that thing unethical. I can't perform surgery on myself either. My squeamishness is a psychological fact about me, not a moral verdict on surgeons.
- Priya S.2w ago
I want to push back on the entire premise actually. Why is willingness to kill the animal the moral threshold? A doctor who prescribes medication doesn't manufacture the drug. A judge who sentences someone doesn't operate the prison. Moral accountability does not require direct participation in every step of a process.
- Yuki3w ago
I think the more honest follow-up question isn't 'could you kill it' but 'would you visit the farm it came from.' Most people who couldn't kill an animal would still be fine watching a bolt gun in a well-run facility. The question is specifically engineered to trigger an emotional no.
- Noah2w ago
Can we stop pretending plants don't die for vegans? I'm not saying plants feel pain — I genuinely don't know if they do — but every dietary choice involves death. The question is degree, not kind. Vegans get to feel clean because their deaths are small and green and silent. That's aesthetics, not ethics.
- Maya _x2w ago
This 'but plants die too' argument... I cannot. A cow has a central nervous system, nociceptors, demonstrable fear responses, and documented social bonds with its herd. A carrot does not. Degree matters enormously in ethics. We don't treat punching someone the same as murder just because 'both involve harm.'
- Elena K.2w ago
I said degree, not kind. Calm down. My point was that no diet is morally zero-cost, which is a legitimate observation, not a defense of factory farming.
- Priya 922w ago
using other cultures' practices to justify your food choices is a genre of bad argument i am so tired of. 'people elsewhere do this therefore it is fine' is not ethical reasoning
- Maya 212w ago
Because the analogy breaks when the action in question is the core ethical issue under debate. You're arguing the structure of the situation — we're arguing about the thing itself. Circular.
- Theo3w ago
Hard no for me personally. Not because I think it's wrong for others, just — I know myself. I would become vegetarian immediately. So I guess I've already answered my own question and I'm just choosing to keep not answering it out loud.
- Jamie2w ago
I'd do it. And I think more people would than you expect after the initial adjustment period. Humans are enormously adaptable. The whole history of medicine suggests people can normalize watching things they initially found unbearable when it becomes routine and purposeful.
- Elena3w ago
Confidently: yes, and anyone who says no is just admitting they have a preference for convenience over conviction. Pick a lane.
- Reese 212w ago
Ive killed fish a bunch of times. It's different than I imagined. Less dramatic. Which in some ways is more disturbing than if it were dramatic.
- Morgan3w ago
If you can't watch how it's made, you've already answered the moral question and you're just choosing not to hear it. The distance is the whole comfort.
- Jamie 213w ago
this is the most interesting comment on here honestly. because it flips the usual argument on its head completely
- Maya L.1w ago
I'd do it. I've gone fishing and felt terrible the first time. Got over it. Hunting season starts in October for me. The intimacy of it makes you respect the animal more, not less. I waste nothing. Compare that to someone who throws away half a rotisserie chicken.
- Taylor1w ago
respectfully: fishing is not really in the same psychological category as slaughtering a cow. let's not conflate them
- Riley3w ago
Went vegetarian the day I actually watched. Not from a video, in person. Couldn't un-see it. Your stomach knows the answer before your brain argues with it.
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