Tyson foods. They raise, torture, and kill 40 million animals per week. There’s probably no other entity in the history of our planet that’s responsible for more total suffering.

I recommend looking at my response to the reply about “the good place” and continuing the thread there, it’s the same ideas.

Me personally? I don’t know if I’d applaud it, because if someone’s still eating animal products (a) they still see animals as resources to exploit, not individuals, and (b) the chicken you kill on Tuesday doesn’t really care about the chicken you didn’t kill on Monday.

But for sure it’s a great first step. Some people need time to adjust and I support anything that moves us in the direction of kindness towards animals.

I’m a big fan of the show. But we need to realize that we actually do have a responsibility to minimize the harm we cause when we’re able to. I wouldn’t accept “but you have a phone tho” or “no ethical consumption under capitalism” as justifications for buying a child-killing SUV, for example. It’s just kinda defeatist.

And even if my choices make literally zero difference, and the world is exactly the same with or without my actions (which is just not the case), I still sleep better knowing I’m not contributing to the extreme and obvious harms of animal agriculture.

Right, this is a very common mindset to have. There are two things to think about that come to mind for me:

First is that (almost) everyone thinks factory farming is bad, but around 75% of all land animals in animal agriculture are factory farmed. In the US, it’s around 99.7%. In particular it’s a very safe bet that if you eat a random chicken, while they were alive they were in abject misery.

Second is I think animals have an inherent right to life that we shouldn’t infringe upon. I wouldn’t suddenly think it’s ok if someone shot and instantly killed a dog, even if they were loved their entire life and only had “one bad day.” It also wouldn’t make it ok if someone ate the dog afterwards, because that doesn’t really matter to the dog. All animals want to live, and killing them unnecessarily is wrong.

It’s just sad seeing the dissonance between people who don’t make the connection (or lack thereof) between simultaneously thinking “I have a dead, tortured animal on my plate” and “I’m a good person,” especially when it’s so easy to just not hurt animals.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. These behaviors are so normal because that contradiction is so commonplace.

This isn’t true for the vast majority of commercial honey unfortunately. If you’re buying it from the supermarket, or any producer that operates at even medium scale, they’ll clip the wings of the queen so that the hive is unable to leave even if they want to.

Unfortunately the cheese inside the plastic wrap is going to be far worse for the environment than the couple grams of plastic surrounding it. The bigger zero-waste win would be to get them hooked on something plant based instead.