Obviously this question is only for people who eat beef regularly.
But I just was wondering, what IQ/ability would make you swear off beef? If they could speak like an 8 y.o, would that be enough to cut off beef? If they got an IQ of 80, would that do it?
That’s a no on your link dawg. I like the magical land you live in tho, where meat just appears for you to consume
Meat doesn’t magically appear. It comes from animals who have just died. But the deaths do not necessarily come via a single means, nor does the consumer necessarily have any bearing on the suffering of the animal or future animals.
I am surprised that anyone would mention “supply and demand” at all given Lemmy has a largely (including myself, just not from a Marxist viewpoint) anti-capitalist demographic, which would mean supply and demand shouldn’t be seen as a necessary factor.
That’s absurd. So if I hire an assassin to kill you, I have absolutely no responsibility if you’re killed by an assassin?
Companies won’t kill animals to produce meat unless there’s demand. If you buy meat, you’re creating demand. There is a causal link between your consumption and what happens to the animals. Therefore, you have at least a share of the responsibility.
Being anti-capitalist doesn’t mean one is incapable of understanding how capitalism works. There are rules that govern it, and those exist whether you’re in favor of it as a system or not.
I would blame the assassin. They pulled the trigger. Anyone could do anything between “enjoy” the outcome to “want” it to ask for it, and that’s a spectrum, but then there’s the person who does the deed. And even then, there’s coordination between you and the assassin. There’s nothing saying there’s absolutely going to be any coordination between the meat being brought to the store and the meat being brought home.
But that’s crazy! The assassin didn’t kill anyone, all they did was point the gun at the victim and pull the trigger. Maybe we should lay the blame on the gunpowder or the bullet. Actually, that doesn’t work either. We can’t blame the bullet, it wasn’t what killed the victim. The real problem was the massive blood loss. Or maybe the victim survives a bit and dies in the hospital due to an infection from their injury. Now we can’t blame the assassin, the bullet, the gunpowder, the gun or the injury caused by the bullet. Right? Those are not what actually caused the victim to die, it was the bacteria!
Thinking that way is obviously ridiculous. Of course, it’s easy to understand why you’d want to: it’s incredibly self-serving. The bar is set so high for you to be responsible for anything that you basically will never have to consider yourself responsible whatever you do.
The reality is if we can say “but for my actions this wouldn’t have happened”, then I’m responsible. But for consumers creating demand, there’d be no meat in the grocery store. Therefore the consumer has a share of the responsibility. You have a responsibility if you eat meat, hire an assassin, whatever. Refusing to recognize it doesn’t make it go away.