>> Many animals kill out of pleasure/instinct, not to eat. Ask any shepherd, wolves will often come, kill a sheep, and leave it. Humans cook meat to increase their caloric intake, which reduces the amount of meat needed to eat. I don't see any problem with this.

What you describe is surplus killing. It's not because they get a kick out of torturing or seeing another animal suffer. Here is the definition: "researchers say animals surplus-kill whenever they can, in order to procure food for offspring and others, to gain valuable killing experience, and to create the opportunity to eat the carcass later when they are hungry again". Also see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229928398_Surplus_k...

I think what the former special forces guy explained in the video I shared previously applies to you. You use a flexible morality. When it suits you, you compare yourself to wolves or other carnivores to justify your actions of supporting cruelty. When it doesn't suit you, you say we shouldn't compare ourselves to animals. So what is it? If you want to be like a wolf then kill and eat the animals raw - no cooking or making it taste nice.

Most people would feel sick watching an animal being butchered. That's why the realities of butchering are hidden from society. In the US they have AG gag laws - it's not allowed to film what's going on in factory farms or slaughter houses. I wonder why.

Would you show your child this video: https://www.nationearth.com/ ?

There were many reports of small children not wanting to eat animals once they realized they eat Peppa the pig. Or the recent cases of kids crying because the farm animals they made friends with are being taken away and being slaughtered. We are not carnivores. We are not hunter gatherers anymore, most of us don't need animal flesh to survive anymore. What differentiates us from other non-human animals is that we can choose. We have the ability to progress. Future humans will look back at this time the same way we look back at when we enslaved other humans and 'othered' them.

The core question really is not whether animals are the same as us, but it's whether they can suffer like us. And the answer to that is a resounding YES. But you might be OK for animals to suffer so you can have temporary mouth pleasure and convenience.

>> Your link regarding "high performance athletes" isn't really relevant. F1 Racers are not athletes - they have to be as slim as possible to fit in the car body. Also, nothing is told about performance, just random facts about cardiovascular health, something that doesn't affect athletes, as they're already doing a lot of exercise. Last, there is a lot of difference between red meat full of fat and the lean, white meat that most athletes consume. Same with antioxidants, eating meat doesn't prevent you to eat berries on the side.

What do you think an athlete is? So anyone who is slim is not an athlete? Marathon runners are not athletes according to your definition.

How come you left out the other types of athletes from the article, like NFL players. Do you think NFL players are not athletes?

And I think you don't know how fit F1 drivers have to be https://f1chronicle.com/are-formula-1-drivers-athletes/

If you want to see other athletes and how they thrive and perform on a plant based diet then watch this https://gamechangersmovie.com/

I bet your argument against this will be that the most performant athletes in a certain category of sport are not on a plant based diet. But are you trying to be the best athlete in the world and you need to carefully fine tune your diet to maximize performance?

>> Ah, and plant-based diets are usually full of carbs, which are metabolized into fat, so their last point is another example of vegan pseudoscience.

So you think 17,000 doctors & medical experts are pseudo scientists? https://www.pcrm.org/about-us

Or do you think a heart surgeon advocating for a plant-based diet is also performing pseudo-science? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsworth_Wareham

>> The "happy farm" method could exist by reducing our meat consumption. You can also greatly improve industrial farms if you accept price increases, which is I think a reasonable solution.

We kill Billions of animals each year. How do you reduce the demand for animal flesh?

>> It's virtue signaling. I met so many vegans earning top 5% income lecturing me about global warming and taking planes few times a year for their holidays, I now know the drill quite well. You know what? The best predictor for your CO2 production is your income, which is associated to your consumption level. You want to reduce global warming? Withdraw 80% of your salary in cash and burn it. Stop using a fridge, as well.

So yours is anecdotal evidence and you make the same mistake many others make (I make the same black&white thinking mistake and try hard to avoid it) - assuming that all people advocating for animal rights and for a more plant-based diet... that they are all virtue signalling.

I don't own a car. I haven't flown for over 5 years. According to the WWF carbon footprint calculator my score is below the world average. So please don't assume that all people who don't eat animals are all the same.

In conclusion, I think we agree on one thing - that animal factory farming is bad and that we should reduce our animal flesh consumption. How do you propose we do that? How would you abolish factory farms?

What we don't agree on are ethics. You don't seem to believe that animals don't have the right to live and it's fully justified to kill them against their will even if our survival doesn't depend on it.

I'm curious, if we could grow animal flesh in the lab without having to grow a full animal and making it suffer, would you eat it?

Anyway, thank you for trying to keep this discussion civil ;)