this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Have you ever heard of demand and supply? You are being willfully ignorant or playing dumb
It's not demand and supply if you don't "demand" the supply of anything. Sure, I buy meat, but it's not something I look forward to the existence of.
If someone strikes an animal while driving, or a natural disaster takes its life, and someone decides it might as well be eaten, is that supply and demand? If I stop over at someone's house, and they have hunted an animal they're about to eat, but I neither hunted the animal nor knew they would eat the animal for dinner that night as I visited, is that supply and demand, or did I just happen to be somewhere where someone else's guilt of having killed an animal is in my favor?
It's a spectrum, hence the link.
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.
That's called a kill. That's like saying if I hunt on someone's behalf, even though I struck down the venison, I'm not the murderer, just the contractor is. Which brings us back here.
If someone is driving down a wildlife-heavy road thinking "ah well, if I hit anything, the vultures will clean it up", and a day later, a vulture finds a dead squirrel in the road that was hit, is the vulture to blame for the squirrel's death by virtue of being a beneficiary of the squirrel's death? Because that's analogous to the situation.
That's not analogous to the situation of the vulture going to the store and buying squirrel meat.
The problem isn't benefiting from the squirrels death, the problem is doing something that increases the probability that the squirrel gets killed. If the vulture finds and eats a dead squirrel at the side of the road, that has no effect on the how likely that squirrel (or future squirrels) are to die.
On the other hand, if the edit: vulture goes to the store and exchanges value for some squirrel meat, the vulture is giving others an incentive to kill squirrels to acquire their meat.
If you were the squirrel, would you rather live in an environment where no one benefits from killing you or one where there's a massive bounty on squirrel meat?
And you're saying it's absolutely impossible to exchange meat in such a way as to not increase the incentive of meat being killed to be consumed in the future? I'm careful when it comes to that stuff, if my case-by-case circumstances knowingly put me in such a situation as is implied, I pull out, whether it be corporative or local (which should be treated differently anyways). My answer to the last question depends on if they're a strict dichotomy or not; my point would be that it isn't.
What do you mean by "exchange meat"? I assume you mean exchange value (i.e. money) for meat?
No, it's not impossible to do this without increasing the chance that an animal gets killed to provide the meat. For example, if someone promised they're only selling roadkill and will never kill the animals or do anything to increase the chances the animals get killed then you could buy meat from that person without increasing the probability that animals get killed. Obviously it would have to be reasonable to trust that person to keep their word.
That's a very unlikely exception though. If you go to the grocery store and buy some meat, there is no basis or evidence to believe they're only collecting roadkill. When you buy meat from a grocery store, it's virtually certain that this is increasing the chances of animals being killed (very often after being subjected to extreme suffering). And you will have a share in the responsibility for those effects, because there's a causal link between your choice to buy the product and the things that are done to make it available.
The purchase of an item is treated as the demand of an item. This is how an economy works. They don’t mean that you’re barging into places yelling about how you want meat. Your money flowing to them is enough to justify further slaughter to provide more meat.
Sometimes the supply exceeds the demand though. Suppose there are a thousand pieces of meat in a store. Only eight hundred are bought. The other two hundred isn't bought and spoils, yet with no bearing on the market. So then imagine someone standing in the store mulling this over, "I could buy the meat, as long as it's there, or I could refuse it, and it has died in vain, but also if I buy it, who is to say I have a bearing on its death or if the money goes to the industry, when the store already paid for it and might have backup uses for it?"
I don't think in black and white.
They always prepare more than the allotted amount based on demand to meet unanticipated fluctuations. Your spent dollars on meat per month are calculated into their spreadsheets. No amount of pretend justification liberates you from the consequences of your actions. If you did not buy meat, there would be (your consumption*1.25) less meat in the store on average. You are not buying overflow meat. They are producing your meat plus overflow.
Just for you.
You say that like the stores don't buy it all first.
You say that like the stores don’t buy that based on your meat-buying history.
Until any exchange can be made, who is to say, as far as they're concerned, I necessarily exist? As an individual, I'm an oddly specific expectation for them.
That’s completely untrue. At this point in your life you have an established set of purchasing locations and a purchase history. You’re discussing disingenuously for either the sake of arguing or because you don’t understand how the world works, either of which suggest pursuing this further is a waste of time and energy.
That's not even the only point I made in this reply chain; only one of them has gotten addressed.
you’re contributing to demand if you buy meat
It depends on the circumstances of its origins, as I explained below.
"what if"
.__.
What if what?
does the meat you buy come from a natural disaster
This also exists.
Like being in a small subculture is unheard of
Kinda describes Lemmy tbh
most people don’t eat roadkill
Keyword here is "most people".
if you buy meat it isn’t roadkill
Unless it became dead by being killed in the road.
what kind of grocery store sells that
Specialty stores. Not really "grocery stores" per se.
where does it say you can buy it
In the linked posts in the link.
stop treating edge cases like the majority
Where do I do that?
You could say that.