TIFU by making my child vegetarian.

[u/CompetitionExtreme36]

I have a 6 year old son. We went to a fair a few months ago and there was a display of livestock that the public could pet.

Me, trying to be jolly, told him that he'd be eating them for dinner someday.

My son was shocked and asked me how was that possible. I told him that meat is made by killing animals and cooking them. He then asked me what all the meats were. I told him that it's chicken, beef, steak, sausages, salami and mutton.

Later that night at home, I noticed him seperating his dinner. He removed all the meat pieces from the rice and only ate the rice. My wife asked him what was wrong and he said he doesn't want to eat animals.

Thankfully, he's fine with milk and eggs. However, he continued refusing to eat any meat. A week passed and we went to the doctor. The doctor said that it's probably just a temporary phase and we should feed him vegetarian alternatives for the time being.

We now buy canned beans, lentils, greek yoghurt, olive oil, whey protein, soy nuggets and plant-based patties/sausages. We also order a cheese pizza for him.

It's been a few months now, and I've bought iron and B12 gummies for him. Even my wife and I are starting to go more vegetarian.

TL;DR: We went to a fair and there was a display where the crowd could pet livestock. I told my son he'd eat those animals soon, and he's a full blown vegetarian now.

[u/Various_Succotash_79]

Most kids do this at least once, I think it's part of learning empathy. He might stay vegetarian or not, just be supportive.

[u/Willowed-Wisp → u/Various_Succotash_79]

I think I was two or three when I did this.

Thirty years later and I'm still a vegetarian and so grateful to have had supportive parents.

[u/zeledonia → u/Willowed-Wisp]

One of my kids did the same thing around 2 or 3, and has been vegetarian since. He hates the idea of animals dying so that he can eat. I fully expect him to become vegan once he has a better understanding of other food industries.

[u/tcgunner90 → u/zeledonia]

That's what happened with me.

"Oh I don't want to harm animals, I'll just go vegetarian"

"THEY DO WHAT TO COWS TO GET MILK"

[u/carolinecrane → u/tcgunner90]

I made the mistake of writing a paper about factory farming in high school. I'm 51 now and a vegan.

[u/mean11while → u/tcgunner90]

They don't have to do anything to get milk. This seems to surprise a lot of people, but cows (and goats, etc) really want to get pregnant. It's more expensive, but you can get milk and eggs without hurting anything.

[u/Gallon-of-Kombucha → u/mean11while]

It doesn't matter that the animals are in heat/ovulating/etc.

They aren't human, they can't consent to vaginal or anal penetration by humans. It’s literally assualt and beastiality. (The only exception for it is medical intervention, because its done solely for the animals wellbeing.)

And that being said, if they want to get pregnant then they also want to raise their offspring until they’d naturally wean, which the majority never get to do. So even then, their wants are still being ignored.

[u/mean11while → u/Gallon-of-Kombucha]

That's what I'm saying: they don't have to artificially inseminate anything. The animals want to go have sex.

And they can raise their offspring, wean them naturally, and still be milked.

Just because factory farming is horribly unethical doesn't mean that milk is inherently unethical.

[u/tcgunner90 → u/mean11while]

And what do we do with all the extra cows that are born from our “ethical” dairy farm? What about the male ones? The dairy industry and the meat industry are the same industry, not separate ones.

I was where you were a few years ago on this subject. I thought “well there are definitely ethical ways to milk a cow, it’s just factory farms that are the problem”.

I’m not saying this to look down on you, just that I encourage you to keep being critical and learning.

[u/mean11while → u/tcgunner90]

They live out their lives. It's not complicated; it's just more expensive. You're still talking about an industrial approach; I'm not. Milk isn't the problem; expecting it to be cheap (as a result of industrial farming practices) is.

I know there are ethical ways to drink milk because I've been doing it. We have one kidding of goats a year, which provides us with plenty of milk and a herd of pet goats that is at steady state at about 16. They're happy, friendly, and highly socialized, and they pay for themselves as an agritourism draw.

[u/tcgunner90 → u/mean11while]

If we let cows live out their lives on dairy farms. Then they’d quickly cost so much that the dairy would be paying to sell milk.

I’m talking about an industrial approach because that’s the only approach to handle the quantities of milk people demand. Idk what world you live in but people demand milk products everywhere and constantly.

Let me be clear. If you have chickens in your backyard. I don’t think it’s cruel to pick up their eggs. But our society demands so many eggs that the only solution to supply that is cruelty and factory farming practices.

Probably the same with goats, I don’t know much about homesteading goats. 🐐

In a perfect world. Where people don’t demand milk. There would probably be some actually ethically sourced milk available (like you have with your goats). But it is simply not an achievable solution for everybody to have 16 goats that pay for themselves as a petting zoo.

[u/mean11while → u/tcgunner90]

Yes, obviously. The price of milk would have to go up dramatically. Demand would go down. The industry would be forced to scale down if society decided that only ethically sourced milk was acceptable.

Demand for cheap milk and cheap eggs is very high. Cheap food is almost always provided on the backs of unsustainable, unethical, and destructive practices. The same is true in plant agriculture.

That does not mean that agriculture can't be done ethically - it's just a lot more expensive. It can clearly be done - even in a world with cheap competition from industrial ag - but most people don't share your ethical concerns, so it's not going to become predominant.

You didn't quite finish your argument. You seem to be implying that drinking milk is unethical, even if it's ethically sourced, because not everyone can have as much as they want of it. Is that where you intended to take your argument?

[u/LopsidedPalace → u/mean11while]

We can not have milk ethically at any scale worth note.

Let's say the ultra wealthy want 1,000 milking cows. That means approximately 1,000 calves a year- about half of which are male. That's 500 bills who all need 35lbs of food a day. That's 17500lbs a day or 6,387,500lbs a year. They can live up to 15-20 years. That's 95,812,500lbs of food on the low end for just one year of male calves. You're talking billions of pounds of food to produce something at any meaningful scale. It's not practical at all.

[u/mean11while → u/LopsidedPalace]

Cows can be milked for longer than a year. They don't have to get pregnant every year. The typical year-long cycle is used because milk production is highest after a pregnancy, and there's little incentive to reduce offspring.

The great thing about cows is that they eat grass and turn it into milk. For 8 months out of the year, the cows in our fields require no food at all. For the other 4 months, they eat hay, which is inexpensive and can be sourced locally.

The best way to calculate this is to look at the steady state population of cows if we want 1000 milking cows and assume a one-year milking cycle. To have 1000 milking cows with an average lifespan of 17 years, we'd expect an ongoing population of about 8500 cows and 8500 bulls (17*1000/2).

On average, a US dairy cow produces ~2800 gallons of milk per year. So those 1000 milking cows would yield 2,800,000 gallons of milk every year. Hay costs about $0.18 per pound, so even at your feed estimates (which are a little high - a milking cow requires about 25 pounds of hay per day), feeding 8500 bulls and 8500 milking cows would cost ~$39,000,000. In other words, only $13.96 of each gallon of milk would have to go to feeding these large herds.

In reality, feed costs would be much lower than this because most cows would require no hay for most of the year. I would expect the actual annual feed costs to be more like $11 million (25 pounds for 8500 cows, 35 pounds for 8500 bulls for 120 days/year), or $3.95 per gallon.

Big numbers seem scary if you only look at the costs and ignore the big numbers on the other side.

[One interesting thing about this system is that the average cow would only have to give birth twice and be milked for two years before being retired. One result of this is that the average milk production would probably be quite a bit higher under this system than it is in our current system, with only the healthiest and most productive cows being chosen.]

[u/Classic_Process8213 → u/mean11while]

Yes theoretically if we devoted half of our economy to producing dairy it could be done ethically. Of course, that will never happen so it's a total red herring

[u/618smartguy → u/mean11while]

What they do to cows to get milk is more relevant than what they could do in a fantasy situation. 

Most dairy cows do not make it out alive. What's done to them ends in death. 

[u/mean11while → u/618smartguy]

What "they" do is not what I do. It's not what my neighbors do. It's not a fantasy if people are actually doing it. You're just not going to find it in a supermarket.

[u/618smartguy → u/mean11while]

The context is a typical kid not wanting to eat typical meat. I guess your way kind of makes sense as a solution but it came across as contradicting (they do in fact "have to" kill the animals to raise them in a typical fashion) rather than supporting their choice to do something. 

[u/Here4uguys → u/zeledonia]

I hope your son/daughter doesn't eat avocados or quinoa, because if they do I've got bad news for them [avocado trade from Mexico is controlled by cartels, whom DO NOT share your child's same sense of morality and have no qualms with killing human animals; the export of quinoa from SA countries seems to be at the expense of the people living there (that means that the more quinoa we eat outside of SA the less people are eating inside SA -- presumably people are starving because of so)]

People can do whatever with their diet, idgaf, but the idea of vegetarianism being morally superior is laughable. We dig up and burn dinosaur bones just to get to work -- at expense of literally every organism on the planet. If you don't use fosil fuel for power/transit and you're a vegetarian then I'll give it up -- you might be a better person than myself and most people. Every other vegetarian can get a reality check

[u/Traditional-Camp-517 → u/Here4uguys]

I mean limiting harm where you can is better than saying well fuck it I can't avoid contributing to human animal and environmental suffering completely so I should make no attempt to avoid contributing to these issues.

[u/alsokalli → u/Here4uguys]

Are you ok? This is about little kids not wanting to eat dead animals. Idk what kind of enemy you made up in your head but you're fighting windmills

[u/Here4uguys → u/alsokalli]

I suppose you're right

[u/User123466789012 → u/Here4uguys]

This was the funniest response after your rant I’m so sorry

[u/ooohthatsmelll → u/Here4uguys]

Look at how many words you typed and how worked up you got just for your conclusion to be "oh you don't meat and yet you participate in society? you're not better than me okay WE ARE BOTH BAD (and this somehow will make me feel better about my subconscious guilt)".

Also, it's quite telling how you think vegetarians and vegans only abide by their diets so they can act morally superior.

[u/Here4uguys → u/ooohthatsmelll]

I mean there are negative health out cones associated with vegetarianism and even more so with veganism, so if it's not a matter of concious then it must be an act of masochism

I don't feel guilty about eating animals. We've done it for as long as our species has existed. First we had to scavenge it, then it seems like our brains changed and we were more capable of hunting in groups and we were able to hunt what we needed. 

I've got ethical qualms about what our treatment of animals means if a more intelligent species were to stumble upon us, no doubt. But aside from veal I don't see any issue with eating animals. Yeah farms should be less disgusting and cruel; that's a good reason to buy local instead of Tyson etc

[u/ooohthatsmelll → u/Here4uguys]

Yeah farms should be less disgusting and cruel; that's a good reason to buy local instead of Tyson etc

Oh, you get all of your meat "locally"?

[u/Plant-Zaddy- → u/ooohthatsmelll]

I definitely do but im blessed to live in an area with an abundance of small farms

[u/Here4uguys → u/ooohthatsmelll]

I do try. I don't buy Tyson. It's a bit more expensive but not difficult to source local meat here. My grandparents have a farm and butcher cattle but I don't have the space for all that meat

[u/ooohthatsmelll → u/Here4uguys]

Oh so you do buy factory farmed meat? So what you said earlier is literally meaningless, got it :]

honestly the fact that you're engaging with this topic tells me that you DO care but you're dealing with some serious cognitive dissonance. I hope you follow your heart someday.

[u/Here4uguys → u/ooohthatsmelll]

I was going to say "you're no longer worth talking to" but by the time I finished reading your reply, mine was "you're a moron"

I don't know where you got "I buy factory farmed meat" from but good work. Probably do, really hard to tell. My grandparents cattle have a large pastures they're rotated between. Idk if you were making assumptions about that or what

Cognitive dissonance is abound in this world. Like thinking that killing animals for food is cruel, but purchasing food products that cause at least is much human suffering is better

[u/ooohthatsmelll → u/Here4uguys]

Cognitive dissonance is abound in this world. Like thinking that killing animals for food is cruel, but purchasing food products that cause at least is much human suffering is better

LOL so true, the only solution is to eat food that both kills animals AND notoriously exploits, maims, and kills more workers than any other food product. Yes, THAT is the logical choice hahhaa

[u/Dense-Assumption795 → u/Here4uguys]

Except a significant amount of science and research says veganism/ vegetarian and plant based diets can be significantly healthy than a meat eating diet.

Like processed meats is a class 1 carcinogen 😂 but yeah - meat meat meat 😂

[u/Here4uguys → u/Dense-Assumption795]

I'm not sure it's that straightforward. Yeah steady bologna etc anything processed and with preservatives is less than ideal. There are many people who face health consequences as a result of vegan/vegetarian lifestyle. I'm not going to say everyone does but it is a thing. 

[u/captchairsoft → u/zeledonia]

Nobody would be vegan or vegetarian if they understood more animals die to allow for the farming that makes it possible

Of course that's not the "understanding of other food indistries" you're talking about, but it is what it is

[u/pcf062124 → u/captchairsoft]

That’s actually laughably wrong. You really think it kills more cows to grow the plant that directly supplies calories for us than to grow the plant, feed it to the cows, then kill the cows? In both scenarios plants are being grown and eaten. The difference is, the calories go directly to the end consumer when we eat it, but have to go through an intermediary if it’s fed to a cow. I’m not even vegetarian and I recognize this discourse as defying all logic.

[u/Ffanffare1744 → u/captchairsoft]

This is moronic. To farm livestock you must also farm grains. I’m pretty sure that most vegetarians and vegans understand a lot more about the damages of industrialized farming than most people.

[u/Dense-Assumption795 → u/captchairsoft]

Except that’s been proven so wrong numerous times. The man in argument people throw to support eating meat is - soy production kills billions on insects, small animals so your killing more animals blah blah blah without realising 70% of the worlds soy goes to feeding…… not humans….. you guessed it - cattle so you can have steaks and burgers so not only does that kill the cows but also all the bugs, insects and small animals too