Meat lovers: does it make any difference if the animal was raised comfortably before you eat it?

Yes. Yes it does.

Meh. I would like to have the privilege to be so choosy in where my food comes from, but I like to eat more or less on a daily basis.

Nope. The animal died long before it got to me. It is of no significance to me how it was raised.

First world issue.

I worked on a farm for five years. It was primarily produce, but they kept hens for eggs as well. They were big advocates of “barn-raised” chickens (as opposed to free-range or cage-raised).

They also carried (from local farms) grass-fed beef and fresh turkeys that were hand-fed and treated better than most of the elderly in America.

I’m also a bit of a foodie and I will tell you that, without a doubt, the eggs, beef, and bird tasted much better than their average, supermarket counterparts.

So, with regard to taste — I care.

But here’s the thing: those perfectly pampered animal products cost a far too much for your average family and, as @Seek said, I like to eat every day.

So in actual practice — no, I cannot afford to care.

I rarely think about it.

And rarely is how I like my steaks cooked.

Yes, to me it does and I am lucky to live in an area abundant with home grown meat and eggs and diary. ( Mostly Goat milk and cheese. )
My old neighbors keep a small herd of steers to train their cutting horses with, and out of the 10 head, a couple cows give birth to a calf once a year and a few steers are butchered. They live on open pasture with large shady oak trees and a pond for drinking and are done in by the mobile butcher and packaged right at home. Sure, they are still killed, but, they enjoy very happy cow lives up until that moment.
They are put down in the pasture, no crowded and stressful and terrifying transport to a slaughter house.

The best we can hope for and I feel no guilt in consuming some of the meat, though I do not eat much beef in general. Home grown meat is not inhumane, factory farm raised meat is.

I don’t eat veal, because to often the animals are held in a pen where they barely can move.

I often buy cage free chicken eggs. I buy mostly Tysons and Perdue chicken. Supposedly, they treat their livestock well??

I usually buy milk that says they treat their cows well. I hope they do.

Even with all of that I bet at least half of the animal products I eat, if I knew the truth of how they were raised and slaughtered, it would bother me.

Often I wish I were vegan.

@JLeslie yes, I boycott veal and Foie gras too. Deliberate and unnecessary cruelty.

It kind of takes away part of the guilt (for those people who would like to go vegetarian but still can’t make the decision).

Oh yes. Foie gras should be illegal. Pure torture to the birds. Very upsetting.

They do the same in some tribes in Africa to young teen girls so they fatten up fast to build up their curves so men will marry them. Force feeding for a few weeks literally. Makes me sick.

@Lemley Nah, humans are omnivores, predators too, it is about the circumstances of how an animal is reared. In a natural environment where it is free to be what it is or in a cruel and unnatural environment, warehoused as nothing more than a commodity. Our free range hens ( I don’t eat them but collect their eggs ) are living as nature intended chickens to live, roaming around, scratching, foraging in a family flock. The same goes for cattle, sheep, or whatever livestock one might consume.

It is not the act of humanely dispatching an animal for food, it is the act of unnatural environments full of stress and fear. Homestead farming is a humane practice factory farming is not.

Yes. It is more tender and has more marbling. It also helps that the animal was raised on natural foods, not force-fed in some feed lot or the like.

Yes. I wouldn’t want to suffer so I would grant that to others and animals.

Thankfully where I live grass fed beef, fresh eggs and just about any wild game is readily available and not too much more expensive that the supermarket shite. Yes, without doubt it is better tasting.

I prefer that the animals that I eat be raised humanely but I am not always diligent in insuring that. I read an article years ago by Michael Pollen about this issue and he said that since animals don’t anticipate their deaths, the most important thing was a “happy life” and a humane killing.

I would prefer to be a vegetarian but I’m not.

@janbb Well said, very true.

I miss the days when my parents had friends with farms and we could get eggs, poultry, pork and beef that had lived wandering around lives. The eggs and pork for sure tasted so much better and I still try to find non-factory farmed meats and eggs that are affordable.

One of Canada’s biggest grocers has one line of beef where they identify the farm the meat comes from . I grab that stuff when it’s on sale , it really does taste better than most beef we get.

If I can’t find well-marbled beef and pork I’d rather skip it.

Yes, it matters to me. I’m definitely an omnivore, but I can afford it because people don’t need to eat meat every single day anyway. As a matter of fact, most people eat too much meat.

Not in the least, tastes the same no matter what
Just last week Carstairs grabbed his blunderbuss & bagged a pheasant for dinner…yummykins

Your question is not clear in its intent. If you think about a hen walking around, scratching and pecking at the ground, it is obvious that some muscles get worked a lot more than others. We used to identify the difference in chickens as “light” meat and “dark” meat, meaning breasts and thighs respectively, and there was a prominent difference in taste and texture. But the way chickens are raised now, you can’t taste any difference at all. The same was true of beef cuts, but now the cuts are only graded as “fat, fatter, and fattest”. (Don’t believe that? Look it up for yourself!)

Another difference shows up when the chicken is slaughtered. My mother used to chop a hen’s head off and throw the carcass in the corner to bang around until the life had leaked out. That causes bruised meat and she was lucky to keep all her fingers. The better way is to cut the bottom off a plastic bottle and put the bird in upside down so it can’t bang itself around like that.

So I dunno. Does that qualify as “raised comfortably”?

I care. But apparently not enough to adjust my lifestyle. I eat fish I caught. They are as free range as possible. I don’t know that a fish in the wild has a ‘better’ life than one raised in a farm.I would think actually that farm raised fish would be happier. They didn’t spend their life trying to escape predators., and they weren’t yanked from their homes by a metal hook in their mouth.
There are many things that I ‘wish.’
If it didn’t mean paying more for pigs, chickens, and cows, it would be something I would be more interested in, as far as buying free range or whatever.
Unfortunately, I’m quite poor. I take what I can get. Besides, it sucks to be them, but I didnt make them the animals they are. I suspect a animal above me on the food chain wouldn’t think much about my life before it ate me. It’s nature. I’m a creature that eats meat. Animals are made of meat. I never asked to be born, or be an omnivore….

Yes, which is why organic chicken has a superior quality.

At our farm in West Tennessee we raise registered polled
Hereford cattle with no antibiotics or steroids or added hormones.
We grind our own feed and only process what is actually born
and raised on our farm and I can tell you from experience that
cows that are on plenty of pasture with no petroleum fertilizers
on them and under no stress are better tasting meats than
cows who grow up or thrown in a stressful environment.
Our cows LOVE our farm and Herefords are a docile cow so
we scratch and love on our cows daily and yes they come to
their names. They have the BEST life possible on our farm and
the taste of their meat proves it. Same for our all natural chicken
and pork we sell. We treat our cows, hogs, meat chickens and
laying hens like they were at the Hilton Hotel. We respect the animals
that give us the top quality products that sell. Its all part of it.

@MooCows Do you freeze and ship meat? I’d be interested!

We are a small scale farm and everything we process
flies out of our freezers at the market. We pick our
processing up on Thursdays and by the time Sat
at the market is over we are sold out :). Since we only
process what is born on our farm we run out of our beef.
Wish we had more cows but don’t have the pasture land
for them and we will NOT wreck our reputation by buying
cows at the sale barns or from friends. We only have so many
a year to process that is why we also sell our pork and chicken.
Which is equally as delicious. Come visit our farm and pet our cows!

Can’t say that it does, to be honest.

@MooCows Why?

Would you rather live a miserable life of suffering, fear, overcrowding and stress and then die a frightening and violent death after being packed into a truck and trampled by your fellow man who are reacting in terror, being transported to some unknown place, or…would you rather live a happy, healthy, natural life in a good environment and then be dispatched in an instant on your turf with no knowledge of what’s to come? If we are going to consume animal products their quality of life, while they are alive, matters greatly.

Correction” ^ I meant to address @Darth_Algar

Well I know what I would pick, if given a choice. But I still consume meat that almost certainly was raised in factory farms, so clearly I can’t say that it makes any difference to me.

I buy much of my meat from Harris Ranch

@Darth_Algar Sure you can. It can bother you and yet still do it. I am guilty of consuming dairy products when I know that the dairy industry is also cruel in many ways. I just try not to think about it. I am a hypocrite in that way. I am a vegetarian due to the way animals are treated for the most part. Yet I choose to ignore other suffering so I can enjoy dairy.

@YARNLADY I like knowing that animals were humanely killed. And butchered in clean surroundings.