I disagree. It's not "forward thinking" to distance yourself from your food, and while veganism is a fine choice for some, it is not for all. There will never be a time when everyone can be--or will want to be--vegan, and I have a serious problem with people who push their personal dietary choices onto others. It's also not "forward thinking" to believe that you can control nature, that you can manipulate an animal as though it comes with an on-off switch and you can just make it stop doing what nature has hardwired it to do. This is yet another symptom of our society's detachment from the reality of our food--and from reality itself. Our increasing distance from where our food comes from is making us sick, weak, and shortening our life spans. How can that be called forward thinking? It's not that people have more respect for animals than they used to--they just literally have no clue what goes on in the production of their food anymore, so the reality is shocking to them. The way we "actually live" as a society is literally killing us. For the first time in our history as a nation, children have a shorter life expectancy than the generation that proceeded them.
The more natural and closer to the source your food is, the healthier and more nutritious it is. We gain absolutely nothing from distancing ourselves from our food.
I'm not making a value judgment. I'm not saying anything about what's good or bad for the human species. (If I was I might agree with you.)
If someone else is more in line with the way the world is actually headed, you just have to be careful about poking fun because people will look back after the
society has made its value judgment and see you as a villain, while lauding others as heroes. I'm not a vegan. I tried at one point to be a vegetarian but didn't thrive on the diet. I can see the way things are headed, though. When people were calling themselves vegetarians it was about a personal moral choice. Now that they're calling themselves vegan, it has shifted. If you squint really hard and stare at the books of the past, you can read the books of the future. You can see them explaining that the way we bred chickens to use themselves up in a tiny fraction of their natural lifespan to produce ludicrous amounts of eggs was absolutely wrong. They then add that the natural lifespan of the red jungle fowl is 30 years, while our hens burn through that in three and stop laying as they enter premature senescence.
I'll continue to keep chickens as long as I can. As far as I see it, they're the best animal, period. Nothing else can be your beloved pet and essentially give you meat anyway in the form of high-quality protein. I've seen the books of the future, though. I know where I fall in them. Fun times with history... At one point not everyone bothered to wash their hands. People were wiped out, and the only ones spared were those with good hygiene habits. Now we all do it.
Are we getting sicker, and weaker, and living shorter? Absolutely. I can see us becoming as allergic to our own yards as we were to the plague. I can see all those antibiotics they pump into the chickens in egg factories becoming absolutely necessary. In the future I see, the superbugs are
created by the huge egg factories and meat farms with wall-to-wall chickens, and would never have even existed if people just had backyard flocks, but as a rule history books don't have too many what-ifs in them and
only the factories are allowed to have the industrial measures they need against now-ubiquitous diseases. Irradiated eggs? Well irradiated food doesn't hurt you, but I don't see backyard chicken keepers getting access to that. Sterile chicken eggs. Push-of-a-button contingencies to wipe out flocks that get contaminated by even a single microbe. Chickens are now illegal. Individually-wrapped, fresh-pak, factory-sealed... chicken eggs. And anything else could kill you.
In short, the sanitary people win. They become right. Their way becomes the only way to stay alive. So I'm going to refrain from calling them stupid.