It turns out that in order not to feel discomfort, a person while eating meat thinks of cows and pigs as primitive creatures not worthy of sympathy. Isn't that right people?
Many people love meat, but few are ready to speculate about where it came from. In this case, we are not talking about the hard work of food industry workers, but about the fact that a person has to harm cows, pigs, chickens, etc., which go to his table.
If we forget for a moment about the daily crime reports and more than eloquent historical examples, we can say that it is difficult for a person to harm a rational being. Even if we just assume the presence of intelligence, self-consciousness in animals, relying on our similarity with them. Therefore, a person prefers not to ponder over dinner, in what conditions chickens live on poultry farms and what happens in a slaughterhouse.
In short, vegetarians know what to put pressure on when they paint in paints in front of meat-eaters inhuman living conditions and bloody murders of innocent animals.
However, the person has developed a protective psychological mechanism that allows him not to feel remorse about the chop. As psychologists from the University of Queensland (Australia) write in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, we are simply lowering the "level of intelligence" of those we eat. This is not necessarily a general ideological attitude: studies have shown that a person begins to deny the presence of intelligence to his victims, let's say, just before eating, anticipating a meat dish in the near future.
This helps to ease the contradiction between the prohibition to harm intelligent beings and the requirements of the stomach.
As another trick, humans separate what they eat and the animals that make it all up. That is, there is a psychological barrier between the “cow” and “beef”. Let the cow be a living intelligent creature, but beef is definitely not like that, and it is completely meaningless to talk about the suffering of beef.
It is possible to treat this property of our psyche in different ways. From a purely academic point of view, it would be very interesting to know about the evolution of this issue: how it was with the psychology of meat-eating among some Scandinavian Vikings and how it all relates, for example, to tribal cults like totemism.
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From a purely ethical point of view, one can both be indignant at such psychological casuistry, and admire its scrupulousness. One may wonder if this causes any additional stress … Probably, vegetarianism is indeed more cleanly in the ethical aspect, but its adherents can only wish one thing: that in the near future scientists - what the hell is not joking! - did not manage to find something like consciousness in plants.