You've just put a new idea about "the good life" into my head… This sounds positively delightful, to combine tech with rural living. I just might give that a try someday!
As someone who has struggled with his diet for ethical reasons for a long time, I have a question though. You say
> at the end of the season, when it's time to turn living creatures into meat, doing it yourself ensures that it's done well, and with minimal stress and pain.
How does this work? Do you not get cognitive dissonance from killing "your children"?
In the abstract, I completely agree with you that 1) eating meat can be done in a good, respectful way and 2) that perhaps the best, most honest way is to do it your way. But I would imagine that once I actually raise a chicken, I could probably not bring myself to kill it with my own hands (let alone eat it). Hell, I'm probably soft enough that even spending just enough time with a chicken to get a sense of its personality would make this impossible for me. Well, maybe if it's a particularly nasty personality, I could kill it but then how could I put such a revolting character in my body? Either way, it seems undoable to me… So how does it actually work, in practice?
As someone who has struggled with his diet for ethical reasons for a long time, I have a question though. You say
> at the end of the season, when it's time to turn living creatures into meat, doing it yourself ensures that it's done well, and with minimal stress and pain.
How does this work? Do you not get cognitive dissonance from killing "your children"?
In the abstract, I completely agree with you that 1) eating meat can be done in a good, respectful way and 2) that perhaps the best, most honest way is to do it your way. But I would imagine that once I actually raise a chicken, I could probably not bring myself to kill it with my own hands (let alone eat it). Hell, I'm probably soft enough that even spending just enough time with a chicken to get a sense of its personality would make this impossible for me. Well, maybe if it's a particularly nasty personality, I could kill it but then how could I put such a revolting character in my body? Either way, it seems undoable to me… So how does it actually work, in practice?