I don't think there's really a meaningful purpose to any of this if we're being serious. And I'm talking about life in general.

I think witnessing the lives some of the animals lead in the mass production realm has pretty much soured my opinion on all of it, but I also recognize that there's eight billion people to feed.

Maybe it's because I got into it later in life, I didn't grow up farming, I even spent several years in my early 20s begin vegan, but after having lost most of my family to old age, many of them with their minds intact while their body slowly erodes around them, suffering in pain for years and years on end in their end stages of life, I realize that picking up a chicken I've raised, or walking a cow or a sheep I've raised out to a block and cutting off its head or putting a bullet in it respectively, while they are under no stress whatsoever because they know me, they know the place they're in, and they are calm and comfortable and then they are dead, it's just not as bad as the horror stories made it out to be.

I've kept pet chickens to old age. One of them just died a few months ago at eight. She just kind of slowly eroded away. She started eating less. Her feathers started falling out. I had to keep her away from the flock she wanted to be with because they were her family, because they kept pecking the shit out of her as she fell down the hierarchy. I had a vet look at her, there was nothing she could do. And then one day she's out in the yard and had what I could only describe as a massive seizure, and I picked her up, or really I tried to, and she slowly just faded away. It was not a peaceful transition.

I should have just cut her head off when she started going downhill. Life, especially once you start seeing a lot of it, is not the blessed thing people in our insulated first-world society think it is.

I still feel weird when I do it. I don't think that'll ever go away, but I also don't think that's something that should go away.

As for why I do it, I cull my livestock to feed my family, and feed my dogs and cats, my neighbors and friends get eggs and meat sometimes, but it's not my livelihood, no. I have a job too. It's just extra. I like providing for myself and my family. It's not reasonable to eat a fully vegan diet where I live and grow all of the produce myself. We've got winter six months of the year here, it's just not feasible. And in the same way I don't like the industrial meat industry, I don't like the industrial fruit and vegetable industry destroying other country's water supply and resources to ship their food halfway across the world to me.