Silas - I don't actually mind paying a pittance out of my yearly taxes in order to finance keeping murderers fed and housed in prison...as opposed to saving that pittance in my yearly taxes by having the state murder the murderers...

And it is a pittance. You say "millions are spent" housing those prisoners, and it sounds like big money...but it's not big money to you and me once the cost gets spread around through the entire tax base.

What I do mind, though, is spending a far larger slice of my yearly taxes on funding wars that I don't agree with! But that's another discussion... ;-)

The point about the slaughterhouses is well taken. The vast majority of the population are meat-eaters...yet almost none of them would be willing to work in a slaughterhouse and to take the lives of the animals whose meat they casually purchase at their local supermarket! Is that hypocrisy? Or is it just denial? I think it's more denial than anything else.

There were two Native American guys I knew who got jobs in one of the downtown slaughterhouses in the Toronto area. They found the conditions there so disgusting that they both gave up eating meat entirely and became vegetarians ever since! That tells you something. This society lives in massive denial when it comes to the way we have allowed industry to treat the animals we consider to be nothing more than "food" for our consumption.

I still eat meat, fully knowing the above, and I think about it often when I am sitting down to a meal. I've gone through periods when I switched to a vegetarian diet, and I enjoyed it too and was healthy on it, but I then get back into the meat eating simply because it's convenient...and it tastes good.

I have often said that the real motto of modern society isn't the old "Give me liberty or give me death!" (Patrick Henry)....no, it's the new motto: "Give me convenience or give me death!"

Are people nowadays hypocrites? Or are they just lazy and caught up in repetitious habits that they don't really give any thought to?