I don't know if the question is meant to encompass every aspect of harvesting meat, but I see it as two or three related questions rolled into one:
1. Do you have an ethical issue with killing an animal for food?
2. Are you ok with performing the actual killing, but leaving the other skilled work, the processing/butchering to someone else?
3. Are you ok with the substantial work in processing the slaughtered animal? It's not an inconsequential job.
So to answer my own questions...I actually do feel some tugs at my conscience over the harvesting of animals for food, at least as it pertains to my personal situation, meaning that I have no dietary restrictions or difficulty in sourcing other kinds of protein.
It could be that I'm evolving, who knows? In the past, I didn't think at all about food animal welfare. Nowadays, I do by most of my meat from reputable local farms, who advertise humane treatment of their animals, though I'm still not above a Big Mac here and there, and since the pandemic started, I've relaxed my meat-buying standards a bit, getting meat from Kroger, for whom price and profit are their number one concerns, I'm sure. Maybe in five years, I'll be vegetarian.
As it stands now, would I be able to kill an animal, if that were the last practical resort? Yes, definitely, so any squeamishness over the actual act of shooting/slitting of an animal wouldn't be much of an issue, though I certainly wouldn't enjoy it. I've done it and helped do it enough times, though if a person hasn't, it's hard to express how unpleasant it can get, and there's a world of difference in killing, say, a fish, than there is a pig or a cow.
It's the third question then, that's the one that would get in my way from a practical standpoint. Butchering an animal is a lot of work, and much of it isn't exactly fun. It smells, it's physical, and it's messy.
When I think "butchering," my mind goes immediately to pigs, because that's what we butchered the most. Well, not in sheer numbers, that'd be chickens, but in amount of meat, it's hogs, so that's what I think of, and that's some work.
Even chickens, small as they are, are more work than you think, with the scalding and plucking and gutting. Matter of fact, the main reason we stopped raising chickens was that my dad felt it was too much work for too little meat. Chicken day meant taking care of a good 30-40 chickens in a day, and not have a whole lot of meat to show for the work, especially compared to a hog or to an entire beef cow.
So practically speaking, even if I felt the need to raise a pig for meat, I'd pay someone else to do the slaughtering and the butchering. The very last cow we ever raised to eat, all my brothers had grown and moved, and it was just my dad and me, so we did that, and after it was all done and we got all that beef back, cut up and ground the way my dad requested, he shook his head and said, "I should have done this years ago!"
whole pre packed chicken, had no idea where to cut, where the joints are etc...
