My friends and I have been getting back into Team Fortress 2. Still tons of fun after all these years, especially the jump maps

You’re conflating the “amusement” of eating food with the amusement of killing the animals to obtain that food. They are not the same. As stated in my previous post, there is a big disconnect in most people’s minds between the food they eat and the animals they come from.

But more to the point I’m trying to make, animals dying in order to feed people is different from animals being recorded while they are slowly and deliberately tortured to death as a form of entertainment. I don’t know how to explain that one is worse than the other. I’m not disagreeing with you that plant based alternatives are preferable to meat in order to avoid the suffering of animals, but I’m also not understanding why you feel the need to bring that up in the comments of this article. The issue described in the article is fundamentally different from that of the meat industry.

In the meat industry, animal suffering is not the goal. The goal is to deliver as much product (food in this case) to the consumer as cheaply as possible. Animal suffering is a byproduct of this because on a large enough scale, both the consumer and the capitalists running the slaughterhouses are far enough removed from the animals that they don’t have to confront the moral questions of what they’re putting these animals through.

I agree that it’s still a disgusting practice, but it’s not the same thing as deliberately harming animals for your own amusement. In the meat industry, some people can hand-wave those moral concerns away by saying to themselves “at least the animals died for something good: to feed countless families”. Whether you agree with that reasoning or not (which, for the record, I do not), that same person can’t use that excuse in the case of these monkeys. It’s just pointless suffering for the amusement of a handful of psychopaths.