Vegans: If the meat eaters believed what you did about animal sentience, most of them would be vegans, and they would be horrified by their many previous murders. Your heart-wrenching videos aren’t convincing to them because they aren’t already convinced that animals can feel.
I think the people who changed my mind about this are underestimating how many people believe non-humans aren’t sentient, but I was drastically underestimating how many believe animals have internal experience but eat them anyway.
This is also misleading because I am mostly not in the group of meat-eaters I was describing, despite eating meat. Granted, I didn’t claim to be, but it’s a perfectly predictable inference that I shouldn’t have allowed. Before now, I thought that other people reflectively aware of being like me were incredibly rare, but apparently I was wrong. I’ve seen several people today claim that they believe animals are conscious and that they don’t care.
Many people have proposed this model with respect to animals but it isn’t true. This old post covers a particular saliant time it came up in the rationalist community. https://agentyduck.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-i-feel-about-emotional-appeals.html