Meat used as part of a throwaway metaphor doesn't trigger that sort of thing.

When I hear the word, 1-3 images of tortured animals usually briefly cross my mind, and I know there are much more emotional vegans than me. Speak for yourself. And even if torture mindkills some people, like I said, you can't properly discuss some important topics without it, so if it spawns 1000-post threads that aren't worth reading, too bad. (When I've used torture thought experiments so far, it hasn't.)

Edit: Actually, I probably would stop talking about torture if every time I did it spawned a1000-post thread that wasn't worth reading. But if that was what LessWrong was like, I would probably leave. Or if it was in every other respect the same (an implausible counterfactual), stay, but not enjoy it nearly as much.