wow Manchild, you didn't leave anything for me... oh well, I'll have some leftovers
manchild wrote:andrew wrote:You know how some veggies bang on about "Meat is Murder"? Surely veg is murder also as vegetables are living things until they are picked.
Vegetables don't have emotions, they are by no mean self-aware beings. That is the basic ethical reason.
To equalize vegetables with animals, they'd need to have at least some basic similarities humans share with animals - intelligence, senses, emotions, eyes... and they have none.
That is correct. In fact the murder itself is not the biggest problem if you ask me, though it is a problem of course, and i've been a full vegan for almost 5 years now.
The main issue for me is the torture animals undergo throughout modern factories. Think a milking cow, pumped full of hormones, antibiotics, overfed to the point of not being able to stand on its own, 'living' in a 3x3, always pregnant, seeing its normal life cut to 1/5th of what it should have been like.
Plants lack a nervous central system, capable of inflicting pain. Kick a pig, dog, cow, it'll run away and eventually learn to fear you, it'll scream not unlike humans do. It's not too surprising, just like us they have bones, nerves, muscles, kidneys, liver, etc. Trim a plant down and if you do it right it'll probably grow stronger.
After all, we have to eat something right? well then why choose to eat the one thing that is clearly capable of feeling pain? and depending on who you ask may even have a conscience? Saying plants are also alive and thus constitute the same ethical dilemma is just an easy cop out of the discussion.
People may suddenly take the easy esoterical and non scientific way out to explain plants are in the same league animals are, but as always my recommendation is that when in doubt resort to plain and common observation. Go, kill your dog and watch it scream, bleed and then rot away the way a human would. Then go and kill a field of rice. If your senses, conscience and your reason tell you it's the same process, then you are either a radically different human being than me, or most likely simply not interested enough to pay attention and open your eyes.
andrew wrote:Considering who one of the most infamous vegetarians was, I think it is a bad sign.
Godwin's law this quick?
Belatti wrote:
Which would be more beneficial to an independent study? Stating that 300g of beef produces the same amount of carbon emmissions as driving 200 miles in a V8 land rover or comparing those with the amount of carbon emmissions that produces this:
MC already answered this, but i just had to bring it up again. Given cattle has to eat, and strangely enough cattle is vegetarian, think how efficient it is to feed your food for years before you eat it. How many times did that cow poop? how much energy went into regenerating its organs? all the energy and water needed to keep billions of animals that would have never existed without the demand generated by humans? how much heat did that animal put out? what's the methane gas content they fart into the air? Lots of energy right there for you, and every single drop of it driven by demand.
Just_a_fan wrote: However, I try to source meat that has had a decent quality of life prior to slaughter. ...
... Sure I eat meat but I eat 'good' meat where possible.
Hmmm, what exactly do you mean by 'I try' and 'where possible'? This being an ethical dilemma, how do you turn on and off your ethics/beliefs?
It's not like you can rape someone one day of the year and it'll be cool as long as you behave the other 364. 'Your honor I had to do it, my wife was nowhere near close'
Just_a_fan wrote: that I watched grow up in a field down the road last year so I know how happy they were.
How happy do they need to be for you to eat them? and if one looks downright miserable, do you spare it in compensation? or do you feel it was its fault for not embracing life and it deserves getting eaten after all?
Pandamasque wrote:Just a point. Nature is a cruel system. Animals kill other animals to eat, just like the two-legged relatively more intelligent animals called humans.
...
The biggest difference between us and other predators is that most of us don't actually have to slaughter our food personally.
The biggest difference is they kill because they must. We don't, hunting and gathering is a thing of the past for most current societies. And don't get me wrong, if I need to kill an animal to survive then i will. Just like I would kill a human if my survival depended on it, even if it's because I need the food yet have no other choice.
We torture animals because:
- eating them brings us immediate pleasure,
- we were 'raised that way'
- we ignorantly think we have to
Most of the times those 3 reasons are deeply intertwined in any given human.
Plus using that video as rationalization is akin to looting a store because last night i saw Haitians looting left and right. The key here is different circumstances exist, thus I humbly suggest to consider each situation as separate and run your moral/ethical processes through each one of them, you should arrive at different conclusions.
sebbe wrote: We can't live eating only vegetables.
.
Says who? please tell me that knowledge did not come from watching futurama, or maybe the simpsons? how about american dad?
flynfrog wrote:... The real problem isn't the farming its the number of people we now have feed.
I don't find not eating meat any more noble than raising it or slaughtering it your self. Its all a personal choice we have to make.
It's a supply and demand problem isn't it? what happens if your excessive demand (the need to feed billions of livestock) puts a big strain on your supply?
Prices go up, and the poorer you are the quicker you fall off the table.
It's certainly a personal choice, but it should still be a choice. For 99.whatever% of the population it's not a choice, it's just something they've always done and never thought about. If questioned, they'll just spurt 'plants are alive too' and think that grants them carte blanche to torture and kill anything that's legally killable, or that at least won't put up much of a fight.
If it's a choice, let's make it so, in fact, let's make it an informed decision. I'd be cool with that.
Belatti wrote:manchild wrote:
I guess these were "anemic" too, so their brains malfunctioned.
da Vinci, Edison, Einstein, Pythagoras, Schweitzer, Tesla...
While its true what you state, its also true that many people that turns veggie without informing themselves suffer from several health problems due to the lack of proteins, minerals or vitamins.
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Yes, but you can say that of any diet, if it's not balanced then you're screwed. I know people that went vegetarian and ran back to meat because they thought all they had to do was stop eating meat. They never thought substitutes were necessary, put that on top of an already weak diet and you've got recipe for failure.
flynfrog wrote: But going away from industrial framing will not produce more food it will be much less.
No, as already explaind, feeding your food is highly inefficient.
flynfrog wrote: We make more than enough food right now. Its a distribution problem. Its also a medical problem. You have populations of people in non fertile area with insane birth rates. This wasn't so bad before modern medicine but now the death rate is not keeping up with the birth rate and the local food supplies cant keep up. We can grow plenty of food but many of these countries have no means to distribute it to there people. Or the leaders keep it for there armies.
I agree it's a distribution problem, and even if everyone went vegan we would still have that problem. People would find ways of producing expensive onions that turned up better profits, or land would be sold to fill it up with whatever people feel like.
flynfrog wrote: you keep on bringing up Joe Lewis what about all of the track stars with records that did not have the advantage of being vegan. I wonder how they did it.
I don't think he meant it gave him an advantage. It simply served to prove you don't need animal products, and statistically speaking it's no surprise there's only a few vegan athletes just like there's very few vegan people
Just_a_fan wrote:
Imagine those sort of people trying to feed themselves without ready meals and fast food. It would certainly reduce the obesity rates!
What makes you think no one would step in and make a buck selling vegan ready meals? there's already an industry for it. And i'm sure people would still find ways to become obese. I for one went from 85 Kg as a meat eater, down to about 78 Kg the first couple of vegan months, and now unhappily back to 84 Kg and increasing, I do sit on my @$$ all day and not getting any younger. I should weigh somewhere around 77 Kg, so not too bad really.
Just_a_fan wrote: In other parts of the world people aren't starving because there are cattle about - they're starving because fellow humans are doing their damnest to make them starve (or find other equally unpleasant ways to kill them)
True
