Thoughts On Vegetarianism

[JonnyAnchovy]

Some people have the ability to have empathy for people with different skin colour, religion or sexual orientation at a different level to how they have empathy for people who look/feel/**** the same as them. That's why the logic is the same, IMO.

 

[MarkBastard]

Some people have the ability to have empathy for people with different skin colour, religion or sexual orientation at a different level to how they have empathy for people who look/feel/**** the same as them. That's why the logic is the same, IMO.

It's a slippery slope isn't it. I see a nicely defined line between other humans and animals. If you include them together, then are you inclusive of all animals? Does their size matter? Their intelligence? Their population? Their visibility to humans? Their usefulness to humans including as pets? This is becoming purely philosophical which is a good thing IMO. Would like to know your view on the matter. Is an animal life an animal life? Say whales and chickens were both under no threat of extinction and you had to feed a village of 1000 starving humans meat or let them die. Would you:

A) Kill one whale to save the 1000 humans.
B) Kill 500 chickens to save the 1000 humans.
C) Let the 1000 humans die.

This is taking me right back...

 

[Ronin]

What I would like to see is a vegan that admits to loving the taste of meat, missing the taste of meat, agreeing that it is good for your health, but choosing not to eat it based purely on the ethical considerations. I would respect this person a great deal indeed.

I think you'll find that there are a lot of those out there, maybe not vegans but at least vegetarians. most of those that I know initially made the decision for moral reasons.

my decision to become vegetarian was largely a moral one, I had no issue with the taste of meat. And although I believe that eating meat is unnecessary nutritionally, I do believe it is the easiest way to get the nutrients we need. I do however believe that it isn't healthy in the quantities that a lot of people eat it in.

I occasionally miss chicken and fish, very rarely red meat.

The dietary side is scientific

yes indeed, and I believe you'll find very very few scientific sources that suggest that we should eat more meat. Most suggest the exact opposite. Those that do suggest the consumption of more meat often have very interesting funding sources. Look at the CSIRO total wellbeing diet.

The misuse of scientific data pisses me off too, given my background

james

 

[Ronin]

So we're just talking about Europeans? Seems like a short time frame that may exclude a fair bit of hunting & gathering on the Australian continent...
Just a friendly stir; I am enjoying your reasoned responses.

no problem, I'm enjoying this too.

I have no problem with hunting and gathering, the animals are wild and live a normal life. Those that kill them to eat them are actually those that do the killing. No coles or safeway with neatly wrapped, bloodless steaks there. They are fully aware of what they are eating, how it lived, died and was prepared.

I'd say that the vast majority of human meat consumption was via hunting and gathering, no intensive farming, no abattoirs. How the animals were raised was not really an issue.

There's becoming much more of an awareness at the moment about the source of our food and it seems to be largely coming out of the UK. Have a look at some of the documentaries by Jimmy Doherty, if we are going to keep farming and eating meat, there are better ways to do it that are both economically more viable and much much more ethical.

James

 

[Dave70]

Choosing to respect black people - or to like homosexuals for that sake - is like turning your back on 10,000 years of human evolution, which is clearly ******* idiotic.
Like that wanker Martin Luther King on the box at the moment telling us that 'he has a dream'. People of his ilk would like to see us all share equal footing with monkeys!
Clearly he's a ******* idiot also.
Do your homework and you come to realize what a load of horse shit this whole campaign for gays and blacks is. This is the result of corporate propaganda and flawed science being manipulated into conventional, accepted wisdom.


Blacks and gays and their variations may be the new black in some circles, but they are retarded, ignorant, and I'm sure on some Freudian level, attention seeking. (I can say that cos my sister is gay and black).

Pity this is a text based medium because one cant always tell if we are typing tongue in cheek with a wry grin across our mugs.

If you are actually trying to make some obscure connection between racism, homophobia and ribbing vegetarians then I feel a little embarrassed for you.

 

[MarkBastard]

I have no problem with hunting and gathering, the animals are wild and live a normal life.

While I actually agree with you on this one surely from a harm and stress minimisation point of view hunting is more barbaric? For example Kangaroos being short and then you'll find there's a Joey inside. Or animals that get wounded but still get away only to die an agonising death later. Overall I agree because it annoys me when people won't for example eat any meat that still looks like the animal it came from (e.g. fish presented hole, baby octopus etc).

The impurity of meat as a processed product is sort of shitty, but then again how fukn good are deli meats.

 

[JonnyAnchovy]

It's a slippery slope isn't it. I see a nicely defined line between other humans and animals. If you include them together, then are you inclusive of all animals? Does their size matter? Their intelligence? Their population? Their visibility to humans? Their usefulness to humans including as pets? This is becoming purely philosophical which is a good thing IMO. Would like to know your view on the matter. Is an animal life an animal life? Say whales and chickens were both under no threat of extinction and you had to feed a village of 1000 starving humans meat or let them die. Would you:

A) Kill one whale to save the 1000 humans.
B) Kill 500 chickens to save the 1000 humans.
C) Let the 1000 humans die.

This is taking me right back...

I'm a bit allergic to nice dividing lines.... Who was it that said 'explain everything as simple as possible, but not simpler'? Einstein? I think a nice straight caesura separating out animals from people is a bit over simple... drawing lines like this can lead do dodgy politics, as there are always individuals who fall on the wrong side. (as an aside, this dude writes a lot about how 'the human' is only made possible by the seperation and subjection of 'the animal', in contexts like medicine, philosophy, the law etc. Its a skinny little book, and well worth the read!)

I think its a bit silly to even be talking about 'animals' as some homogeneous group - I mean, what does a dolphin have in common with an ant, or an oyster with a crow? I think specifics matter a great deal. I plan on smashing some oysters this weekend, but I'd think twice about eating a dolphin steak.

Is a pig more morally important than an overcomatose person or a child (a pig is demonstrably smarter)? All this utilitarian stuff (like your quiz above) is a bit of a boring way of thinking if you ask me..... i prefer not to do my ethics on a calculator.

Thankfully haven't been in a situation where I've had to decide between a bunch of skinnys and a whale....

 

[Dave70]

I agree with manticle, this has been a quite civil discussion, except for some. This post adds nothing to the discussion.

Do you have any idea of the science? How many journal articles have you read regarding the links between meat consumption and vascular disease, heart disease, stroke, colon cancer? Do you know how to access scientific literature? I'm assuming that you have some sort of institutional access to a database like pubmed to be making claims like that regarding scientific conspiracies funded by vegetarian societies aimed at preventing the consumption of meat.

People misquoting science pisses me off. There are very few, extremely few, papers out the that recommend the increased consumption of meat. And guess where the funding for those comes from? Meat industries.

So in our 10,000 years of evolution, for how long have we been intensively farming animals? For how long have pigs been raised in pens that prevent them from turning around? How long have chickens been bred to grow so fast and stuffed full of antibiotics under the guise of growth promoters that their bones can't keep up and they end up immobile?

You'll actually find that some people, vegetarians even, are remarkable well informed and have made conscious decisions not to support such practices.

I have no problem with people eating meat and I recognise that it is a traditional part of our diet. However, modern practices leave a lot to be desired.

If you don't care about the source of your food and hava no empathy for those who lose their lives so that you can gorge yourself at a BBQ I pity you,

Now go away so that the rest of us can have a civil discussion,

James

PS, sorry to the rest of you for stooping to a response, but it annoyed me more than a little

James, please take your seat mate and relax.

You start out arguing nutritional science and wind up lamenting animal mistreatment - obviously nobody wants that.

I'm talking eating animal product, nothing more.

Now I'm not about to do your homework for you, but I'll get you started with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet

There's about 163 references to click on at the bottom from various non-partisan sources so you can get an idea where I'm coming from.

 

[MarkBastard]

The main point of the totalitarians BS above was to work out whether you're arguing about life itself as something that needs to be preserved, and if so how you measure the quality of that life. As you've said you'll eat Oysters but not Dolphin Steaks (I'd probably rather the Dolphin steak myself to be honest). So how do you work out what is and isn't appropriate to eat or kill? What is it based on? I'm curious. Give me something tangible.

As for animals, if it helps replace everything above with Humans and non-humans.

 

[JonnyAnchovy]

I once met a guy who ate a dolphin steak (in the states, of all places!). He said it was ******* delicious.

edit: he ate the dolphin in the states, I didn't meet him in the states. ******* ambiguous sentences.

 

[MarkBastard]

I once met a guy who ate a dolphen steak (in the states, of all places!). He said it was ******* delicious.

Haha, that's awesome. I would totally do it so that I didn't hurt the feelings of all the pigs and cows I've eaten. It'd be like making your nigger and spic friends take their shoes off at the front door but letting the honkies walk right in. Who says dolphins are so awesome? I know they're smart but I don't want to set some dipshit precedent like Plato did.

 

[JonnyAnchovy]

So how do you work out what is and isn't appropriate to eat or kill? What is it based on? I'm curious. Give me something tangible.

I think I do the same thing as you, or as most people who have chimed in here do. I give it a long hard think, and make a pretty much arbitrary decision. I try to think about the conditions under which my food was produced, try to avoid stuff procured through killing, and I spend a great deal of time thinking about these kinds of issues in general.

It's all a bit hypocritical, because as I type this I'm wearing a leather belt, and sipping on a coffee with milk, which is pretty much just as bad as eating veal, IMO.

I spend a shit load on brewing, when I know that the money could be used to save lives of people dieing of hunger and poverty-related disease, so no moral high ground here.

As for animals, if it helps replace everything above with Humans and non-humans.

Ah, but this doesn't really solve the problem, does it? How can we define human, except by opposition to non-humans. There is always some kind of violence involved in making these distinctions.

 

[pcmfisher]

I have no problem with people eating meat and I recognise that it is a traditional part of our diet.

I could have sworn I read that you said it was absolutely ridiculous for anyone to eat meat if they were not prepared to pull the trigger.

I find it absolutely ridiculous that the first thing you do every morning at work is kill some rats for your days activities and then take the stand you have on not eating meat. Oh thats right you can rationalize it because you believe its truly essential.

You breed rats for experiments, sheep and cattle get bred for food.

Without our intervention none of these animals would have existed. We created them, we dispatch them. Not very warm and fuzzy but thats how it is.

Yes farming practices could be more humane and efficient and yes we should all eat less meat.

The last thing on my mind when I pick up a nice lump of t bone at the supermarket is whether I have the right to eat it just because I don't have the guts to kill it.

As an aside,
A friend of a friend of mine is a vegan after being a huge meat eater all their life.
They have decided in their infinite wisdom that so should their dog be.
So the dog's diet now consists of lettuce, tomato, and the rest of the greenery that the owner eats.
Is that cruel??

 

[MarkBastard]

http://www.ntnews.com.au/article/2011/01/0...491_ntnews.html

Pretty messed up.

 

[schooey]

http://www.ntnews.com.au/article/2011/01/0...491_ntnews.html

Pretty messed up.

This link is what I associate with the term 'animal cruelty'

I'm not so fond of battery hen farms or the pure industrial meat factories as previously mentioned. I usually shop for all of the meat this family eats and it either comes from the farmers market or old fashioned corner store type butcher that can tell me where his meat comes from. I'm not so niave to believe that this guarantees that I am not consuming some produce that has been subjected to some not so nice conditions along the way.

In part, my decision to do so is driven by a quality point of view; The meat is always fresher and better than and supermarket. Then in part driven by giving back to the local community... I really abhor shopping with the big two. And lastly, partly from the view of if enough people make a change, then the number of mega-meat-treat-animals-like-shit-factories will decline.

In saying all that though, I'm honest enough to say that when I go buy sausages or a fillet steak, I don't envision a family of cows crying over the senseless death of their loved one because schooey could have survived fine on tofu and soy burgers. I see a steak and a sausage. End of story. An animal that was bred for the table, died for the table and hopefully it was treated humanely along the way. Yeah yeah, there are exceptions, again that's just another sad fact of life. Everytime we regulate or make a rule we create an exception.

I grew up on the dirt. I have cut the throat of more sheep than I care to remember. I shot about two and a half tonne of roos a week for 2 years, Partly so my family could survive, partly so the peoples crops they were eating could survive and because thos crazy Germans couldn't get enough of skippy at the time. I can get up every day and face myself in the mirror about my choices. There are bigger things to worry about in life...

 

[marksfish]

at least skippy was free range and organic <_<

 

[Katherine]

I have no problem with eating meat... its about the treatment of them before hand and Im actually really shocked to see that article that Mark put up... Im even more ignorant then I thought.

If we didnt eat meat we wouldnt be where we are now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But maybe the earth would be better of that way... Who knows.

 

[schooey]

at least skippy was free range and organic <_<

Heh...

Funny you should say that. After seeing the inside and outside of so many roos, it's the one meat I refuse to eat. If certified organic roo meat means it comes from a mangy old roo that was full of tapeworms and liverfluke, give me the hormone chicken any day...

It still makes me wonder when I see the vendors at the farmers market spruiking about 100% organic beef and lamb. First thing I ask them is if they drench...

 

[technoicon]

done both. happy with both.

manticle, did you just watch food inc.. lol

 

[pk.sax]

Choice should he just that, choice. As long as you understand your choices and are prepared to listen when your choices affect others, you can be quite tolerable. That said, irrationality is the colour of life. My own choice of not eating meat is simply moral, why cause killing where it's not strictly required. I wouldn't go out and vote for a war if there were one on the ballot but sure as he'll would volunteer if my country was in a justified fight. Doesn't make one a hypocrite, just able to make their own damn minds up. It's the sheep you have to look out for, the bad effects of ppl with good intentions.

I don't exactly enjoy being teased with ridiculous antics of meat eaters when they are around veggos, trying to act all macho, so I return it by not propounding vegetarianism, the choice is mine right, to preach or to not

In turn, there are ppl who make a fuss at cafe's and restaurants on finding out there is nothing veg on the menu, well, you definitely are not going to get something fresh and creative from those factory food serving food courts. Use your judgement when choosing where to eat. I can get a restaurant to pretty much do up something nice for me with a polite word and that's pretty much how I like it. But I'll admit that the noise makers will have a bigger impact on what we get to eat out there. Nobody is ever completely wrong, just some insensitive and some just plain amazing.