Totally agree. I try to limit my meat eating to one meal a day, and a small serving of it at that. And while I don't follow any strict "diet", I set myself a "limited meat" culinary guideline. As a result, I tend to eat more healthy, and ironically, less expensive foods.Originally Posted by Emil Miller
“Oh crap”
-- Hellboy
feel like I am jumping into the middle of a conversation but anyway....
when I first became a vegetarian I felt I had to tell everyone about it but that was a childish act and I got over it. Now I rarely tell people but I always find it interesting when the discussion comes up, some people like some of you have mentioned before get a bit defensive like it means that they are doing something wrong but I often get a detailed description of their favorite meat as if to get me hungry for it.
I really don't care what other people eat and I think it is their choice what they eat and I include my son in that, I only cook vegetarian food but he gets to eat anything he wants at school and having dinner with his grandparents or anyone else.
almost everybody has some food thing and here on the ice many people don't eat horse meat even though they eat everything else. also more and more people won't eat pigs because of recent news of very bad treatment of pigs in their early life.
my son often reminds me that I don't eat dead animals but he himself does... I often hope he will follow into my footsteps but it is his choice.
I hope death is joyful, and I hope I'll never return -Frida Khalo
If I seem insensitive to what you are going through, understand it's the way I am- Mr. Spock
Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil. - Baudelaire
Both my wife and I are vegetarian, and we made the decision to bring our kids up as such with the proviso that they could eat what they wanted when they were adults/ 16/ expressed a preference - whichever came first. This is really only the other way round to how my wife was brought up. She declared an intention to be vegetarian at a young age. Her mum, diplomatically said she could when she was 16, probably thinking that my wife would forget. She didn't and duly became vegetarian at sixteen and has been so ever since.
My two kids are still vegetarians, but it remains up to them of course. I think you just have to do what fits your circumstances best. With us there was no pressure, as my wife had already been a veggie for twenty-odd years already.
I don't see why anyone should care at all about what anyone else eats, or about what they themselves eat for that matter (what I mean is, why use the food that you happen to prefer as a description of your identity?). Why even bother to call yourself a "vegetarian?" No one else goes around calling themselves "omnivores" (as in, people don't say: "hi, I'm Scott, I'm 27, I like to play squash and I'm an omnivore"). It's just not that big a deal, what someone decides to eat is the most redundant decision that anyone in our society has to make.
Last edited by JuniperWoolf; 04-13-2011 at 11:23 PM.
__________________
Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth.
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
-Lord Byron
It IS a big deal to all the animals living miserable lives and dying misrable deaths. Some things are simply ethically wrong, and asking 'why should anyone care?' shows you haven't understood that part. There has been a time where hardly anyone, not even the founding fathers of America, questioned the ethics of slavery. But why should we care how others handle labor affairs at their estates? Why should we care about our own treatment of fellow sentient beings?
Edit: Obviously the 'defining oneself by what one eats' is a different issue, and it needn't be exagerated, meaning it probably shouldn't be the first thing you tell someone if they ask you about yourself (maybe the third thing).
Last edited by Dodo25; 04-13-2011 at 11:33 PM.
And what are you going to do about it? Preach like that at people who decide to eat meat? Yeah, I'm sure the moral superiority angle will play out really well for you (read: people will do the opposite in the most blatant way possible just to piss you off, and it will be your fault). It's just the way things are: you can't tell people what to eat. Meat simply tastes really good to humans and they're not going to stop eating it (trust me, I'm from Alberta, you're not going to make these guys into vegetarians).
If you're so concerned with animal wellfare, you'd be better off advocating for more humane treatment of cattle and poultry because all consumers benefit. The people who don't share your views benefit in that the healthier the animals are that they and their families are eating, the healthier they themselves will be. Animal rights activists benefit in that they can pat themselves on the back and make actual leeway because they're shooting for something that's actually possible. The animals themselves benefit in that they don't live miserable lives (they still die, but hey, so does everything else and if it weren't for the cattle industry they may not have even existed in the first place - at least their lives don't suck while they're alive, and if you do it right, they won't even notice when they die). People like me benefit in that we don't have to listen to boring kids with superiority complexes and nothing else to define their identities (ergo the "boring") trying to tell everyone else what to put in their own bodies (seriously, there is nothing else in the world that makes me want to rip into a big steak more than when these people start talking and pull out their stupid postar boards depicting crying calves with "where's my mommy?" speech bubbles above their heads - true story, I swear that actually happened to me). It's a win-win situation.
Last edited by JuniperWoolf; 04-13-2011 at 11:58 PM.
__________________
Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth.
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
-Lord Byron
If you're raised with it (I was), meat DOES taste really damn good. So what? We can't just put our desire to 'have a tasty meal' above the much more important desire of 'not suffering hell'. If you haven't already, please read my longer post on the last page. Yeah, I suppose I'm 'preaching', but contrary to religious preaching, my case is actually based on logical arguments and empirical evidence. There's nothing wrong with making people aware of important issues. And yeah, improving farming conditions is a first goal. But as of now, even the best larger farms are very unethical.
By the way, I know exactly what you mean with the 'where's my mommy' example. I've been there. I remember once deliberately trying as hard as I could to eat as many chicken wings as possible (and definitely an odd number) so I could rub it into the face of a vegetarian colleague how many chickens just died because of me (: Actually it's not very funny and I don't really know why I did it back then.. It's an interesting psychological reaction anyway.
You have to let people know sometimes what your food preferences are. As I said some posts earlier, I don't usually mention it.
Then someone will post about it on here, and so I like to have a balanced and reasonanble discussion about it.
Last edited by Paulclem; 04-14-2011 at 06:55 PM.
It seems to me that where one draws the line on what is acceptable dinner fare is somewhat arbitrary. I’ll bet most cannibals refuse to eat members of their own family (Jason of Argonaut fame notwithstanding). Many omnivores would refuse to eat apes, or even monkeys. I know plenty of people who don’t eat mammals, others who eat fish but not warm-blooded animals. How about insects? Is it OK to eat them?
Some Jainist monks sweep the sidewalk before them as they walk, to avoid stepping on insects. Other people here in tree-hugging Oregon revere some plants as much as animals.
It's not arbitrary. It's based upon a person's own reasons - moral, health related or matters of taste.
It's totally arbitary if you exclude humans from the 'category which we're allowed to torture' while at the same time include chimpanzees, cows, chicken or fish. It's not arbitrary if your criterium for moral consideration is sentience, and with it, the capacity to suffer. Because nothing else really makes sense.
Sentient beings have interests, and all these interests should be considered equally. Humans want to eat tasty food. Cows don't want to suffer. Which interest is more important? Do we suffer as much as the cow does if we eat vegetarian instead? If yes, eat the cow. If not, don't. It's that simple.
(Obviously the cow doesn't suffer when being eaten, she's dead then! If the cow is raised in a healthy environment, and is killed without (much) suffering, then by all means don't waste the opportunity to have a tasty dinner. But factory farming and EVEN most large-scale 'organic' animal-friendly farms just cause too much suffering. Ever seen footage of a slaughterhouse? It's inhumane.
I believe killing for food is amoral. If one decides not eat meat it is an issue of sensibilities not morality. There is nothing wrong with either choice on a moral level.
I do however feel that it should be the duty of the meat industry to reduce as much as possible, cruelty toward animals. I eat meat but as often as I can, I eat sustainable, organic, pasture raised meat from small, non-factory farms. This goes for chicken, beef, pork, eggs, milk etc. And I don't eat lobster.
It depends on which slaughterhouse. They are not all created equal.
Are you aware that making this claim requires you to have a consistent ethical system? And not just that, actually it needs to be better than preference utilitarism. Well, good luck with that. If you really have one, publish it, thousands of philosophers are waiting for just that.
There's the 'shooting a bolt into the animal's brain'. This is done while the animal is scared and often hysterically moving around in the narrow 'death box'. It happens a lot that the 'executor' misses the brain and the bolt hits somewhere else, causing a huge amount of pain additional to the scariness of the situation.
There's the 'cutting throat while hanging upside-down' method. It's surprising how long a cow can remain conscious with a slit throat, but compared to the other method this seems the 'best'. (Kosher slaughtering is similar, but it's not specified that it has to hang upside-down. Some animals are forced to lay on the back when their throat is cut, then they literally drown in their own blood.)
There are other methods, but I'm not sure whether they're used large-scale. Either way, killing painlessly seems to be just too expensive for the meat industry, and it will remain so until the public becomes aware of the atrocities and changes its buying behavior.
As far as I can see, I don't have to create any ethical system to claim that killing for food is amoral. It's amoral because it is an element of animal nature that preceeds morality. The very existence of morality was dependent upon it.
Before I spend time creating an ethical system, I would like to see a list of organisms -- plants, fungi, protists, arthropods, mammals, bacteria -- (ones own species excluded, of course) organized by importance and the reasons why they have their place on this list whether it be for objectively definable genetic reasons or objectively defined reasons of sentience and consciousness described at the quantum level.
I wasn't referring to your claim about killing for food (but I still don't agree with it), I was referring to 'chosing what to eat being a morally irrelevant issue'.
The theory of consciousness that makes the most sense to me doesn't require the 'quantum level'. I'm a bit surprised that you'd think bacteria might have consciousness... I'll just give you a list that's grounded in empirical facts and experiments on consciousness in animals and possibly other beings. For what it's worth, I have read a couple of philosophical and scientific books on these issues because it interests me and I consider it a highly relevant question for ethics. So here the list:
Category A: Rationality
Mentally healthy humans (out of the baby / little children age)
Category B: Self-Awareness
Humans (older than infant-age, mentally more or less healthy), chimpanzees, possibly other great apes; maybe though less likely: dolphins, whales, elephants...
Category C: Consciousness
Humans (all of them except forever comatose ones, or dead ones), all mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes. Possibly arthropods.
Most definitely not: Bacteria, protists, fungi, plants.
So what do these categories mean?
First of all, they don't have to be black-white, sometimes there are gradual differences. A fetus isn't self-aware, a six year old definitely is. Somewhere in between self-awareness emerges gradually.
A isn't very relevant, rationality is only needed for getting things like 'the right to vote' or 'the right for education'. It might even be considered a bad thing because it gives us responsibility. A lion can't choose whether he cruelly kills a gazelle. We can.
B is highly relevant when it comes to killing. Since non-suicidal beings of category B have a strong interest to live, killing them is wrong, even if done painlessly while they're sleeping.
C is highly relevant when it comes to suffering. Suffering is bad, that should be obvious to anyone. No being should suffer if it can be avoided.
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