Very well, if you say so. You're welcome and thank you too.Originally Posted by Dodo25
Very well, if you say so. You're welcome and thank you too.
You know I had brain fever, and that is to be mad.
Honestly I think vegetarianism attracts alot of quacks and people who just have trouble dealing with reality and how much violent death there actually is in nature.
Isn't it because of the red in tooth and claw, slaughter of the seas reality of nature that some vegetarians don't want to add to it?
As humans living in a highly developed and relatively wealthy societies, we can make a choice, where some may not be able to.
Possibly, some vegetarians might have 'weird' reasons. However, this doesn't negate the fact that compelling reasons for it do exist.
Cows or pigs have the same level of awareness as human infants or Alzheimer patients in the late stages of the disease. Do we value beings the latter more than the former simply because the 'look different'? That's committing the same mistake racists or sexists make. All the suffering inflicted on the animals by the meat and diary industry doesn't save a single life. Our human preferences for 'tasty meat' are not strong enough (meaning if we don't eat it we don't suffer enough) to justify the suffering of animals.
And what is it with this 'nature is cruel, so why shouldn't we be cruel too' argument?? YES, nature is cruel, because evolution is an indifferent, blind process that only 'cared' about the spreading of the genes. But that doesn't mean WE have to be cruel too! We have socialism, welfare, medicine for the sick, contraception; each of these are very 'unnatural', but prevent suffering.
Are you talking about preventing suffering - which is reasonable enough? Or are you talking about not eating animals at all?
I'm 'just' talking about suffering. I don't think killing non-self aware animals (and the only ones which are self-aware are humans and possibly some of the other great apes) is wrong, IF it's done painlessly.
So if it were guaranteed that an animal had been cared for to the best of our abilities (well, reasonably that is, animals don't need jacuzzis of course) so it didn't suffer, then I would eat it. I LOVE meat. I stopped eating it for ethical reasons.
The problem is that even in 'animal-friendly' meat or milk production, the beings suffer terribly. Chronic udder inflammation in milk cows, which are overbred to begin with so their life expectancy is shortened to a fraction of a normal cow's life expectancy due to stress. In order for the cows to give enough milk, they have to be impregnated several times a year (and obviously they can't keep the young, which suffer because they don't get enough milk, and not in the right way). Eventually, the calves are slaughtered, and if you've ever watched videos from slaughterhouses, it's obvious that it's NOT done painlessly (and don't forget the scary and often long-distance transport, and the moments of agonizing fear before the death blow). It would cost too much. Or take chickens, their beaks are cut (there are nerves in there) to prevent canibalism, but it happens anyway when they're close together. The dense, warm conditions of farm houses are a herd for disease and infections. There's suffering even in animal friendly farms that actually make profit.
The only way to really get meat without suffering is when you only feed like one family and maybe some friends of the house with it, there's pretty much no way to actually make profit out of it.
Also, there are compelling ecological reasons to eat vegan (as best as one can): Meat production is highly inefficient, it takes 7'500 litres of water and 11 pounds of soya or other crops to get one pound of meat, on average. Additionally, the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all of global traffic(!).
And meat happens to be quite unhealthy. I don't care much about that though, I eat sweets all the time too.
By the way, scientists are working on in-vitro meat that could be produced without there having to be an actually sentient animal. If people stopped having an aversion to something 'unnatural', they could just eat that meat instead. Without suffering, it's ethically correct to eat whatever you deem tasty.
OK, that I don't have a problem with. But saying we shouldn't kill animals at all because it's 'biased' in the same way Nazism was biased - as many vegans do - is downright balmy in my personal opinion.
There are ethical reasons to prevent suffering though, obviously.
Well, in a way the Nazi comparison is accurate. People seem to think that the suffering doesn't really matter because animals are just 'animals'. In the same way, the Nazis thought the Jews weren't morally relevant.
I do however dislike the term 'mass killing' when it comes to vegans comparing meat production with the holocaust. I really agree, there's a big difference between killing (self-aware) humans and killing (non-self aware but sentient) animals.
I think many vegans are being counterproductive, they antagonize people with stupid arguments and radical views. I just saw some animal rights guy calling the philosopher Peter Singer a speciesist because he said it would be justified to experiment on 100 chimpanzees if it saves the lives of ten thousands of humans. Ironically, it was Singer who made the term 'speciesism' popular in the first place.
But again, merely because some vegans use bad arguments doesn't make the existing good arguments invalid.
Last edited by Dodo25; 05-28-2011 at 05:10 PM.
See even if I wanted to get involved with folks like you because of some shared ethical principle I could NEVER go through with it because of hair-brained thoughts like those above.
Like I said, vegetarianism attracts alot of quacks.
You recognize I qualified it by saying 'in a way'?
Genocides have been committed often. What made the holocaust unique was its large scale, how systematically it had been done, and how little the population in general cared.
See any parallels to the meat industry? Do the words large-scale, systematically, and little caring ring a bell? Thousands of animals are painfully(!) killed by humans every second. Is there an outcry? No, the world happily participates in it by eating the dead bodies.
I didn't say the comparison was apt in every regard. This doesn't have to be the case for an analogy.
I feel like eating a steak.
Your argument merely serves to polarise the issue, and will not persuade anyone from eating meat. There are many reasons why people eat meat - culture, habit, health, tradition, taste, economics etc. Equating the process to nazism does no-one any favours. At the end of the day, you can't stuff vegetarianism down people's throats. They tend to resist more, as Prickly demonstrates. I suspect if you were talking to someone in the real, you'd get the same reaction. There's no point to it because ulttimately you get vegetarianism a bad name without helping any animal - or, in my view, any human who might consider it.
Last edited by Paulclem; 05-28-2011 at 07:04 PM.
If you read the posts again, you'll see that it wasn't me who brought up Nazism. I don't think Nazi-comparisons are arguments either. But since it was brought up argued there was no comparison, I pointed out that there actually are parallels. Nothing more, nothing less. Let's drop the issue and focus on the actual arguments.
@Wilson, enjoy it! It's less unethical if at least some being is happy (: But it doesn't hurt to actually think about the arguments and consider one's position..
If eating plants only was completely rational, I would consider a vegan diet. At present, it seems largely irrational.
Last edited by G L Wilson; 05-28-2011 at 08:50 PM.
I don't see anything 'irrational' about not eating animal products. Go back a couple of pages and read this thread if you're interested in all the arguments. Veganism is much healthier than eating meat (even little), and definitely not less healthy than vegetarianism. You just have to plan what you eat in order to avoid deficiencies, but it isn't that hard. And you could always take vitamin pills. Some people seem to have an aversion against pills, THAT would be irrational. But as I said, it's possible to get every important vitamin and nutritient without pills, you just have to inform yourself.
But why not start with little steps? If 100 meat eaters would reduce their meat consumption to a fourth, the end result is as if 75 of them became vegetarians! One should do what's realistic, and if it works, then do more.
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