The Palin is an idiot thread

[Graham Kennedy]

You can make a case for a vegetarian diet, though it's not a very healthy one IMO. But the fact is that people like meat, and they don't want to be vegetarians for the most part. So we're not changing over anytime soon!

[Tsukiyumi]

I always use the fact that O blood types can only be vegetarian with large amounts of supplements. Supplements I can't afford. Or be bothered to take (I can barely swallow an asprin).

Also, there's the fact that herbivores produce more fecal waste on average than other animals...

[Sionnach Glic]

Aye, meat provides many nutrients and benefits that plants just can't match.

[Monroe]

Personally I'd love to see someone bioengineer a soy cow.

As for why we need to hunt its simple. Deer reproduce with wolves and other predators in mind. We took them out of the picture. Also we have shrunk the area that Deer can live in. So in order to keep huge quantities from dying to mass starvation we thin out the numbers that the predators would have so that the remaining deer can have plenty of food.

[Lt. Staplic]

exactly, hunting is just as good for us as it is for the animals, and we need meat, we may not have to HUNT for meat, but, we still slaughter animals for it so i just used the two in one context on my last post.

[Mikey]

None of that is in dispute; my issue is with legalizing a federally-banned method of hunting which is both decried by hunters and used against endangered (or at least threatened) predators.

[Grundig]

Hey, I like meat, and I miss it all the time. I just can't eat it with a clear conscience, so I don't.

The fact that livestock are now domestic and dependent upon us is really troubling, and there's no easy answer to the question of "what do we do with them if the world stops eating meat?" But the thing is, if the world ever were to move towards a more vegetarian diet (which seems improbable for many reasons) it wouldn't happen fast enough for this to be a problem. We wouldn't suddenly have a surplus of cows that nobody wanted to eat. Any trend of that magnitude would take generations, and I would guess that cows would end up being rare, but not extinct. I think they'd be kept for reasons other than to feed people. Plus, they could become more feral as time goes on, like so many stray dogs and cats. Feral cows... that's a thought.

Also it's important to me that I don't sound like a preacher because that's a quick way to alienate lots of people, so I'm sorry if that's what's coming out lately. This is just an issue that I feel really strongly about. And because it's emotionally driven, it can sound less than logical at times. I do like talking about this stuff though; just tell me if there's a point where I should shuddup.

[Teaos]

Actually growing crops kills more animals than farming cattle

Veganism Is Murder
If God didn't want us to eat cows, he wouldn't have made them out of steak.

By Wesley J. Smith

PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - is at it again. When actress Jessica Simpson recently wore a T-shirt bearing the words "Real Girls Eat Meat," the animal-rights zealots pounced. "Jessica Simpson might have a right to wear what she wants," a PETA spokesperson said, "but she doesn't have a right to eat what she wants - eating meat is about suffering and death."

Listening to animal-rights activists bray on about the wrongness of slaughtering animals for food - summarized in their advocacy phrase "meat is murder" - one would think that the choice we have is between a diet in which animals are killed and a strictly vegan diet involving no animal deaths.

But life is never that simple: Plant agriculture results each year in the mass slaughter of countless animals, including rabbits, gophers, mice, birds, snakes, and other field creatures. These animals are killed during harvesting, and in the various mechanized farming processes that produce wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and other staples of vegan diets. And that doesn't include the countless rats and mice poisoned in grain elevators, or the animals that die from loss of habitat cleared for agricultural use.

Animal-rights activists certainly don't mention this inconvenient fact in their advocacy materials. But if the matter comes up in debate, they have a problem: They believe it is "speciesist" to grant some sentient animals - including humans - greater value than others; as PETA's Ingrid Newkirk so famously put it, "a rat, is a fish, is a dog, is a boy." Thus, they cannot contend that it is more wrong to kill a pig than a rabbit. Nor can they argue that field animals experience less-agonizing deaths from plant agriculture than food animals do from food-animal slaughtering. Field animals may flee in panic as the great rumbling harvest combines approach, only to be shredded to bits within their merciless blades; they may be burned to death when field leavings are burned; they may be poisoned by pesticides; they may die from predation when their plant cover has been removed.

No question: The animal-rights forces hold a weak intellectual hand.

I asked an animal-rights leader, Rutgers law professor Gary Francione, what he thought about this. He claimed that the key issue is intent:

Forget about animals. The very same situation exists with respect to humans. We build roads knowing that people will die; we raise speed limits knowing that an additional 10 miles means X deaths. . . . There is an enormous difference between harm that happens that we do not intend to occur and that which we intend. We should obviously endeavor to commit as little harm as possible but we cannot eliminate harm. We can, however, eliminate intentional harm. And eating animals involves an intentional decision to participate in the suffering and death of nonhumans where there is no plausible moral justification.

Francione also claimed that omnivores occasion a far greater animal-death toll than vegans: "It takes 3 ¼ acres to feed an omnivore for a year; 20 vegans can be fed from that same space. Therefore, to the extent that there is harm caused to sentient beings by the production of plants, that harm is only multiplied by the omnivore."

But neither "intent" (as Francione defines it) nor utilitarian comparison of the carnage is the real issue. The argument made by animal-rights activists is that meat is murder, while veganism is supposedly cruelty-free.

Moreover, even if the relative number of animals killed were the morally decisive issue, veganism might not be the most ethical solution. In 2001, S. L. Davis of the Department of Animal Sciences at Oregon State University, Corvallis, wrote a paper claiming that the diet most likely to result in the deaths of the fewest animals would be beef, lamb, and dairy - not vegan. Davis found a study that measured mouse population density per hectare in grain fields both before and after harvest and estimated a harvest casualty rate of ten mice per hectare. Then, he multiplied that figure by 120 million hectares of farmland in the U.S.; meaning that 1.2 billion mice would die each year in food production if America became a wholly vegan country. Next, he estimated the number of animals that would be killed if half of our fields were dedicated to raising grass eating forage animals (cows, calves, sheep, lambs, etc.) from which to obtain meat. He found that there would Be 300,000 fewer animal deaths (.9 billion) annually from such an omnivorous diet than the number of deaths (1.2 billion mice) that would be caused from a universal vegan diet.

We are not obligated to do any such thing, of course. But I think Davis's somewhat tongue-in-cheek study made an important point: Contending that meat eating is somehow murder while veganism is morally pristine because it doesn't result in intentional animal deaths is factually false and self-delusional. No matter your diet, animals surely died that you might live.

[Sionnach Glic]

"Jessica Simpson might have a right to wear what she wants," a PETA spokesperson said, "but she doesn't have a right to eat what she wants

Er, yes, dumbass, she does. Goddamn braindead vegan fascists.

[Grundig]

He found that there would Be 300,000 fewer animal deaths (.9 billion) annually from such an omnivorous diet than the number of deaths (1.2 billion mice) that would be caused from a universal vegan diet.

1.2 billion - .9 billion = 300 million, not 300,000. I wonder if they meant million instead of billion. Who knows?

Adding cows to the mix increases (by a factor of 20 according to your article) the amount of food we have to grow. So wouldn't there be a corresponding increase in amount of unintentional deaths?

We grow x amount of vegetable food.
y number of non-food animals die in the process.
We eat the vegetables.
Number of deaths: y.

Or:
We grow 20x amount of vegetable food.
20y non-food animals die in the process.
We feed the vegetables to livestock.
We eat the livestock.
Number of deaths: 20y and livestock. Not to mention the thumbs and fingers of meat-packing plantworkers.

[Tsukiyumi]

...Not to mention the thumbs and fingers of meat-packing plantworkers.

Hey, that's my favorite part!

[Mikey]

Great find, Teaos.

Grundig - no. Arable land dedicated to pasturing livestock doesn't result in the "incidental" animal deaths that harvesting for commercial consumption does.

[Lazar]

Grundig - no. Arable land dedicated to pasturing livestock doesn't result in the "incidental" animal deaths that harvesting for commercial consumption does.

But aren't most commercial livestock fed grain and corn these days?

[Mikey]

Probably - my agricultural experience extends to "pick-your-own" orchards. I'm just referncing what the article mentioned.

[Grundig]

Lazar, that was my impression too. The animals are kept in a feedlot and fed grain rather than being allowed to graze on arable land.