TS: eating meat vs. not eating meat

I see no reason why chickens have to be kept in six inch cages or whatever it is, but I'm not stopping eating meat. I couldn't survive on chocolate only, after all.

I totally agree that the animals suffer, but convenience of availabilty, nutriton, and taste make me not stop eating meat.

This is the whole debate made simple and good. To eat meat is to put human convenience and taste (nutrition doesn't make sense here, I admit) above the potential suffering of lesser creatures.

People don't need meat. But many of them want it. That's enough.

Yeah, that is a main argument about this topic. Are animals sentient and do they suffer?

Oh yeah, that's the question. Are animals sentient? What does it mean to be sentient? These are questions.

Are A Nairn and Martin Skidmore sentient? No doubt about it, surely?

But what if there were doubt? Is it really possible for us to prove or disprove that Martin Skidmore or cows are sentient/non sentient?

Should the attitude be, 'prove cows can suffer and then we'll stop killing them for convenience and taste, and feel slightly sad for all the years when we didn't need to eat cows but just fancied a burger'?

Or should the attitude be, 'until it can be proven that cows don't suffer (this can't be proven, I admit), we won't kill them and eat them just because we fancy it'?

Oh yeah, I forgot. There's good evidence that A Nairn and Martin Skidmore are more sentient than cows. The evidence is that they post cleverer messages on ILX than any cow in history.

They also post cleverer messages than my retard little brother. He was born a dummy. He hardly thinks and should be eaten.

My sister's son, mind you, officially isn't a retard, but I swear to God he isn't sentient. Mark. He's four months old, but if I butcher the fucker soon, that'll be cool. To fit him into Martin Skidmore's scale, I'd say: Oysters < Mark < sheep < chimps < humans.

Is this fact relevant? Up to a point, sure. But no further.
Widely accepted canons of morality require that we do not inflict pointless suffering. However, if you stretch morality to require that we do not inflict any suffering, then you very rapidly find that morality is strictly and comprehensively impossible. That is not a good thing. If you put morality forever out of human reach, there is no incentive to pursue it.

But killing to eat is not pointless. Anything but. And we humans, I would like to point out, dispatch our victims at least as rapidly and painlessly as most predators do. One has only to watch a lion calmly rip out the entrails of a dying gemsbuck to know that.

Moreover, every animal dies and is eaten. You will die and be eaten. This is not only unavoidable, it is necessary. It is God's way, Nature's way and the way of the world. It requires willful blindness to miss this fact. Without this delightful fact the world would be knee deep in uneaten corpses of every description. Luckily, bacteria are not finicky eaters. In fact, when meat 'spoils' it is just bacteria's selfish way of keeping it all for itself and not sharing.

In my estimation, the only ironclad motives for not eating meat are religious or emotional ones. I have no bone to pick with anyone who honestly believes God wants them not to eat meat. The same applies to anyone for whom the very act of putting morsels of dead animals in their mouth is viscerally disgusting. You can't argue with that and shouldn't try.

If you remove these extra-rational motives, I just can't see how you can get there on purely rational grounds.

Humans killing to eat has a point in that many people find the taste of animal corpses pleasurable. That's the point. I'm comfortable with the fact that humans consider their own pleasure to be of greater importance than the potential (but unproveable) suffering of ugly creatures.

It is God's way, Nature's way and the way of the world.

Fine, but you sound crazy, and your logic would excuse anything.

If you remove these extra-rational motives, I just can't see how you can get there on purely rational grounds.

Here's how: it doesn't take much effort not to eat meat. Your body does not need meat. By eating meat you finance cruelty. If you wish to defend your own actions by transposing the behaviour of other species onto humans you will encounter trouble as ideas abhorrent to you are also shown to be "nature's way and the way of the world".

That's what I was talking about above with nutritional convenience. As for Peter Singer the book is called "Animal Liberation", I intend to read it soon. He covers lots of areas of Philosophy in his articles and books, but his main focus is animal rights.

http://www.animalsvoice.com/PAGES/rights/anilib.html

i acknowledge the cruelty issues. from what i understand, meat is a fairly inefficient food source (how much land it takes to support a cow, and all that) A LOT of people want meat. this leads to a situation where the well being of the animals is sacrificed for the (supposed) benefit of the human consumers. and as typical of capitalism, the net result is less than ideal: a bunch of low quality, (relatively) cheap product for the masses to consume. that's just how it's going to be, most of the time. there are the exceptions, like the smaller free-range livestock companies, but you are going to PAY for that moral/taste consideration - the majority of meat cannot be raised that way.

it's kind of a dumb thing to take sides on, really. i don't much care if another person eats meat or not. and up to this point, what other people think doesn't really have much to do with whether i will continue or not. i'm not a big fan of evangelism, religious, dietary or otherwise

Chipotle (a subsidiary of McDonald's) claims that none of its pork is factory farmed. Do you think that this could literally be the case?

Naturally I can't speak for all vegetarians but my experience has been, yes, most vegetarians are trad. lefties: concerned about the poor, ant-war, etc. The use of land for grazing livestock instead of growing vegetables results directly in more starving people, according to a number of admittedly biased vegetarians, though their logic seems sound to me: I can feed more people with the beans and corn grown on an acre of land than I can with the cows I can graze on that land over the same amount of time. But as James notes above in his "yum-yum" comment, most people couldn't give two shits if the eating of meat and its surrounding bad agricultural practices results in more starving people. It is much more important to feed our faces, get off a flip comment or two, and, most importantly, acknowledge that the situtation is "complex" and therefore we should just do whatever we like.

j. lu - I'd guess that Chipotle have found someplace where it says "factory farm" means a very specific sort of hog confinement, and Chipotle's confinements don't meet all the specific criteria, and therefore we don't need to worry about the pigs in question. If this is the case, I don't imagine one of these non-factory "farms" would be a place you'd like to spend an afternoon.

i wasn't aware that cows were posting on ilx...

an interesting article on this very subject:

(was thinking of starting a thread on it, but i'm not much of a thread-starter)

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/10ANIMAL.html?pagewanted=1

you have to register for nyt, but it's worth it.

oh, here's excerpts (not necessarily cut and pasted in an order that would make sense, per se), from the article by micheal pollan:

This should come as no surprise: morality is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us negotiate social relations. It's very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn't provide an adequate guide for human social conduct, isn't it anthropocentric to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for nature? We may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights suit us humans today.

(and on vegetarianism)--

The farmer would point out that even vegans have a ''serious clash of interests'' with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer's tractor crushes woodchucks in their burrows, and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky. Steve Davis, an animal scientist at Oregon State University, has estimated that if America were to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, the total number of animals killed every year would actually increase, as animal pasture gave way to row crops. Davis contends that if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, then people should eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least intensively cultivated land: grass-fed beef for everybody. It would appear that killing animals is unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat.

The world is full of places where the best, if not the only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing animals on it -- especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into protein and whose presence can actually improve the health of the land.

The vegetarian utopia would make us even more dependent than we already are on an industrialized national food chain. That food chain would in turn be even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel farther and manure would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful that you can build a more sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature -- rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls -- then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.

Granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal world of predation, but it will entail the sacrifice of part of our identity -- our own animality.

Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and then demands that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.

When a similar argument to this was mentioned to my friends they said that they are not against the killing of animals, but they are against the conditions the animals are raised in. They are vegitarians because they don't want to eat meat that was raised in bad conditions, not because they don't want to kill animals. They acknowledge that man is higher on the food chain. They said if an animal could live naturally in the wild and then was killed to be eaten they wouldn't think that morally wrong.

Except that our gastrointestinal tract doesn't even remotely resemble that of the average carnivorous GI tract. Most creatures with long GI tracts like ours are herbivores, or at most occasional eaters of meat (as some monkeys, like baboons).

but there are farms, such as one described at the end of that article, where the animals are treated humanely. unfortunately, the meat coming from such farms is considerably more expensive. many who feel strongly about reasonable treatment of animals can't afford that.

vegetarianism is an easy and economical way to make such a statement. but some of us like burgers. a dilemma...

physiologically, we aren't designed to be carnivores or herbivores per se so much as omnivores.

i seem to be putting myself to sleep.

of course, i'm glad that your diet makes you feel healthier. :-)

Millions of vegetarians who don't read ilX0r have had similar experiences to the one Douglas reports, but that wouldn't convince you either, I don't suspect! People who are determined to eat meat will ignore mountains of evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, to justify their behavior.

It seems to me that one's state of health depends on factors other than whether one excludes all meat from their diet. For example, if I ate meat once a week, I would not be a vegetarian, but I would probably derive every health benefit claimed by vegetarians. It is the emphasis on total prohibition of meat that makes a vegetarian a vegetarian. What isn't clear to me is why total prohibition is superior to moderation.

As for the problem of cruelty to animals that are bred and raised in factory farms, it would seem to me that this is a great argument against cruel practises, but a negligble argument against eating meat, since, presumably, being raised on a factory farm is not a necessary condition, but only a contingent or incidental factor. To make this clearer, suppose you bought factory-farmed meat and didn't eat it, you'd 1) still be a vegetarian 2) still be subsidizing cruelty. So, obviously, the eating isn't the critical factor here.

back to what i said before - for me, meat is "worth it". going veggie might take me down from two sick days per year to one, but i would be less happy because of all the tasty foods i'd be missing. maybe someday i'll change my mind. who cares

NB i'm not really taking this as seriously or literally as it seems ;-) and again, i'm all in favor of people eating whatever they want to, and i'm glad that so many people enjoy the health benefits of veggie lifestyles, that's wonderful.

it all depends on individual metabolism and such. i have a friend with extreme food sensitivities, who would be a vegetarian for her beliefs. but she has to eat meat because she's so allergic to most plant sources of protein, and she feels awful when she doesn't eat meat.

i'm all for vegetarianism--i don't eat much meat myself, and have gone through periods of foregoing meat altogether. but it's not the only way to go, idealistically or health-wise.

mmmmmm, sweeet potato...

Actually, this pretty much covers it for me.

It is the high demand for CHEAP meat that drives the deplorable conditions in most industrialized farms and meat-packing plants. If the demand for meat was reduced, then conditions would improve. It is very expenisive to keep a cow stuffed with all of the various drugs that allow it to live in the horrible conditions that it is presented with.

In America, meat is a lot like oil. We pay way too little for it (the real costs to the environment are obscured), and we believe the low prices we pay are a (god-given) Right.

also, i am not in favor of advertising to kids.

Yeah, It's the supporting of the factory farming businesses by buying the meat that is the critical factor.

Now, the usual answer to this from people who are very gung-ho about eating meat is: "Ha! So I die at 79 instead of 80? It's worth it if I get to enjoy all this delicious meat!" Ask some 79-year-olds, though, whether it's all the same to them if they die next week or a year from then, and you'll find that the extra year gets more meaningful as you get closer to it.

There are plenty of other studies in this regard; I've picked one of the most conservative. Human metabolisms weren't designed for eating meat, and when they're forced to do so they break down earlier.

re: sick days. again, i can totally see where you guys are coming from. i don't doubt that a veg. diet can be much healthier. but what i'm saying is that this year i took one day off work because i was sick. so in terms of being sick (which was what douglas was originally talking about, NOT general long-term health) there's really not that big of a problem for me.

so, long-term then. i am sure that i will be less healthy at 79 than if i had been a vegetarian. i may, at that time, regret the decisions that i'm making now. i feel that is better to base my decisions on what does bring me pleasure, rather than on what might - in 50 years time.

right now, i really hope i don't live to be 80, actually. that's a whole different set of issues that maybe it's best not to get into

I love meat, without it there would be now C'est What beer pie. I even forgive it when it tried to kill me.

With health issues, don't lots of doctors now recommend not eating red meats or limiting intake because there are links to conditions such as bowel cancer?

I am verging on becoming vegetarian and it is damn hard but it is possible & I rarely eat meat now. I don't eat a lot of dairy, although this is a contentious issue - it's easy to find free-range eggs but what about cheese and butter and yoghurt etc? I'm also going to try and avoid leather products which will probably be the hardest, because I do like a nice pair of shoes.

My reasons:

(1) Dislike the taste of most meat & am grossed out by blood.

(2) Ethical dilemmas: the practices of the animal/meat industry are sickening; animals are sentient creatures who experience suffering; animals are also not instrumental objects to be used and abused just because humans are the dominant species; and human beings have reasoning abilities and the consciousness to alter their behaviour.

(3) Environmental ethics: the mass production of meat/dairy is extremely harmful to the environment, which in turn, affects every living being and society.

(4) It is possible to live healthily without eating meat: to sensibly plan your diet and ensure you get all the important vitamins, protein, iron etc from vegetable alternatives or supplements.

I wouldn't enforce these opinions on anyone else, but think anyone who doesn't think about what they eat and how it has been produced should seriously inform themselves, and then decide whether to continue or not. And yes, there are more ethical ways of eating animal products than others.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060907211405AA04xdj

My skin breathes. I guess that means I am an earthworm.

-- Trayce (spamspanke...)

trayce brings the logic

haha xpost

xp

I'm not sure I buy into an argument saying 'the human body is best sutied for x diet' as I'd wager that the human body is adept to handle a variety of diets, provided it is nutritionally balanced.

You took me srsly Ethan? Honestly, when you gonna learn. Tch.

I thought we had escalated it to the point where it was actually fun!

eating meat from free range animals is crueller in that respect because you give them the pretention that they might have a life they can enjoy and then WHOOSH you kill them. at least in a battery farm dying is a step forward and something to look forward to.

I was told to stop being a vegetarian by no less than 3 separate doctors.

i eat a lot of fish and shrimp and nuts/seeds but i stopped eating cheese/dairy a while ago and so have tried to increase meat and egg eating. yet still, i don't eat a lot of non-ocean meat. hence excitement over chicken and fancy sausages. i am a fan of protein.

but every body/person is different and some just can't deal with meat. i can totally deal with meat. and when i was vegetarian for a couple years several years ago, my body was unhappy even though i was eating tofu, cheese, nuts, etc. (not junk food.)

I thought that was kind of funny! Have I read them? No, no, not I! :)

I was told to stop being a vegetarian by no less than 3 separate doctors.

So they weren't conjoined triplets. That's good. I would never trust a 3-headed doctor.

(or is it just my doctor that's an unsociable dick?)

Also, I think that's your doctor. 90% of the doctors I've gone to have been inappropriately friendly and pally and sympathetic. It's like, yr not my bro, just tell me what is wrong with me and stop chumming it up, sir.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-americans-used-to-eat/371895/

Early Americans settlers were “indifferent” farmers, according to many accounts. They were fairly lazy in their efforts at both animal husbandry and agriculture, with “the grain fields, the meadows, the forests, the cattle, etc, treated with equal carelessness,” as one 18th-century Swedish visitor described—and there was little point in farming since meat was so readily available.

Settlers recorded the extraordinary abundance of wild turkeys, ducks, grouse, pheasant, and more. Migrating flocks of birds would darken the skies for days. The tasty Eskimo curlew was apparently so fat that it would burst upon falling to the earth, covering the ground with a sort of fatty meat paste. (New Englanders called this now-extinct species the “doughbird.”)

In the woods, there were bears (prized for their fat), raccoons, bobo­links, opossums, hares, and virtual thickets of deer—so much that the colo­nists didn’t even bother hunting elk, moose, or bison, since hauling and conserving so much meat was considered too great an effort. A European traveler describing his visit to a Southern plantation noted that the food included beef, veal, mutton, venison, turkeys, and geese, but he does not mention a single vegetable.

Infants were fed beef even before their teeth had grown in. The English novelist Anthony Trollope reported, during a trip to the United States in 1861, that Americans ate twice as much beef as did Englishmen. Charles Dickens, when he visited, wrote that “no breakfast was breakfast” without a T-bone steak. Apparently, starting a day on puffed wheat and low-fat milk—our “Breakfast of Champions!”—would not have been considered adequate even for a servant.

Indeed, for the first 250 years of American history, even the poor in the United States could afford meat or fish for every meal. The fact that the workers had so much access to meat was precisely why observers regarded the diet of the New World to be superior to that of the Old.

sweet sweeet doughbird

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/dining/butchers-meat-vegetarian-vegan.html

One of the central questions in the book is whether Mr. Pollan can bring himself to kill an animal — first some chickens, then a wild pig — for his own dinner.

“It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, which I was then and still am,” he wrote, “that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat eating depends.”

This challenge struck a chord with many people, including vegans and vegetarians looking to change the factory-farming system.

For Janice Schindler, 28, who was a vegan for five years and is now the general manager of the Meat Hook butcher shop in Brooklyn, the animal in question was a turkey at a “Kill Your Own Thanksgiving Dinner” event at a local farm.

“It was really morbid. I was the only one who signed up,” she said. “I’d never killed anything before. Turkeys are such large animals. But when you put them in a poultry cone upside down, they completely relax. Then you can cut an artery. It stuns them and they bleed. I spent the rest of the day working the eviscerating station. It was super-gross, but I found it fascinating.”

That experience was the gateway to her training as a butcher, which she began immediately afterward.

preposterous

There are eight million stories in the naked city, and some of them are presented to you by the NYT in all their preposterous glory.

I been workin' all day
Down at the Evisceration Station
To bring home the bacon
To you babe