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The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

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Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#131

Post by vlod »

bane wrote: post #74
WalterSear wrote: post #37

The opinions on this topic around here are so depressing given how easy, cheap and healthy it is to live without meat, or dairy, for that matter.

> how easy, cheap and healthy it is to live without meat, or dairy, for that matter. Given the volume and nature of advice in the vegan community for how not to hurt yourself eating as a vegan, I would say that "easy" or "healthy" is not a word that could be reasonably associated with a sustained, long-term vegan diet. Even long-term vegans have difficulty in getting complete nutrition on their diet which is offered…

>Even long-term vegans have difficulty in getting complete nutrition on their diet which is offered almost by default in a basic omnivorous diet.

You over estimate the difficult, yes it's a little more work.

Heck you can say the same thing about the current US omnivorous diet. Most omnivores have problem getting sufficient nutrition (in the form of fruits, veg and Vit.D) in their diet. It's not that they can't get it, it's just that they are a little lazy.

Tip to Vegans: for B12 put nutritional yeast on your popcorn... kinda tastes like cheese and super nutritious and delicious!

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#132

Post by jessaustin »

tspiteri wrote: post #119
jessaustin wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have canines for a reason; meat is part of our evolutionary heritage. I'm sure that's why horses have canines, as well, but they don't eat much meat! Of course I agree with the overall point; in fact I shot a delicious young deer a few weeks ago. I sometimes wonder whether the meat-is-murder trolls aren't really just cannibals hoping to mainstream their own predilections.

Horses had canines for fighting, not for eating.

Really? Any cite for that? Kipling doesn't count!

I've seen lots of horse fights, among individuals with and without wolf-teeth. In few of those were the bites even deep enough along the mandible to engage the canines, and in no case did the bite come from the side to emphasize the canine.

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#133

Post by tspiteri »

jessaustin wrote: post #132
tspiteri wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horses had canines for fighting, not for eating.

Really? Any cite for that? Kipling doesn't count! I've seen lots of horse fights, among individuals with and without wolf-teeth. In few of those were the bites even deep enough along the mandible to engage the canines, and in no case did the bite come from the side to emphasize the canine.

I found it here: http://www.horseandhound.co.uk/horse-care/horse-care-tips/ca...

The relevant part follows:

Originally “fighting teeth”, they have no occlusal contact, i.e. the opposing upper and lower canines do not meet, so they are of no benefit in the eating process.

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#134

Post by enraged_camel »

kaoD wrote: post #80
gambiting wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't. You equal animal life to human life, hence your statements like "Would it be moral to kill you if I'd let you live in a decent, stress-free environment before your death?". I do not find them equal - I find animals worth carrying about, I would like them to have decent lives, but ultimately - they are food and if they are killed quickly and painlessly then I don't have a problem with it.

Not sure if your argument holds. We're essentially food too, so it'd be okay to kill and eat you.

Well, yes. It used to be OK. In some parts of Africa and the Amazon, it still is.

But human society as a whole has moved on from the practice of cannibalism.

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#135

Post by arsenerei »

lukifer wrote: post #79
contextual wrote: post #26

If the suffering of animals matters, then eating meat is morally wrong. Animals are non-human persons who are aware of their own existence and who feel a wide range of emotions, just like we do. Killing animals may still be acceptable in western society, but it's wrong. It's wrong just as slavery in the United States in the 18th and 19th century was once acceptable but wrong. Just as hanging, drawing and quartering t…

To take it to the extreme, we can't know for sure that carrots don't experience suffering due to our raising them for food. We have canines for a reason; meat is part of our evolutionary heritage. I respect the moral decision not to eat animals, and the fact that we do not raise livestock more humanely is unforgivable; but eschewing all animal proteins is extremely detrimental to one's health (the poster child being…

> We have canines for a reason; meat is part of our evolutionary heritage.

Gorillas also have canines[0]; they're herbivores.

> by-products such as eggs and cheese (from animals who are well-cared-for).

In some sense, eating eggs and cheese is actually worse than eating meat.

0 - http://www.igorilla.org/assets/images/who/mgsilverteethcu.jp...

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#136

Post by lukifer »

hedning wrote: post #128
lukifer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To take it to the extreme, we can't know for sure that carrots don't experience suffering due to our raising them for food. We have canines for a reason; meat is part of our evolutionary heritage. I respect the moral decision not to eat animals, and the fact that we do not raise livestock more humanely is unforgivable; but eschewing all animal proteins is extremely detrimental to one's health (the poster child being…

Steve Jobs had cancer for the most of those 10 years. It seems he tried a vegan diet to treat it among other things, that was silly. That does not make him a poster child for vegans, it seems like he wasn't even vegan before the cancer.

He tried to treat it with specific subsets of veganism, such as fruit-only and nut-only diets. My understanding is that he was vegetarian/vegan for most of his adult life; please correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#137

Post by taude »

mseebach wrote: post #25
randyrand wrote: post #8

Its hard for me to seriously consider changing my opinion from an article that shows its biases so clearly. You show me the worst case scenario, but what is the average case? Also, what are the alternatives to these techniques? If you don't like cattle prodding, what do you suggest instead? Not eating meat or drinking milk is not going to be an acceptable answer. Edit: Not going to be acceptable as an alternative to…

Pay more for your meat. Eat less meat to pay for it if you must. Research the premium brands available in your supermarket - the words "free range" or "organic" on their own are pretty meaningless. Find out what delivery services are available in your area, research them. Buy from a provider you trust.

This is reasonable advice, and something we follow in our household that eats meat a couple times/week. Only the good stuff, but not too much of it.

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#138

Post by epochwolf »

asciimo wrote: post #72
epochwolf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very act of torture requires a level of emotional depravity that merely killing does not.

You presuppose that torture is always willful. In the context of human-scale meat production, it seems unavoidable. Yet we accept this, as it is necessary for consumer demands. The employees of factory farm facilities may very well suffer "emotional depravity;" not as a prerequisite for their duties, but as a result. The nature of torture aside, taking the life of a sentient being is the ultimate violation of its rig…

Animals are not sentient. Higher animals have some form of emotion and a great capacity to suffer but as far as we can tell today, they do not have self-aware and self-reasoning intelligence.

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#139

Post by robomartin »

Cruelty is, of course, despicable and should be stopped. The vast majority of growers are decent and moral. It's easy for activists to find and focus on bad apples and make it seem like all meat suppliers are criminal monsters. This is simply not true. This would be like meat eating activists finding bad actors in the farming industry to then acuse the entirety of that industry with criminal behaviour. Ridiculous.

As for vegan vs. meat. Well, few things in life have more evidence than the support provided by millions of years and thousands of species who would not have survived had they not used other species' meat for food, for energy and nutrition. The species that did evolve to survive on plants (cows, for example) have radically different anatomy and mechanisms evolved over millions of years of adaptation to that diet.

We are meat eaters. More accurately, we are omnivores. The only reason one could even consider going vegan is that we've industrialized food production and distribution.

Drop two people on an island. One of them is constrained to eating plants while the other is able to eat anything, including any animal, plant and even his left foot. Over time the vegan will either get horribly sick and maybe even die. In addition to that, he would have to devote huge chuncks of the day to finding vegan food. The omnivore could easily ingest all the energy and nutrients needed to function at a high level of exertion for a full day during one meal. One could focus most of his time trying to get off the island while the other has to focus on eating constantly.

Here's another way to look at it. Veganism can be hypocritical in that one's ability to choose this approach would not exist without millions of years of eating meat. You are who you are and you exist because our ancestors, including your parents, grandparents, etc. killed and ate meat. A vegan is only possible because of millions of years of eating meat. Our species would not exist without eating meat.

Yet another view is that millions of meat eaters make veganism possible.

The vast majority of the people in a vegan's food supply chain are almost guaranteed to be meat eaters. How much of a hypocrite does someone have to be to rationalize eating vegan when tens of thousands of meat eaters --killing and eating hundreds of thousands of animals-- are quite literally feeding them their vegan diet. A vegan who makes sure their entire food supply chain is vegan is, of course, being absolutely honest in support of their choice.

Re: The Price We Pay for Cheap Meat

#140

Post by swombat »

chollida1 wrote: post #121
swombat wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature is not morally right. In fact, nature is amoral. Pointing to nature and saying "nature does it so it's ok" is a bit like pointing at a landslide and saying "nature does it so it's ok to build my house like this". It's meaningless. Unlike most animals (as far as we know) we are in the unique position of being moral creatures. We created this morality idea, which was not present in nature before us. Killing any…

> Nature is not morally right. In fact, nature is amoral. Pointing to nature and saying "nature does it so it's ok" is a bit like pointing at a landslide and saying "nature does it so it's ok to build my house like this". It's meaningless. Completely agree here, luckily I never made that argument:) I basically made a tongue in check throw away remark > Killing any kind of sentient creature whose death could have been…

Everything's debatable! But there are pretty strong arguments for "killing sentient beings is wrong".

Most morality stems from the Golden Rule (treat others as you'd want to be treated). If we take that as a given (a reasonable non-controversial starting point imho), then we can easily agree that breeding and killing other humans for food is immoral.

The Golden Rule is generally applied to a small subset of sentient beings, of course. However, one thing is observable throughout history, which is that the group of beings included in the Golden Rule has generally gone up with time. It used to be only a subset of humans, and has progressively grown to include most (and yet still not all) humans in most (still not all) cases. But it continues to grow. And already some types of treatment are considered abhorrent even when applied to non-humans.

For example, we may debate eating pigs, but we would presumably all agree that deliberately torturing a pig for your own personal satisfaction is immoral (hence all the laws against cruelty to animals).

This progress of history seems pretty constant - it may be the only progress we can measure as far as the question "are we getting more civilised" goes. Our measure of progress is, how many more groups do we include under the shield of this Golden Rule.

It's pretty reasonable to predict that, unless things go very badly for humanity, eventually many animals that we currently breed and kill for food will come join us on the safe side of the Golden Rule. We may start with the more inspiring or cuddly ones like Dolphins or Whales, but can you doubt that humanity from 500 years in the future will consider eating a dolphin as abhorrent as we would consider, say, eating someone's pet labrador?

Did eating someone's pet become less moral over time, or has it always been immoral, but before it was tolerated? What about eating other humans? What about other applications of the Golden Rule?

Obviously you can respond that morality is a moving target... and you're right. But then you're still agreeing that the topic we're discussing is something that could easily be conceived as immoral in the future (unlike, say, petting a cat or painting a nice painting, which are unlikely to ever be considered immoral as far as we can predict without resorting to extreme scenarios).

I take the view that something which will be immoral in 500 years is already immoral, we're just too undeveloped to realise it yet, much in the same way that I'd say that death penalty or torture were always immoral, but people weren't civilised enough to realise it in the past.

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