Eating Meat?

[U.R.B.4.U.R.]

That in no way addresses the question of which is more wasteful of resourses. That's the result of govt intervention in the farming industry, which is wasteful as a whole.

 

[protovack]

I think Zorn is talking about crops that deplete the soil and take tons of water and fertilizer to grow after a while (like corn).

 

[U.R.B.4.U.R.]

Duh! Corn Fed to cattle to fatten them. Cows ranging in my state destroy tons of habitat. Cows take alot of grain and vegatable matter to grow a pound. Theres plenty of stats on that.

Come on Zorn. Chime in here.

 

[genaro]

I see a huge difference in say a man hunting for his food or an animal hunting for his food, and imprisoning an animal in a cage just preparing them for the slaughter, and I imagine extiction sounds like a pretty nice option when compared to systematic slaughter without a day or taste of freedom ever.

completely agreed, this is just disgusting...
And I'll add that these animals (I would rather call them meat as this system don't even let them be what I would call a "soulful animal") have complete confidence in man. There's nothing more peaceful and confident than a cow, and they shouldn't. The point is that what we are doing to these animals (as we judge our selves more great minded even if no one knows what a cow may be thinking, and I'm sure they have some emotions as they are able of confidence) is something that would just horrify us if some great minded aliens were doing the same for us (we would protest saying we do think and we do have emotions, and well a cow do think and do have emotions, but as we think ourselves superior and as we are more powerful...)
If some superior minded carnivorous alien ever reach earth and see how we do with cows, we would really have no decent arguments to convince them that they shouldn't do the same for us hahahaha.

 

[synthesis]

Veganism is path to Fountain of Youth

A true story by someone else.

That chilly day in December, 2001 when I first heard X speak, I had no idea
that I was entering upon the most important phase of my life. An “earth shaking”,
“mind-blowing”, “life altering”, reason for being!! After the seminar my new
friend and I celebrated our meeting and sharing of experiences by going to
my favorite restaurant for dinner. I remember enjoying a Mai sandwich, little
did I know that this delicacy would fade into nonexistence for me. I remember
giggling about where we were headed – “Beautiful Fountains of Youth!” It all
seemed so easy – they would just give us these alignments and we would meditate,
bring in these rays and then (like a Fairy God Mother had waved her magic
wand – Poof, we would have our beautiful bods – sure sounded good to me).

I went home and did all of the things that I believed would help me become the
person that deserved such a wonderful gift as the “Fountain of Youth”. It
all seemed a bit grandiose, but it still had a ring of the strangely familiar,
so I worked harder at eating the right foods, you know – less red meat and
more veggies. It wasn’t too long and the instructions changed to, “stop eating
meat”. I thought, “I can do that!” (by now I realized that this was serious
business and that this was God’s Business!). I observed the people around
me – some were also overweight and some were older (like me). Being 55, I
knew that I would have to observe the rules more carefully than a young twenty
something person, so I dug in and quit the “meat thing”. I remember a conversation
with another attendee. “I bet that cheese is going to be eliminated soon”.
Sure enough….. NO ANIMAL PRODUCTS!! By then, we were so set on the path that
it seemed as if it was the natural thing to eliminate! Since the whole idea
of the diet is to eliminate animal products from our bodies we have also added
fasting to our lives. Being of sound mind and cells full of animal products,
I decided that I had better get busy and push the garbage out.

Now the crunch: where, oh where are the vegan restaurants when you want them??
I live in a small California town – far from the vegan restaurants. I first
tried the veggie burgers (forget that). I found a Thai restaurant that served
a mean vegetable curry. After several trips there I found out that they used
chicken broth to make the sauce. I have become much more vigilant with my
choices of food, for I realize that , “what goes in – must come out!”. I have
come to adore the waitresses who honor me with their thoughtfulness and willingness
to find a vegan item on the menu. Or the owner of a small Chinese buffet who
thoughtfully went through the different dishes and checked the ingredients
only to come back to me and say, “I am so sorry, but I don’t have anything
that is made without animal products”. I could have hugged him.

When working to ascend and lose animalistic thoughts and actions I also began to
see more clearly my animalistic food habits. Even though I am a strict vegan
I have to work on portion control and remember that food does not equate with
happiness. As most people, I equate food with good times; when growing up
we always had lots of delicious food to gather around at meal time.

This spring when I was visiting in L.A. we stopped at a little Falafal restaurant.
I scanned the menu on the wall and asked about the vegetarian dishes. Although
the communication was not the best the man behind the counter said “yes, it
is all vegetables. As I thought about the choices he jovially reached into
the greasy pile of deep fat fried potatoes and handed me a huge grease laden
slice of potato. I remembered the deep fat fried potatoes that my Mom used
to make and smiled, bit, chewed. Somewhere in my brain I expected to feel
my Mother’s arms around me, instead the old familiar grease gathered on the
top of my mouth. I hurridly chewed, bit again, chewed and gulped the huge
potato slice. As it went down I regretted my action. While swallowing I asked
“what is the oil that you fry them in? He replied “Natural”. I said like…like…
“pig grease?”, he said, “yes, yes, natural!”. Now, why didn’t I ask that question
before I bit? Was it maybe because I knew the answer and really wanted to
taste that “pig grease?” I even fleetingly thought about running to the bathroom
and trying to retrieve the “pig grease”. No, just remember that 50 + years
of animalistic living does not go away over night. I was disgusted with myself,
but now I smile and remember that I still have a ways to go in eliminating
old habits. I have found that for me changing my diet and fasting has been
the easiest part of working towards ascension. I guess that I like the strictness
and the challenge of “staying the course”. Of course, there is so much more
to my ascension than just what I put (or don’t put) into my mouth. We each
approach our individual challenges with courage and faith. Faith that we are
moving forward (with the help of our friends) and courage to get back up after
we stumble. I decided that every bite counts and the stakes (not steaks) are
really high, so therefore if someone tells you that just a little bit of animal
in our body won’t kill you. My answer would be “oh, yes it may”.

 

[DJDannyUhOh]

Eating meat is too engrained into our culture (because we have evolved to) and to suggest we eliminate it is about as narrow-sighted of a concept as I can imagine. The question is how we can reduce, if not eliminate, suffering of animals. It amazes me to see so many "free-spirited" liberals on this board that follow strict relativistic ideas, yet when it comes to eating meat, all of a sudden it's absolutism. Some people see life as a buffet. They come in, take what they want, and leave the rest. Then you have a big mess on the table left for others to clean up.

 

[miczo]

Man, Im a vegetarian who eats eggs and milk. But I seriously couldnt imagine life without them, so I understand meat eaters in that sense, but I thin kthe idea of a bit of self sacrifice and sparing a thought (even if misguided in the case of milk drinkers) to other animals is a"good" way to look at life. You know, let the other bloke go in front of you in the queue or whatever. It doesnt have any real philosophical groundings in my case, if it did I think the argument would collapse and then I'd have to eat meat again

 

[Jonny Apple]

How can someone think its wrong to kill an animal for food, but alrite to kill a plant for food, they are both living organisms, it makes no sense to me. That being said I have absolutely nothing against vegans, just that it makes no sense based on that reason, I mean if someone said I wont eat meat for health reasons, then hey that would be an acceptable reason

 

[Technic]

thats their whole purpose for being here. food. what other purpose do they really serve?
the strong feed on the weak.. its always been like that. deal with it

 

[U.R.B.4.U.R.]

thats their whole purpose for being here. food. what other purpose do they really serve?
the strong feed on the weak.. its always been like that. deal with it

Who are you to say what there purpose for being here is?

We used to use humans as slaves, so with your thinking the purpose of humans is to be slaves.

Sounds like you're about to be fed on; by evolution.

8(

 

[exarkann]

i'll point out that we are not the only animals that raise and use other animals.... there are a few types of ants that do it...

 

[Oceanboy]

A Viewpoint

Hi, a viewpoint from http://www.earthsave.org/environment/foodchoices.htm


How Our Food Choices can Help Save the Environment
by Steve Boyan, PhD
The Union of Concerned Scientists says there are two things people can do to most help the environment. The first is to drive a fuel-efficient automobile (that means, not an SUV or a truck) and live near where we work. The second is to not eat beef.

I’m going to go one step farther than UCS: I suggest that you refuse to eat any animal or animal product produced on a factory farm. And I’m going to tell you why.

In 1990, when I first read that 10 people could be fed with the grain that you would feed a cow that would be turned into food for one person, I was impressed. But I was not moved. The reason: If 10 people would be fed because I gave up meat, I’d give it up. But, I thought, if I give up meat, it won’t have that impact: it probably won’t have any impact on anything at all, except me.

I was wrong. If I had known that for every pound of beef I did not eat, I would save anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 gallons of water, I would have been moved. It’s a good idea to save water; we are depleting our underground aquifers faster than we are replenishing them. The largest one, the Ogallala, which covers a vast part of the country from the Midwest to the mountain states, is being depleted by 13 trillion gallons a year. It is going to run out. Northwest Texas is already dry. They can’t get any water from their wells.

John Robbins points out that in the 1980s and 1990s, to conserve water, most of us went to low-flow showerheads. If you take a daily seven-minute shower, he says, and you have a 2-gallon-per-minute low-flow showerhead, you use about 100 gallons of water per week, or 5,200 gallons of water per year. If you had used the old-fashioned 3-gallon-per-minute showerhead, I calculate you would have used 7,644 gallons of water per year. So by going low flow, you saved almost 2,500 gallons of water per year. Wonderful. But by giving up one pound of beef that year, you’d save maybe double that. You’d save more water than you would by not showering at all for six months! And that’s just one of the environmental impacts you’d have.

The modern factory farming system is a prolific consumer of fossil fuel and a prolific producer of poisonous wastes. Up to 100,000 animals are herded together on huge feedlots. These animals do not graze on grass, as picture books tell us; they can’t graze at all. Feedlots are crowded, filthy, stinking places with open sewers, unpaved roads and choking air. The animals would not survive at all but for the fact that they are fed huge amounts of antibiotics. It is now conceded that the antibiotics fed to cattle are the main cause of antibiotic resistance in people, as the bacteria constantly in these environments evolve to survive them. The cattle are fed prodigious quantities of corn. At a feedlot of a mere 37,000 cows, 25 tons of corn are dumped every hour. It takes 1.2 gallons of oil to make the fertilizer used for each bushel of that corn. Before a cow is slaughtered, she will eat 25 pounds of corn a day; by the time she is slaughtered she will weigh more than 1,200 pounds. In her lifetime she will have consumed, in effect, 284 gallons of oil. Today’s factory-raised cow is not a solar-powered ruminant but another fossil fuel machine.

And she will produce waste. Livestock now produces 130 times the amount of waste that people do. This waste is untreated and unsanitary. It bubbles with chemicals and diseasebearing organisms. It overpowers nature’s ability to clean it up. It’s poisoning rivers, killing fish and getting into human drinking water. 65% of California’s population is threatened by pollution in drinking water just from dairy cow manure. It isn’t just cows that produce this waste. Factory-raised hogs produce four times the waste in North Carolina as the 6.5 million people of that state do. Even the oceans are polluted: 7,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico are a dead zone.

There are more environmental impacts. Cattle don’t spend their entire lives in feedlots. When they are young, they graze. Where do they graze? Well, more than two-thirds of the land area of the mountain states are used for grazing. 70% of the lands in western national forests are grazed; 90% of Bureau of Land Management land is grazed. These are public lands, lands that President Clinton didn’t even try to save. These lands are trampled by the cattle, compacting the soil. When it rains, the land doesn’t absorb the water. Instead, it runs off, taking away topsoil, forming deep gullies and damaging streambeds. The government protects the cattle by killing off any creature that might threaten the livestock. They poison, trap, snare, den, shoot or gun down the wildlife. Denning, by the way, is the practice by federal agents of pouring kerosene into the dens of animals and setting them on fire, burning the young animals alive in their nests. According to Robbins, agents kill badgers, black bear, bobcats, coyotes, gray fox, red fox, mountain lions, opossums, raccoons, skunks, beavers, porcupines, prairie dogs, blackbirds, cattle egrets and starlings using these methods. These activities take place on public lands, which were created in large part to protect the environment! Your tax dollars subsidize these activities.

I’m not done yet. We in the United States do not get all of our beef from the West. We import more than 200 million pounds of beef from Central America alone. Every second of every day, one football field of tropical rainforest is destroyed in order to produce 257 hamburgers. Every time you destroy rainforest land, you destroy rich plant and animal life, varieties of life we don’t even understand, and forms of which may provide the medicines we need to cure disease. Rainforests supply us with oxygen. They moderate our climates. When rainforests are destroyed, it’s only a matter of time before the land becomes desertified. Rainforests absorb some of the carbon dioxide we are spewing into the atmosphere.

We humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 25% compared with any other period when humans were on this planet. Most of that has taken place in the last 50 years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consisting of some of the best scientists in the world, says global warming is a fact. If uncontrolled, we will have ecosystem collapses, crop failures, weather disasters, coastal flooding, the spreading of previously controlled diseases, the death of coral reefs and new insect pests. Some of these things are starting to happen already. Coral reefs are dying. Insect pests are spreading out of their range and killing off new kinds of trees. Weather patterns are changing. Some places have had extreme weather events, with billions of dollars of losses. Some island people have had to abandon their islands because rising seas have salinated their underground aquifers.

Carbon dioxide is largely produced by the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, and especially our use of inefficient vehicles for transportation. But not often mentioned is the fossil fuel used to raise farm animals. As I said earlier, a factory cow is a fossil fuel machine, not a solar-powered ruminant whose wastes fertilize the fields to produce more grass for the cow to eat. When you eat beans, for example, you use 1/27 the amount of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of energy as you do when you eat beef. You get the same food energy producing only 4% of the carbon dioxide that a person eating beef does. Another fact we don’t talk about: cattle produce almost one fifth of global methane emissions. Cattle fart. Big time. Their gas is methane. Methane is actually 24 times as potent as carbon dioxide in causing climate chaos.

There’s another major environmental consequence of our factory system of animal raising: that’s the matter of species extinctions. It is true that species die off all the time. Normally, the Earth has lost 10 to 25 species per year. But in the billions of years of life on this Earth, we have had five periods of major extinctions; the last one was 67 million years ago, when, possibly because of a meteor colliding with the Earth, we lost the dinosaurs. But now there’s a sixth extinction, and it is not caused by a meteor, but by human beings. And this is a big one; we are losing several thousand species per year, and maybe tens of thousands. We think of mammals that are endangered, and 25% of mammalian species are endangered. But what’s much more endangered, or wiped out already, are the plants, including varieties of plankton, fungi, bacteria and insects, that are fundamental to all so-called higher forms of life. All life will unravel if these creatures are wiped out.

The driving force behind all these extinctions is the destruction of wildlife habitat, especially the rainforests. The driving force behind the destruction of the rainforests is livestock grazing. The leading cause of species in the United States being threatened or eliminated is livestock grazing. A 1997 study of endangered species in the southwestern United States by the Fish and Wildlife Service found that half the species studied were threatened by cattle ranching.

You and I cannot change all this. We are not going to be able to get a bill through Congress outlawing factory farming. Yet EarthSave as an organization believes we can still have a dramatic effect: We believe that you can protect your health and protect the environment one bite at a time.

Let’s review what I’ve said here: By not eating beef– and other farm animals as well–you:

save massive amounts of water – 3,000 to 5,000 gallons of water for every pound of beef you avoid,
avoid polluting our streams and rivers better than any other single recycling effort you do,
avoid the destruction of topsoil,
avoid the destruction of tropical forest,
avoid the production of carbon dioxide. (Your average car produces 3 kg/day of CO2. To clear rainforest to produce beef for one hamburger produces 75 kg of CO2. Eating one pound of hamburger does the same damage as driving your car for more than three weeks);
reduce the amount of methane gas produced. (I imagine the next bumper sticker: stop farts, don’t eat beef);
reduce the destruction of wildlife habitat, and
help to save endangered species.
That’s a pretty good day’s work, for just what you don’t put in your mouth.

Steve Boyan PhD recently retired from his post as a political science professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has published two books on environmental issues.


Peace.

 

[Gaz_hmmmm]

Ants farm aphids for some kind of juice stuff they make, in return they protect the aphids from Ladybugs and other predators.

Why shouldn't we farm? It seems like it may be a part of evolution, not something that's just unique to humans!

 

[U.R.B.4.U.R.]

Great post Oceanboy.

Gaz, it ain't the farming per se. It's how we farm and what we farm.

 

[DJDannyUhOh]

Beano for cows!

 

[vegan]

I see nothing wrong with eating meat

me neither, if that doesn't imply killing the animal
it's not the fact of eating meat, it's the fact of enslaving and killing animals
eat dead cats found in the forest as much as you want

i understand the arguement that its natural

it's not an argument to me
many things considered "natural" are obviously harmful : diseases, earthquakes, malformations...

these animals would have probably been extinct by now if we weren't using them for food
i mean...we raise them...we eat them...we are their nature now...

why would they be extinct? they would probably still exist in the same conditions as they did before their domestication : smaller population, still wild (different metabolism), happier...
we are not their nature, we are their hell

but if they'd rather starve than eat meat, i'd say they need to get a better grasp on life.

if it meant killing, i'd rather starve than kill animals to eat them
i see no point in killing everyday a life to sustain another unique one
if it was one for one, i'd think about it
if it was already dead animals, i'd force myself

Beacuse humans are carnivores

humans are not carnivores, they are omnivores
carnivores need nutrients that they can only find in meat
whereas omnivores can digest and feed on meat but don't necessarily have to

Maybe if livestock showed signs of knowing what was going to happen to them, but throughout their lives they are fed and taken care of to meet a pre-determined end. Not too bad of a life if you don't know whats coming to you

"not a bad life"? do you really believe in what you say?
does a slave have "not a bad life" because he's "given" food and bed?

Dude... livestock spend most of their life free in a field. Drive through farmland or ranchland and you see shitloads of them just wandering around

obviously, you see the ones that are in the field... and you don't see the 90% of animals bred in intensive farming who are behind the walls of a warehouse.
the shitloads you see... just remember there are 9 times more in cages

YES i am talking about the soft, delicate hands of a gorgeous farm girl here

i'm not sure i would like a gorgeous cow to touch my balls
anyway, once again, extensive farming is 10% of total farming.
90% of cows are milked by machines

Its called the food chain, if one species has an advantage over another species in this area then they can eat it. It helps balance the world and prevents overpopulation of species.

the food chain is just a description of the current relation between foods and animals. it's not something to necessarily live by
i, for instance, decide not to be on top of the food chain
and it works very fine for me

humans and meat production don't help balance anything
on the contrary, we're fucking up the environment with farming
we're creating an overpopulations of animals that didn't exist in the first place and that we're just creating to doom them to a life of pain

Just because a plant is devoid of conscious experience in the sense that we understand, does not make it inferior to cow, or a pig

plants don't have a central nervous system, so they can't experience pain as we know it
maybe they do experience some other kind of suffering, but we know nothing about it... whereas we're quite sure that animals suffer
and plants don't suffer from being locked in cages, since they have no ability to move

The fact is, life exists in many forms and no one form is superior or deserving of a better treatment than the other

i would agree with you, if you didn't have the hypocrisy of saying this to reproach vegetarians for treating plants better than animals, while yourself treating humans better than animals

also, if you care about plants and don't like them to be killed, eat them directly
they are less plants consumed by direct consumption than by eating animals that you have fed plants for a lifetime before eating them

Very true, meat takes much more land to grow than vegetables

No, not true. If you had read the thread you would have known that but I guess reading comprehension isn't your strong suit

he said land... area of ground
what you were arguing is that animals and humans don't eat the same plants, that don't grow on the same grounds
that doesn't change the fact that plant production is much more land efficient than meat production, be the recipient an animal or a human

Eating meat is too engrained into our culture (because we have evolved to) and to suggest we eliminate it is about as narrow-sighted of a concept as I can imagine

there is a culture outside your culture
- the culture of other countries/civilisations
- the culture of those who choose to decide for themselves and not follow blindly the norm

there is also your culture that's evolving. look at england and how vegetarianism has evolved there in the last decades

How can someone think its wrong to kill an animal for food, but alrite to kill a plant for food, they are both living organisms

suffering, consciousness, interest in living, stress of breeding conditions, lesser harm... and these kind of concepts

thats their whole purpose for being here. food. what other purpose do they really serve?

what purpose do you serve?
is the purpose of the born poor to be exploited by the born rich?

 

[DJDannyUhOh]

many things considered "natural" are obviously harmful : diseases, earthquakes, malformations...

Be what they may, they are all still vital parts of nature's cycle, like eating meat. Just because we are of "higher consciouness" doesn't mean that the instinct to eat meat is wrong.

there is a culture outside your culture

Obviously the meat eating culture is the majority here in the US.

if it meant killing, i'd rather starve than kill animals to eat them

Now that goes against every law of nature. If that was the case and every one of us transcendental humans had that point of view, you would not be here. In fact, none of us would be here to experience this joyfull debate. Darwin anyone?

me neither, if that doesn't imply killing the animal

- in reply to "I see nothing wrong with eating meat" -

How else are you going to eat it? I'm sure you don't advocate swallowing whole, live goldfish. And eating dead aminals might have some health issues attached to it.

 

[Psychedelic Gleam]

"Be what they may, they are all still vital parts of nature's cycle, like eating meat. Just because we are of "higher consciouness" doesn't mean that the instinct to eat meat is wrong."

This may be part of natures cycle and I see nothing wrong with it, the act of eating another animal is not what disgusts me its the methods of obtaining the meat that the majority of people use. You are trully an idiot if you think enslaving and killing mass quantities of animals like some sort of animal holocaust is natural or part of natures cycle in any way.

 

[U.R.B.4.U.R.]

Right on!

 

[DJDannyUhOh]

"Be what they may, they are all still vital parts of nature's cycle, like eating meat. Just because we are of "higher consciouness" doesn't mean that the instinct to eat meat is wrong."

This may be part of natures cycle and I see nothing wrong with it, the act of eating another animal is not what disgusts me its the methods of obtaining the meat that the majority of people use. You are trully an idiot if you think enslaving and killing mass quantities of animals like some sort of animal holocaust is natural or part of natures cycle in any way.

Please show me where I posted that I advocate the current way that animals are killed.