The World Beyond BetterMost > Anything Goes
Horse is falling off the menu in France
delalluvia:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on December 17, 2009, 03:02:53 pm ---And sometimes even each other.
Hey, it's been known to happen. ...
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Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: delalluvia on December 17, 2009, 03:06:03 pm ---Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
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And I love children. Especially with stuffing and gravy. ...
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: delalluvia on December 17, 2009, 12:27:27 pm ---Giving a tough trial in the wilderness, we would not only eat our dogs, cats, rats and horses - any creature within reach, we'd also eat any other creature we'd be able to catch.
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Including humans, according to the movie (and, I assume, the book) The Road.
--- Quote ---However, that being said, I find myself dismayed at the cruelty at which our livestock is killed. I thought for the most part there were laws reinforcing the humaneness of the kill. A man who worked as a cattle butcher told me about the techniques they used. But apparently the laws are not as strict as I thought. Stuff I read from PETA on chickens is horrifying and on another board I went to, when describing the worst jobs we ever had, one guy wrote about his job pig killing. How he had to go into the stockyards and kill all the sick pigs by beating them to death. He talked about the blood and the screams of the pigs and it was just sickening to read.
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The book that I quoted above (Eating Meat, by Jonathan Safran Foer) brought home some things that I already knew at some level but tried to suppress, and put them in vivid, awful detail. For example, 1) Not only do meat animals die horrifying deaths -- what's worse, factory-farmed animals live horrifying lives, spending their entire existence in cramped, dark, airless compartments -- in the case of chickens, cages the size of a sheet of printer paper -- bred or drugged or mutilated in ways that maximize meat production but cause discomfort, deformity and disease for the animals themselves 2) Almost all of the meat in this country comes from factory farms 3) Chickens that provide eggs and cows that provide milk don't have it much, if any, better, so anybody who isn't a vegan isn't entirely absolved of complicity in this process.
On the other hand, eating meat makes us human in a very literal sense. There's archeological evidence that eating meat -- both consuming the additional protein plus the demands of trying to outsmart larger, fiercer animals -- caused our ancestors' brains to grow bigger.
--- Quote ---To live, something else must die. Plants are just a lesser evil since we can't hear them scream, but botanists can tell you that when you do cut plants, they recoil, so they are experiencing some sort of reflex to being damaged. If we could survive on air and water, we would.
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If you are really concerned about killing plants, you can try to live off things you don't need to kill. For instance, if you eat an apple, you're not killing an apple tree -- the apple is designed to be eaten. If you ate the whole thing, seeds and all, then pooped the seeds out in a place where another tree could grow, you would be performing the exact service for the apple population that nature intended.
Brown Eyes:
It seems true that there's little way out of the dilemma of harming animals one way or another when it comes to the food supply (somehow I'm simply not as concerned with plants as food). Even the harvesting of vegetable crops often results in the death of animals living in the various fields, etc.
I still, on a personal level, can't eat meat anymore without feeling guilty. It's definitely tasty, but I never feel particularly good about myself when I do eat it these days (and I'm not talking about calorie count here). It doesn't seem at all necessary to me to eat meat on a regular basis (especially for a casual meal or quick/careless lunch or something), so I choose to do it very sparringly, or as I mentioned earlier... on special occasions.
LOL, there are also some sexual benefits to being a vegetarian (at least when it comes to women) that are pretty interesting... which is not at all why I've decided to go with a vegetarian diet. But, I think that's one reason why a lot of lesbians are vegetarians.
milomorris:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on December 17, 2009, 04:32:51 pm ---The book that I quoted above (Eating Meat, by Jonathan Safran Foer) brought home some things that I already knew at some level but tried to suppress, and put them in vivid, awful detail. For example, 1) Not only do meat animals die horrifying deaths -- what's worse, factory-farmed animals live horrifying lives, spending their entire existence in cramped, dark, airless compartments -- in the case of chickens, cages the size of a sheet of printer paper -- bred or drugged or mutilated in ways that maximize meat production but cause discomfort, deformity and disease for the animals themselves 2) Almost all of the meat in this country comes from factory farms 3) Chickens that provide eggs and cows that provide milk don't have it much, if any, better, so anybody who isn't a vegan isn't entirely absolved of complicity in this process.
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Two thoughts:
1. I'm sure this stuff happens, but I have to wonder how widespread it really is. I have seen dairy farms here in the rural counties outside the Philadelphia area, and their cows spend all day grazing in the fields rather than stuck in airless stalls. So apparently there are people out there that do treat their animals humanely. At the same time, we know that there are those that do not.
2. Considering the way carnivores kill their prey in the wild, I'm not sure how much more horrifying the deaths of livestock are at the hands of humans.
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