(no subject)

[threeplusfire]

I shouldn't read the internet so soon after waking. It only pisses me off.

Fuck that vegan moral superiority bullshit. There's something delightfully evil about knowing that in order to sustain large crops of grains you end up with a lot of dead field mice. Oh, I am so going to use that line on the next self righteous vegan who tries to make me feel guilty for eating meat.

Thankfully my friends who are vegetarian/vegan/whatever who are not militant about their choices and don't feel the need to run around trying to guilt others into adopting their behaviour. I will kindly eat their share of the world's meat so they won't have to. Everyone wins!

Comments

[amp23.livejournal.com]

My favorite is getting the militant types to think about just why animals in specific are held above all other life. A salad kills just as many living things as a steak. Washing your hands is tantamount to genocide on the microbial scale. Why is killing only murder when done on something with a face?

Life feeds on Life. People have the right to choose what they do or do not eat, but pushing those choices on others (whatever the choice may be) steps over that line between your rights and the rights of others to their own path.

interesting link

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I am all for producing better ways of farming, and using less scary chemicals and all that stuff. But oh my do I hate being talked down to, or being antagonized about my eating habits. I feel the same way about those who are militant and fearsome about religion or politics or music.

Like you said, everyone needs to find their own path.

[n-o-m-i-c.livejournal.com]

I was a vegetarian for a while (by no means militant), and one of the more compelling reasons for it that I found was the way in which the grains and other vegetable matter that goes into feeding animals raised for meat could go a lot farther in feeding humans.

To me, the sort of utilitarian math of the resources that go into a single meal (and the environmental impact of it) was a lot stronger reason than the moral weight of killing animals.

Just something to think about.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I think the morality argument is a hell of a lot more useful when discussing the unpleasant and cruel conditions used to produce a lot of mass market foods. But saying just eating another creature is a moral issue flies right out the window with me. The entire ecosystem is based around creatures eating other creatures, from the insects and plants up to the cows and tigers.

Not all of the vegetable matter that goes into feeding livestock is suitable for human consumption. Cows have different teeth and different stomachs that allow them to eat a lot of tougher, more fiberous stuff.

[amp23.livejournal.com]

I'm aware of that argument and completely agree with it. There are a number of reasons to eat vegetarian diets that have nothing to do with the morality of killing or exploiting animals, and it was those arguments which lead me to look further into vegetarianism as a way of life. In my opinion, the militant "meat is murder" types do a lot to detract from the more reasonable arguments regarding why someone would choose vegetarianism through their ridiculous outspoken tactics.

I've never fully committed to vegetarianism, but i have plenty of veggie and vegan friends (especially from asian countries). Learning about vegetarianism has definitely changed my eating habits for the better, though I have trouble sayin no to a good burger or steak.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I have to say I'm a lot more receptive to vegetarian options when they are presented from a health point, or as elements of a cuisine perhaps less familiar to me. Man, there's some awesome vegetarian Indian food. They do great things to potato and eggplant. Yum.

[amp23.livejournal.com]

That they do, and this seems to be something common to most non-western diets: meat is not a staple, it's a flavoring or texture enhancer.

changing our outlook of meat to be more in line with this, would do a lot to negate the "need" for commercialized animal production, which in turn would greatly reduce the amount of water and useful food essentially wasted in our agricultural system.

but doing so would also reduce the beef industries profits and undo all the work they've paid for to convince everyone it's what's for dinner. as the oprah case shows, they're happy to spend millions to protect their billions from any perceived threat whatsoever.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I need a shirt that says "I love meat, but damn if I hate giant evil corporations."

[rm.livejournal.com]

Kyle would be so paralyzed.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Bwahahaha! That is such a thought.

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

You know, I thought that, too. snicker

Some thoughts on the matter, stolen from elsewhere

[ekatarina.livejournal.com]

I recall reading an argument to support the ethical treatment of animals by *not* going vegetarian.

It went like this:
If you stop eating animals because they are ill-treated in modern agribusiness then purveyors of such business will have a smaller market and will therefore have to increase efficiencies, possibly leading to treating the animals even worse in order to squeeze every last dime to pay the feed and rent on the farm.

If you instead research, seek out and patronize those farms and ranches that treat animals better, who feed them better and use as humane methods as possible to slaughter them - not only are you supporting these likely local and smaller businesses, you are telling the agribusiness that there *is* an alternative to the way they are working and that alternative is economically viable.

So, don't go veggie, just get educated about the sources.

Makes more sense to me than just avoiding meat altogether. If I take myself out of the customer category, then why should the business people pay attention to what I say? If I stand up and demand a different product and back that up with purchases, they had better listen to me or go out of business.

Cheers,

Ekatarina

Re: Some thoughts on the matter, stolen from elsewhere

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting argument and one I had not heard before. I like it a lot, because I'm all about any position that says "Get Educated." :)

better to have lived and lost, than never to have lived at all.

[warhol.livejournal.com]

Well, another take on the same issue: by being a meat-atarian, you're giving animals a chance to experience life. Sure, they'll meet (no pun intended, snicker) an untimely death, but until then.... they get to enjoy frolicking in a field, eating grass, fornicating, and all these other worldly pleasures. At least they get a chance to experience some things, and hopefully a bit of happiness.

Of course, much meat is produced in miserable, industrial-scale operations.... so maybe life isn't so idyllic. But there's the potential to be.

Re: better to have lived and lost, than never to have lived at all.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I happen to like cows a lot. Precisely because they aren't so bright! They just seem so zen to me, sitting out there in the fields chewing and looking around.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

I don't consider myself a militant vegetarian, but there's actually a really glaring hole in those guys' reasoning. It's not like we hunt cows, and therefore by killing a cow we're only killing one organism. Cows are at a higher trophic level than grains, and in order to produce one cow's worth of beef you need to grow about ten times that cow's weight in grains and hay, just to feed the cow until it's ready to slaughter. And the practices that go into raising feed grain are about the same as teh practices that go into raising grain for human consumption.

So if about 5 field mice died to make my quarter-pound loaf of bread, 50 field mice would have died to make a quarter-pound steak.

Vegetarianism is always a matter of degrees. I mean, I kill things all the time- I kill parasites in my body without even thinking about it. I kill plenty of plants (though I tend not to care about plants as much since they have no nervous systems) in order to feed myself. I've indirectly killed plenty of lab rats through using prescription medications that had to be tested on animals. I probably kill a large number of bugs just walking around, and you know what, I just don't care, because caring about that stuff would drive me crazy. But it wasn't too hard for me to give up meat, and overall I do think that I should aim for killing a fewer things, rather than more things.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

Ok, well, I didn't notice they were talking about exclusively pasture-fed cows. Those probably do kill fewer mice, because no mice are killed in order to feed them (though they probably step on mice a lot). But even free-range cattle are fed on grain that was machine-harvested elsewhere, in addition to stuff they eat themselves in fields. In fact you'd have to feed cows on machine-harvested stuff as long as you're raising cows in a place that has a winter, because otherwise your cows would starve to death over the winter. Well, unless you wanted to pay workers to harvest hay for the cows by hand, as in the old days- in that case beef would be astronomically expensive.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you've got to put food away for the winter.
But hey, if we paid people to harvest grain then that would at least make more jobs. Hmm.

Heh.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

It would also make more vegetarians, since not everyone could afford the beef anyway...

Re: Heh.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

It would probably go back to having beef once or twice a week, as opposed to every day.

Re: Heh.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

Hundreds of years ago, I think, most people had beef at most once a month. It was the middle class that ate beef once or twice a week.

Re: Heh.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about what I knew of the history of my father's family. They raised cattle, corn and cotton mostly, from the time when Texas was opened up to land grabs.

Re: Heh.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a sort of a special case, because people were allowed to have a pretty large amount of land for free. Your average person can't do that, and in order to raise enough free-range, pasturing cows to eat beef twice a week, you need a good bit of land.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I think they're looking more at cows raised in happier environments, where they are allowed to wander in fields and eat grasses and such. Grass fed beef is generally better than beef fed strictly grain diets. So if we could take all those feed grain fields and let the cows merrily chomp their way through, the field mice would just have to stay out from underfoot.

I know, too much of an idealistic hope. But I like to dream of happy cows.

[warhol.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you missed this paragraph?

In contrast, grazing ruminants such as cattle produce food and require fewer entries into the fields with tractors and other equipment. In grazed pastures, according to Davis, less wildlife is lost to the mower blades, and more find stable habitat in untilled fields. And no-till agriculture also helps stabilize soil and reduce run-off into streams.

The factoid about "x pounds of vegetable matter are required to produce one pound of meat" has always struck me as somewhat inaccurate. At least where I grew up, there's not such a clearcut tradeoff. Most livestock live on land that wouldn't be able to produce edible crops for humans.

Furthermore, I'd point out that "x pounds of vegetable matter are required to produce one pound of grain." Raising corn, wheat, rice, or any other cereal is inherently wasteful -- these are grasses after all, and seeds are only a small fraction of what they produce. Most of the rest of that.... stalks, husks, chaff, and whatnot.... is waste, or else it goes for animal feed.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

Most livestock live on land that wouldn't be able to produce edible crops for humans.

This is because most livestock live in factory farms. Can't grow too many vegetables on concrete. And while it may be true that, in mountainous regions, you can raise cows but few crops, most American beef cows, even free-range ones, only get so much of their daily food intake from actually grazing. Usually, what happens is people grow feed-grain crops, harvest them with the normal machine methods, and then ship them off to the cattle farm.

And while some waste vegetable matter is actually fed to cows, really, you can't just feed cows on stuff that humans won't eat, they need the grains for protein. And even if cows are 400% more efficient at eating corn than humans are, there is still some waste due to the increased trophic level.

This is why, for example, people in most historical agrarian societies ate meat very, very rarely. Eating dairy or plants was just more efficient, and it was expensive to feed a cow or pig. You only see people eating highly meat-based diets when they're living in an area, like mountains or semi-arid regions, where really the only things that grow are grasses. And those cattle live very different lives than your average American beef cow.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I think you missed the point there. A lot of land used to support livestock isn't as usable for growing crops. My grandfather's family had large ranches and some of that land just wasn't condusive to growing corn or cotton, so it went to the beasties.

[mielikki.livejournal.com]

I don't know squat about raising cows, but my impression is that most cows are fed at least some grain (grown in traditional mouse-cidal ways), even ones on large ranches. I'd be curious to see what percentage of the cows we eat are raised completely without human-grown supplements to their diet (grain, hay, etc) but are totally pasture-fed.

Not that I'm veggie; I'm apparently what the accursed marketing guys call a 'flexitarian', which is to vegetarians what metrosexual is to queers I guess. I tend to eat veggie more often than not. I still like a good MLT when the mutton is nice and lean, though, on occasion.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

It's not an issue of land, it's an issue of feed. The land that livestock live on usually doesn't feed them alone. People grow feed corn, harvest it in the same mouse-killing way as normal corn is harvested, and then feed it to the cows- after all, if the land isn't very green, the cows usually aren't going to be able to subsist entirely off of it. So where the cows actually live isn't an issue, the issue is that if corn-growing somehow kills animals, cow-growing will kill animals too, because you need to grow corn in order to feed those cows.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Well then we come to a point where the arguments are all moot. No matter what you're eating, something's got to give.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, basically.

I guess it all comes down to a certain hierarchy in terms of which things required the most amount of killing to eat, with factory-farmed and grain-fed cattle at the top (since you have to machine-harvest a lot of plants to raise them), vegetable matter somewhere near the middle, and entirely pasture-fed cattle somewhere near the bottom. The only problem with exclusively pasture-fed cattle is that you can't really grow too many of them, since they need to be raised in a warm region and each one needs a lot of land.

[warhol.livejournal.com]

This is why, for example, people in most historical agrarian societies ate meat very, very rarely. Eating dairy or plants was just more efficient, and it was expensive to feed a cow or pig.

I don't disagree that eating meat is more costly than eating grain. I'm just pointing out that it isn't all opportunity cost -- it's not that the same resources could be used to produce vegetable foods. At least historically, much of civilization has banned consuming animals that compete with humans for food..... recall the two Biblical rules for mammals to be kosher: they must have a cloven hoof and they must chew the cud. These are purely practical considerations. The first requirement is that the animal have a utilitarian purpose as well (that it can be used as a beast of burden, in particular), while the second requirement is that the animal must feed on something that humans can't digest. People have always relied on meat for part of their diet, and they've tried to do it in a way that minimizes the trade-off between producing different types of food. (Pigs, in contrast to goats and sheep and cattle, eat the same kinds of things that people do -- so they're banned as an impractical food source.)

Admittedly, cattle are raised in different ways and for different reasons today..... but it's simply not true that for each pound of meat you have, you could instead have x pounds of vegetable foods.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

You can not agree if you want, but it's just objectively true that meat was more costly than grain throughout much of history, except in areas that were really hostile to agriculture. Meat was considered a luxury, which is why, for example, Catholics often gave/give it up for Lent.

Also, I never said that for every pound of meat you raise, you could have instead x pounds of human-edible vegetable foods. What I was saying was that if you raise cattle in a way even remotely similar to how they're usually raised now, you need to harvest a lot of vegetable matter in order to feed them, a lot more vegetable matter than you'd need to harvest in order to have a good deal of grain. And that vegetable matter is not just scraps from stuff people already harvest to eat themselves- there are whole crops of corn that are grown and harvested exclusively to feed cattle, and I know this because there are different safety standards for growing feed corn and corn for human consumption (for instance, feed corn can be genetically engineered in different ways) and there have been huge recalls when corn intended for cattle feed has gotten into the human food supply, and people have actually died (mainly of allergic reactions, since that corn produces different proteins).

Cattle are almost never entirely pasture-fed - they almost always eat a huge amount of corn and hay that was harvested using mouse-killing threshing machines. And they always will, because a) this is a far more efficient way to raise cows from the pov of the cattle ranchers, and b) most cattle-raising regions have what we call a "winter" season, during which time cattle can't live on their own terribly well, and need to be fed on hay and other grains that were harvested during the summer.

[tinywarrior.livejournal.com]

Perhaps we carnivores should all start eating field mice...then everyone could be happy. ; )

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Mwuahahah! I bet Alan could figure out a way to cook them up nicely. :P

I Ate Stuart Little

[tinywarrior.livejournal.com]

Hehehe! I can soooooooooo imagine that entry:

"And tonight Alan prepared a scrumptious salad of baby greens with roasted walnut and bleu cheese vinaigrette, along with some field mouse flank steaks lightly marinated in garlic and rosemary. It was delish...and the cat loved the leftovers!"

[jonqui.livejournal.com]

This is war, Peacock! Casualties are inevitable!
you've probably already heard all of this...
I'm all for the oppression of animals. Fuck, people are oppressed all over the globe everyday, why should cows be any luckier? For that reason alone, I'll never be vegan. That and I love cheese too much.

I still hold that I would eat, say, Gene's brain over a cow's because cows are so damn stupid and I have some silly notion of that one would absorb an amount of intellect from eating the brain of something. Unless ofcourse, I would get his insanity instead...must rethink this position...

(And that is Duckula, the vegetarian vampire-duck. mmmm. brocolli...)

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Bunnicula! The carrots must fear the pointy teeth!

[lawnrrd]

Tonight's dinner would have had any wayward vegans dropping dead of apoplexy in seconds. It was very, very good.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Oooo what did you have?

[lawnrrd]

I finished that cassoulet I've been talking about for weeks. It's essentially french pork and beans, but the meat ingredients included an entire roast of pork, an entire batch of lamb stew, the meat from a preserved (in lard) goose, and an italian garlic pork sausage.

Friends came over tonight and helped eat it. It was very, very good.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Oh man. I stuffed myself on Mexican food tonight and that's making me so so so hungry. Mmmmm.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

Usually when someone gives me the rap about how the food animal in question is raised in a tiny box where it can't hardly moved, only to be knocked on the head at the end, I say something along the lines of, "You mean you'd prefer it live free in the great outdoors? With diseases, predators, freezing temperatures and starvation? Because let me tell you- if I had some cougar gnawing on my flank, that room with three squares a day would look awfully damn good."

[hyperina.livejournal.com]

Hey, don't be scared to post a critical reply to Davis's theory.

See Gaverick Matheny’s “Least harm: a defense of vegetarianism from Steven Davis’s omnivorous proposal”, forthcoming in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, available online at: http://courses.ats.rochester.edu/nobis/papers/leastharm.htm)

I cannot think of an ethical theory that equates ‘harm’ with ‘number of deaths.’ All the theories of which I am aware are quite concerned with the treatment of animals up to their deaths. Davis, in discussing the number of animals killed rather than their treatment prior to death, ignores an important question that must be answered in order to assess which system of agriculture causes the least harm.