(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

[rm.livejournal.com]

Kyle would be so paralyzed.

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

[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.

[tinywarrior.livejournal.com]

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

[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...)

[lawnrrd]

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

[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.