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| Thread: Meet your Meat |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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blizzardboy
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posted March 05, 2011 05:53 PM |
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Skrentyz might have the diplomatic finesse of a hydralisk, but either way, I think he's made a point that all of you have failed to address: from what we understand, domestic animals feel pain in a way very similar to how humans feel pain, yet we subjugate hundreds of billions of them and slaughter them. "Vegetarians are hypocrites because plants are also alive" is a moot point. By all accounts of our current understanding, plants do not feel pain nor are they in anyway conscious. They have reactions to their environment, but that doesn't really mean anything. Chemicals have reactions to their environment also. I think people need to acknowledge the fact that by eating meat, they are terminating a conscious being.
I believe that a vegetarian diet is inherently superior to an omnivore diet, excluding the pleasure aspect (hell yeah  ), although that is also debatable since pleasure is often times relative to what you're accustomed to. A plant-based diet is healthier and exceedingly more sustainable. It takes a far, far greater amount of land to produce 1 meal of beef than it does to produce 1 meal of grains, fruit, and vegetables. Producing meat in general is more exhaustive than producing plants, since that meat by itself needs to eat plants until it can be slaughtered. Enormous advances could be made in the realms of health, estate, and reforestation if the entire world adopted a vegetarian diet.
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Jabanoss
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posted March 05, 2011 06:02 PM |
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Enormous advances could also be made in the realms of health, estate, and reforestation if we would give up computer games, art and music...
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blizzardboy
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posted March 05, 2011 06:03 PM |
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Precisely.
Eating meat kicks ass. That's the bottom line.
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ohforfsake
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posted March 05, 2011 06:04 PM |
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I would personally be horrified by the responsibility of deciding who's consciouss and who isn't. I do think though, that it's more likely that animals are consciouss than plants.
About the the pain aspect. I find the killing aspect much more relevant to deal with before the pain aspect, but I think I'm alone on this one.
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JoonasTo
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What if Elvin was female?
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posted March 05, 2011 06:12 PM |
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If were talking of human level conciousness, some whales and apes are the only ones near. Others don't have a concious self.
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By all accounts of our current understanding, plants do not feel pain nor are they in anyway conscious.
Just to bring down your buble, if you really need to, the Helsinki University did a study on this some ten years back or so.
Plants have a memory and plants can think and make decisions aka they can think.
The tests were conducted on a birch tree so I can't say for every plant but the capability, albeit low level, is there.
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blizzardboy
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posted March 05, 2011 06:44 PM |
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I'm assuming they were talking about what would be akin to muscle memory. Plants have no known way of having any sort of conscious at all. They're about one step up from mold.
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JoonasTo
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posted March 05, 2011 07:05 PM |
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Indeed. They cannot have a concious according to our understanding yet they can still think. Doesn't that intrigue you? How do they do it?
We understand animals pretty well but we don't know jack about plants.
It can't be muscle memory because plants don't have nerves.
It is suggested that their memory might be in the "unused" parts of DNA but that's not any better quess than the next one.
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JollyJoker
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posted March 05, 2011 07:11 PM |
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Skrentyz might have the diplomatic finesse of a hydralisk, but either way, I think he's made a point that all of you have failed to address: from what we understand, domestic animals feel pain in a way very similar to how humans feel pain, yet we subjugate hundreds of billions of them and slaughter them. "Vegetarians are hypocrites because plants are also alive" is a moot point. By all accounts of our current understanding, plants do not feel pain nor are they in anyway conscious. They have reactions to their environment, but that doesn't really mean anything. Chemicals have reactions to their environment also. I think people need to acknowledge the fact that by eating meat, they are terminating a conscious being.
You forget that those animals wouldn't even exist otherwise - only wild ones, no domesticated ones, and since we need ever more room for ourselves... well.
Moreover, everyone is feeling pain - rats as well, for example. Or the animals that are eaten by predators. Are we to exterminate the predators or will we wash it off of our hands?
Yes, animals feel pain - but they don't know they are living and fed only to serve as food. They just LIVE - if treated "humanly" -, and eventually they die - painless, if done correctly.
That's the advantage of animals - no imagination.
As long as there are millions and dozens of millions humans suffering ... if the point was at least to reduce cattle and meat production in order to produce more crops to feed the hungry people, but this?
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Fauch
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posted March 05, 2011 07:22 PM |
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but they don't know they are living and fed only to serve as food
that works with humans too. and for some reason, we consider it wrong
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Jabanoss
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posted March 05, 2011 07:27 PM |
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 What are you keeping in your basement Fauch?
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blizzardboy
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posted March 05, 2011 08:01 PM |
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I don't really care a whole lot about the 'killing animals' aspect as I do about the utility of a vegetarian diet, although I still think people should acknowledge the 'killing' part. Denial is bad.
Meat is a luxury item. It's a sports car for the stomach. I'm not going to scream at people to stop eating it because I eat it myself, and I have no intention whatsoever of stopping or apologizing about it. Hell, I worked in a butcher shop for a year during college, skinning and gutting deer, pulling out their organs and cleaning off the fat. I know all about death. This is my life and I'm not going to go through it living like some sort of impoverished monk. But I do believe a person that subscribes to a vegetarian diet is making a more responsible, and superior, choice. Good luck getting most omnivores to admit that.
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JoonasTo
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posted March 05, 2011 08:20 PM |
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Meat is not a luxury item. It is necessary for survival. Now, entrecote is luxury item but say, minced meat, chicken or pork is not.
What people don't get that being a vegetarian not to meantion vegan is a luxury choice. Most people in the world can't get necessary nutrients without meat. I'm one of those people, I couldn't even afford to be a vegetarian. I don't have the money for it. Heck, I'm on minus every month just for eating the cheapest I can and I'm still not getting everything I need. 
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blizzardboy
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posted March 05, 2011 08:30 PM |
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Which is peculiar, because once upon a time, in the Feudal Age, meat was mostly consumed by the wealthy nobility and plants were mostly consumed by poor serfs. Now, cheeseburgers are mostly consumed by poor people and fresh asparagus is mostly consumed by affluent people. It's a big problem.
Rice and pasta still is cheaper than meat. But I know what you mean: if you want to get the nicer fruits and vegetables, they're a hell of a lot more expensive than beef or chicken. A lot of it boils down to the fact that there's such a high demand for meat compared to something like spinach, and industrial farms are able to cut down on the price by buying grains to feed their animals in mass quantities. There's also government subsidiaries to consider. It's also because a lot of fruits and vegetables are seasonal and only grow in certain areas, and if you're living in Finland those oranges need to be shipped up, whereas you can kill a cow whenever and wherever.
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JollyJoker
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posted March 05, 2011 08:53 PM |
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Quote:
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but they don't know they are living and fed only to serve as food
that works with humans too. and for some reason, we consider it wrong
It doesn't. Work with humans, I mean. And wouldn't.
@ blizzard
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But I do believe a person that subscribes to a vegetarian diet is making a more responsible, and superior, choice.
I don't believe that. Ultimately it doesn't matter what you eat or whether you have to kill an animal to eat or not.
In the end it's just a question of how much living space humans will allow other species.
I'm pretty sure that ethically spoken there is nothing wrong with humans trying to secure as much room for them as is possible, thereny denying other species room to live.
If we plant crops, we will use the ground for our purposes, denying other species to live there or feed from it.
If you think it through - do you really think there is a difference in conquering all land and making it usable for humans (leaving only small "wild" areas for people to "enjoy"), thereby killing most species that compete for living space with our race (using the land to farm crops and settle humans), or whether you breed animals with the purpose to eat them, once they are grown-up.
One way or another, humans conquer the planet, which means less animals, whether you kill them for food or not.
Animals are killed all the time. They are killed in lab experiments - and if you think that's not fair, well, humans dying from painful diseases doesn't seem to be fair either.
Sure a lot of animals die for worse reasons - furs, potency, ivory, cosmetics, you name it. And isn't all of that worse than breeding animals for a painless death to serve as food?
We all use what dead animals provide or have provided, one way or another.
Worse, the whole ethical arm of the discussion is clouding the actual issue here. The real scandal is the fact the vegetables are so expensive compared to meat, that meat is a valid choice for the poor. This was different in earlier times. The poor used to eat potatoes and cabbage, whereas meat was something for the rich. This is a political question not an ethical one. A healthy diet would be red meat ONCE per week, fish or white meat TWICE per week, and no meat/fish for the rest of the week.
Prices are not reflecting this.
Still, the healthy diet requires killing animals - although LESS.
Superior choice? My @$$. It's an extremely expensive choice.
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Corribus
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posted March 05, 2011 08:58 PM |
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Edited by Corribus at 22:41, 05 Mar 2011.
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As the great Gootch once said:
Why do people eat meat?
Why do dogs lick their sack?
Because they can, that's why.
All joking aside, when you start off a discussion with such a hyperbolic piece of imagery, how can you reasonably expect the discussion to remain in the realm of the realistic? Besides which, you're comdemning yourself to fallacious reasoning when your argument depends on something that is so clearly beyond normal practice.
That aside, there seem to be two arguments against eating meat:
One, it's more healthy.
Two, it's more moral.
The first argument does have a modicum of seeming validity to it, but it can be perfectly healthy to eat meat, provided it's done (like everything else) in moderation. A vegetarian diet is not automatically healthier than an omnivorous diet, in other words. Many types of meat are very nutritious and are in fact a natural part of the human diet. Thus to claim that eating meat is categorically unhealthy is just plain wrong.
As for the moral aspect, well, no person has ever successfully demonstrated to me why eating meat should be considered immoral or amoral (in general, mind you - I think we can all agree that egregious examples of animal abuse do not have a place in civilized society). Celfious already tried and failed rather spectacularly in an earlier thread on this topic. I challenge anyone to convince me using a sound logical argument why eating meat is morally wrong.
EDIT:
Come to think of it, there's a third argument that is often used to drive the belief that vegetarianism is somehow superior to omnivorism:
Three, it's more economical.
Generally the ecomonics argument hinges on some statement regarding the cost of growing plant crops versus livestock. Frankly, I've never found these arguments very convincing. For one thing, most of these arguments offer an incredibly superficial treatment of what is an extremely complicated industry. For instance, it ignores the incredible cost of sustaining the variety of foodstuffs that modern consumers - vegetarians included - demand be available in supermarkets year-round; thus while it's true that oranges may be much cheaper to grow, per unit area, than cows are to raise, this argument functionally ignores the extra cost of getting fresh, attractive oranges to Wisconsin in the middle of January.
But more importantly, given that vegetarianism is only prevalent among first-world denizens - because only a modern, industrialized food industry is capable of sustaining vegetarianism on a broad level - it just rings a little bit hollow when the bourgeoisie go on and on about the value to society of saving a few pennies per acre on growing alfalfa sprouts while at the same time they have no problem with plopping down $5 for a coffee at Starbucks. For that matter, why aren't they out protesting about all the valuable land being used to grow those coffee beans, anyway?
The economics argument is strictly an ad hoc justification of dietary choice. People don't become vegetarians because it's cost effective (for society) to grow plants instead of meats. They become vegetarians for other perceived benefits (health or moral) and then use the economics argument as an extra rationalization when someone challenges them on why they actually made their choice. If it was a real reason they didn't eat meat, it'd be incorporated throughout their lifestyle choices, not just in their choice to avoid meat. As such, it doesn't really work as a logical argument in favor of vegetarianism.
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JoonasTo
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What if Elvin was female?
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posted March 05, 2011 08:58 PM |
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Actually, only the cheapest rice is cheaper than minced meat.
You can't live off pasta and rise alone. You can try with dark pasta and dark rice but closest you get is with oatmeal. You can forget proteins from beans, you can't match meat, can try with soy but you'll be missing all the additives, so forth and so forth.
Vegetarian diet needs rare and expensive plants to be consumed to cover for the missing of meat. You need a expensive oils to cover for the lack of fish. Etc. Etc. Not doable for poorer people and simply not available for most people. There's a reason why people in Africa drink blood directly from the cows neck you know. That's to stay alive.
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SkrentyzMienty
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posted March 05, 2011 10:42 PM |
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I challenge anyone to convince me using a sound logical argument why eating meat is morally wrong.
Because killing an animal is no different from killing a human, logical enough?
As for the whole dietary aspect that the discussion seems to be focused on at the moment, I disagfree strongly that it is more expensive, and even more that you need some very rare plants for survival off a vegetarian diet...I think it'll be easier for comparison for everyone if I present to you my diet (it is completely natural, and nothing present in it that any of you don't eat, hence CAN afford it anyways). I admit, it's easier for me perhaps, because where I live, the UK, there are widely available vegetarian dishes in supermarkets such as ASDA or Tesco. For example:
Breakfast - cereals&milk, sandwitches with jam, vegetables, cheese etc., porridge, and some Polish dishes that I don't really know English equivalents to.
Dinner - Vegetable Lasagne, Rice&Chilli dish, cauliflower cheese, lots of vegetables, rice, dishes containing soya protein or tofu, spinach, soups, pretty much everything omnivores eat, just excluding the meat.
Anything expensive there? Well due to the recession various food prices increased, but that'sirrelevant as that's the case with pretty much everything, even Adrius' local moose salami.
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Just to bring down your buble, if you really need to, the Helsinki University did a study on this some ten years back or so.
Plants have a memory and plants can think and make decisions aka they can think.
The tests were conducted on a birch tree so I can't say for every plant but the capability, albeit low level, is there.
I actually really respect Finnish education and universities, but the idea of plants having memory is absurd, since memory is stored in the brain which they don't possess. Plants can NOT make decisions, any "action" their organism may take, is chemically-mechanical, e.g. moving towards light, which is caused by more meristem cells concentrating on the shaded region of a stalk, so boosting growth of the shaded side, and consequently bending the plant towards light; the same mechanism occurrs in roots, which grow away from light.
And plants cannot think, that requires a brain.
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Yes, animals feel pain - but they don't know they are living and fed only to serve as food.
Humans have exactly the same psychological flaws, the Jews also didn't know they'll be gassed while getting in the "shower" and taking their numbers into consideration, could have easily rioted against the Nazis and killed many of them under numbers. But that's beside the point anyways...what kind of a "life" have animals got on farms? Cows and pigs may spend their entire lives in little cages and any ill/small ones are executed in sadistic ways, all of them are. Animals are treated as milk/egg/meat producing machines with no feeling EVEN DURING their entire lifetime. Absolutely no difference between Nazis&Jews and humans&animals.
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Meat is not a luxury item. It is necessary for survival.
It isn't. I survived the last 8 years without it and eat nothing you don't. Never tried beans or spinach in your life?
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I had no idea that you were sixteen, I wouldn't rate you that high. Maybe 13 or 14. You american then? Good in school probably, suck at sports. Am I right?
You are quite wrong, my suomi friend. Olen puolalainen mutta asuu Englannissa. Where did the sport judgement come from? I'm average. And yes, great in school.
I want to share this thought again if no one minds:
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Is that terrible?
Yes it is!
Should such treatment be allow?
Never and nowhere on this planet!
Should Humans eat meat or drink milk?
Yes they should if they so wish.
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Should rapists rape?
-Yes if they so wish.
Should child molestors molest kids?
-Yes if they so wish.
Should serial killers slaughter people?
-Yes if they so wish.
Should suicide bombers detonate themselves in highly populated areas?
-Yes if they so wish.
Should dictators exploit the poor citizens of their countries?
-Yes if they so wish.
Sould Muslim men have the right to flush their wives faces with acid?
-Yes if they so wish.
Sould I blow your head off?
-Yes if I so wish.
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Doomforge
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posted March 05, 2011 10:49 PM |
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Well, killing, raping or blowing (no pun intended) humans is considered crime by every society in existence, and eating animals isn't, so... not the best example.
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SkrentyzMienty
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posted March 05, 2011 11:02 PM |
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Prawo i moralnosc sa bardzo roznymi od siebie rzeczami...so yes, good example. Because it isn't considered a crime, doesn't mean it shouldn't be. In Muslim countries, it is legal for a man to spill highly corrosive acid on a woman's face for disobedience? Yes. Is it morally right? That question shall be left rhetorical...
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Fauch
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posted March 05, 2011 11:06 PM |
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Edited by Fauch at 23:10, 05 Mar 2011.
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well, I would say nazis were worst. I doubt farmers would have much interest at making their animals become as weak as possible. and the justification for killing jews was far more fantaisist than the justification for killing animals.
I read that running concentration camp was more costly than what the work of the slaves brought. the purpose wasn't to produce to support the war effort, but just to torture the poor dudes by the work.
I don't know if it really was the case, but if it was, you can agree that killing animals for food makes much more sense.
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In Muslim countries, it is legal for a man to spill highly corrosive acid on a woman's face for disobedience?
there's really such a law? the girl has better be extremly cute, the guy might think twice before ruining her face.
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