The Myth of the ‘Ethical Vegan’
Veganism dates back to 1944, when British Vegan Society co-founder Donald Watson coined the term to mean “non-dairy vegetarian.” The Society expanded the definition in 1951 to state that “man should live without exploiting animals.” Vegans eschew animal products in food, clothing, household products, or for any other reason.
There are a variety of reasons why people “go vegan.” Some simply don’t like the taste of meat. Some claim veganism is “green,” and that a vegan lifestyle minimizes impact on the environment.
In 1997, a survey revealed three percent of the people in the U.S. claimed that they had not used animals for any purpose in the previous two years. Rutgers School of Law professor Gary Francione argued in 2010 that “all sentient beings should have at least one right — the right not to be treated as property.”
Do ethical vegans live up to this stated standard? Do their actions live up to their own stated ethical principle, that animals have the right not to be treated as property? Do their actions really result in zero animal use? The parallel in human terms would be slavery, which no rational person thinks is ethically acceptable. Slaves are the property of masters; they live and die at their owner’s sufferance.
Unfortunately for the ethical vegan, the production of their food alone reduces their claim to impossibility. Animals are killed in untold millions, in the course of plant agriculture. Some are killed accidentally in the course of mechanized farming; some are killed deliberately in the course of pest control. Animals are killed, every day. Every potato, every stick of celery, every cup of rice, and every carrot has a blood trail leading from field to plate.
In 1999, while researching and writing Misplaced Compassion, I ran into a rice farmer who posted the following first-hand account on a Usenet forum:
[A] conservative annualized estimate of vertebrate deaths in organic rice farming is ~20 pound. … [T]his works out a bit less than two vertebrate deaths per square foot, and, again, is conservative. For conventionally grown rice, the gross body-count is at least several times that figure. … [W]hen cutting the rice, there is a (visual) green waterfall of frogs and anoles moving in front of the combine. Sometimes the “waterfall” is just a gentle trickle (± 10,000 frogs per acre) crossing the header, total for both cuttings, other times it is a deluge (+50,000 acre).
My own family was involved in corn and soybean farming; our numbers were not that high, but they were not inconsiderable. Pheasants and rabbits are routinely killed in planting and harvesting, and rodents are killed by the thousands using traps and pesticides at every step: production, storage, and transportation.
Rational people know this and don’t worry about it. It’s an inevitable consequence of modern, high-production agriculture. The ethical vegan, when confronted with these undeniable facts, collapses. Their reaction, in almost every case, is to do a rhetorical lateral arabesque into a new claim, that their vegan diet somehow causes “less death and suffering” than a non-vegan diet, a ridiculous and unsupportable argument. A pound of wild venison (net cost in animal death: about 1/120th of one animal) almost certainly causes less “death and suffering” than a pound of rice (net cost in animal death: including rodents, insect, reptiles and amphibians, number of deaths may range into the hundreds).
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the Bohemean fellow who became Chancelor of Germany in the ’30s adhere to a Vegetarian Diet?
Yes, and he had a serious problem with the Fat Guy Who Used To Be A Flying Ace who ran his Luftwaffe. (He was very fond of suckling pig.)
Other “ethical vegans” whose behavior toward humanity wasn’t so ethical included Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Himmler, Trotsky, Lavrenti Beria, Feliks Dzerzhinsky (yes, old “Iron Feliks” himself), and the recently-deceased Man Of Many Spellings Of His Name, Moammar al-Qadafi. (This is by no means an exhaustive list, either.)
To return to the main subject, ome of the “ethical vegan” crew hold that only “organic farming” is truly ethical, and demand that not only do we all become vegans, but that we must only eat foods raised organically.
To which I say, fine. Considering the low proportional yield of an acre farmed organically compared to an acre farmed by modern methods (been there, done that), that would mean that you would be expecting humanity to get by on (at best) about one-fourth the yield it does now. Meaning, everybody would be farming, and eating, as they do today in Sub-Saharan Africa. That is, inadequately.
Facts are stubborn things, as somebody-or-other said. And they tend to hit the assumed ethical superiority of “vegans” right in the mush.
cheers
eon
I suggest instead that we begin eating vegans. How many animals would that save from slaughter?
“Those people are all gristle” – C. Montgomery Burns
Are cattle and sheep considered vegans? If so, I’m way ahead of you.
People would go to amazing extends just to eat their steak guilt free.
Im sorry people but it is flesh from an animal that wanted to live.
I do not think vegans are hurting anyone, like literally. I suggest we just admire them for what we would not be able to do and stop producing hateful comments to them and try to prove that we are meant to eat meat,
I know a few vegans who have been so for over 20 years, and I am sorry to disappoint you but not only they are very healthy, they are also intelligent and remarkable people.
Did you read the article?
When you no longer differentiate between the death of a cow, a crow, or a human, then it’s not terribly surprisingly whem slaughtering people is no different than slaughtering cattle. I’ll also state my opinion that vegans and moral vegetarians tend to exhibit a crusading fervor that would put a jihadist to shame.
Well, I couldn’t eat vegans; they’re not kosher.
People of Earth… woah, that hippie’s starting to kick in… we’ve all learned a valuable lesson today… dude, my hands are huge. They can touch anything but themselves… Oh, wait.
Depends on how you kill ‘em.
Well – if you don’t mind – I’d rather eat Hodgkins sir. With a little white-wine sauce…
A lower percentage of organic farms to more standard farms also means that, in general, organic produce will have to be hauled farther to reach the stores. And more often as well, having higher rates of spoilage. Maybe they can replace delivery trucks with Chevy Volts, which of course are powered by electricity generated by magical unicorn flatulence.
A 1/4th the Yield using Organics? You should give up gardening because going organic changed everything for me. How exactly were you growing Organically? What does that term mean to you? Ive been experimenting with Organics for about 1.5 years. I failed miserably with Chem ferts in cheap store bought soil and my yeilds were pathetic. Switching to a Custom Organic Super Soil has tripled my yields. You must be doing something wrong.
There is no way to grow veggies or plants outdoors and not battle critters. Whether insects or Mammals, growing outdoors is a War Zone. Animals dont subscribe to morals or politics when it munches your Cabbage down. It doesnt care if you are trying to save it, the world, humanity. It just wants to eat and survive. If a Vegan went off the grid and try to grow their own and be completely self sustaining, they would be putting bullets in animals eating their food. Mites, Aphids, Hornworms, Aphid farming ants. The list goes on and they will destroy your food. An Ethical Vegan would last a week before they bought flame throwers.
As someone learning Organic sustainable farming, it is a long term and expensive investment in both time and money and you cannot just up and jump in and expect to do anything but starve until you harvest…. if you harvest. Survival is the goal here, not some lofty ideal on saving animals that dont give a crap about your survival.
If you have to buy your soil, you’re Doing It Wrong.
Organic farming has never been shown to be able to produce more than 80% (on average) that of synthetic farming, and even those studies used very dubious (arguably non-organic) practices to artificially inflate their productivity ratios. The infrastructure required to support a truly self-sufficient organic farm system world wide, and still provide a full, nutritional diet (of which, veganism is not part of)is mathematically impossible – we would have to reduce the population of the world by nearly half AND increase agricultural land to 100% of the world’s arable land mass.
Never mind the many old wive’s tales and pseudo science that permeates the organic community, such as the assumption that copper sulfate is safe and organic, when, in reality, it is 200 times more toxic than the most toxic synthetic fertilizer produced in the mid 1970s; today’s synthetic fertilizers, on the other hand, could be drunk straight out of the bottle in a pure, concentrated form without any negative effect on the human body.
Mao Tse-Tung was not a vegan. His personal physician lamented Mao’s taste for oily pork dishes from his native Szechuan province.
Mao was not a native of Sichuan. He was from Hunan. But you are correct to say that he was not a vegan.
And not even a vegetarian.
One thing everybody forgets to include in their calculations are the number of animals killed outright or by the secondary results of preparing the land for crops. We forget that croplands are not “natural”. Every square inch of crop land whether it’s in your back yard or on a factory farm was once a wild place replete with it’s own biodiversity. An organic farm in upstate New York displaces (read KILLS) just as many animals from across the phylogenetic spectrum as a chemo-intensive farm in Kansas. YOU CAN NOT EXIST WITHOUT KILLING ANIMALS AND PLANTS. I always look to the Indian story of Jain (founder of the Jainest religious sect. He refused to kill any living thing in order to survive so when he awoke to find some ants had crawled into his mouth as he lay sleeping he did nothing in order to protect them from harm. According to the story the entire colony moved into his body through his mouth and ate him from the inside out. My guess is he just STARVED TO DEATH and the simply ants took advantage of his stupidity.-
jd, consider yourself corrected. It’s not true. While he did eat mainly vegetables due to digestive problems, he did enjoy and eat meat. Even if he were a vegetarian, it would prove nothing one way or the other. I would bet money that many good people are vegetarian and many evil people eat meat. That doesn’t say anything about the morality of the diet. When you get to the crux of the matter, all must devour living things to survive. Life consumes life.
Hitler did not eat meat the last 15 years of his life, except when he felt forced to do so at State dinners.
And this is a germane point, since our leftist media, sympathetic to vegetarians (I read somewhere that about half the NY Times reporters and editors were vegetarians), are willing to shill for the concept, claiming that such people are morally superior, when they clearly are not.
“I read somewhere…” Gotta love that citation. *snicker*
…and he was also against smoking, drinking, and hunting.
Clearly, he was much more moral in his view than the guy who was the leader of folks on the other side of the channel at the time. The latter was known to smoke think cigars, enjoy whiskey, eat red meat, go hunting, etc.
“…and he was also against smoking, drinking, and hunting. ”
Damn. He must have been a real hoot to hang out with on weekends!
Yes but he was really good a twiddling his thumbs!
I don’t do any of those three things, either. What’s your point? Some of us are capable of leading full lives without getting bombed.
Don’t forget that he was a loving pet owner. Blondi (his dog) featured prominently in much of der Fuhrer’s leisure time. And when it came time to face the hereafter, he poisoned her so that he, Blondi, and Eva would pass out of the world together. I think Adolph had “animal rights” written all over him.
Actually, Hitler was not vegetarian. Some basic research, say a simple Google search, would provide mountains of evidence to show this.
Yeah, I’ll correct you, because you’re wrong. Hitler was not a vegetarian. Dione Lucas, author of “Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook,” was a witness to Hitler eating squab–apparently his favorite. She wrote a letter to the New York Times in 1991 when some other smug repeated the myth that Hitler was a vegetarian in the paper: “I do not mean to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab, but you might be interested to know that it was a great favorite with Mr. Hitler, who dined at the hotel [at which Lucas was a chef] often.” He loved sausages and meat pies. In “The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler,” biographer Robert Payne talks about how it came to be believed that Hitler was a vegetarian despite his meat-eating: “Hitler’s asceticism played an important part in the image he projected over Germany. According to the widely believed legend, he neither smoked nor drank, nor did he eat meat or have anything to do with women. Only the first was true. He drank beer and diluted wine frequently, had a special fondness for Bavarian sausages … His asceticism was fiction invented by Goebbels to emphasize his total dedication, his self-control, the distance that separated him from other men. By this outward show of asceticism, he could claim that he was dedicated to the service of his people.”
Of course, whether Hitler was a vegetarian or not is irrelevant to the ethicality of vegetarianism or veganism. Is meat eating unethical because Stalin ate meat, and Hitler ate meat? Well, no.
I’ll correct you. He was Austrian and not Bohemian. As someone of Bohemian ancestry and aware of the atrocities inflicted upon my Czech relatives I find the error very regrettable.
What is more important, whether or not he ate emat, is not only did Hitler glory in his belief in animal rights, but it was used as part of the Holocaust.
See Pearl Benisch, To Vanquish the Dragon, Pages 42-43.
And THAT’S a citation.
It seems that is debated, but it was the image the Nazis deliberately put forth of “Der Führer.”
Hitler did profess that he was a vegetarian. He still regularly ate bacon as well as other meat products. Surprise: Hitler lied about stuff!
Still, one would have to be pretty simple to put stock in the syllogism you are suggesting. Rather, I will clearly state a true syllogism: There are evil people; There are vegans; There is a point of intersection and that is all. So, yeah, point well made. I’m not about to list the evil omnivores out there.
You’ll have to settle for just one: Dick the-oedipal-compound-noun-in-adjective-functioning-gerund-form Cheney.
Vegans remind me of the eco-nuts who refuse to drive cars… until they need someone to help them move. All of a sudden all those stupid yuppies with their SUVs are indispensible.
So I’m confused, I guess I can’t tell whether I’m being mocked for being a vegan or not. I mean, farming practices aside, there is NO way to being completely ‘cruelty free’ since much of what we use in our everyday life has effected the environment around us. Pollution caused by carelessness? Kills animals. Many medications? Tested on animals. Driving down the street? Well, a lot of people do hit deer and moose here in Alaska.
I mean, I’m realistic. I don’t think animals should suffer, but I also don’t like meat very much. I’m vegan as a statement against industrial farming (factory farms), not hunting or traditional farming. I buy sustainably raised meat for my boyfriend.
I’m just curious how many people have actually met the stereotypical vegan, the people you see being a part of PETA.
You buy meat for your boyfriend. You aren’t vegan.
Because all “true” vegans make it their business to impose their beliefs on others? Frankly, I think vegans are a little bit on the cuckoo side, but I am capable of imagining one that can live side-by-side with a non-vegan and not make a complete pain of herself. Why do you find it so hard to believe?
In my personal experiences with vegans I have gotten the impression that they are mostly self-righteous, self-obsessed hypocrites. Veganism seems to be a fake morality that allows narcissists the ability to buy meaningless moral ‘credits’ that they can spend elsewhere in the form of lying, selfishness, or plain meanness. This seems to hold true in general for greenies of all stripes, and lefty liberals.
You’re on to something, there. Not too long ago there was a study that connected having “green” ethics with with being unethical in other ways. That is, the people who recycled or drove a hybrid DID actually feel like they had money in the moral bank that was then spent buying passes on other behavior like lying and cheating.
So the perception that the overly environmentally-conscious person is at minimum, a jerk or snob is probably quite true. What people may not realize is that the bad behavior isn’t superficial.
This explains why Gore feels he can get away with having a giant house and flying to all of his gigs. He really does believe that his actions for the benefit of Mother Nature buy him indulgences. Whereas the truly religious figured out the immorality of that kind of trade-off hundreds of years ago.
Do you really believe algor weighs his actions, good vs. bad, and is satisfied when the “beneficial” outweighs the “harmful”? Or is he just another hypocritical liberal looking to make a load of $$, no matter who is harmed? After watching him for years, I go for the hypocritical-liberal explanation, with a little corruptible, bribable, dishonest, dishonorable, untrustworthy, unscrupulous, unprincipled, mercenary, and greedy (thanks to my Thesaurus) thrown in to complete the psyche. Add a touch of idiocy and arrogance to add flavor, and you have algor (and a whole bunch of other liberals).
Mine is just the most charitable explanation I can come up with. Yours may be closer to the truth. But even psychopaths have justifications for what they do.
And to think I thought Gore was nothing but a snake oil salesman who doesn’t actually belive in the product he’s hyping, but sees it as a means to rake in the dough from sanctimonious true-believer types who are buying indulgences with the money they give him. (or by eating vegan, etc.)
“Not too long ago there was a study…” Gotta love this. Brilliant citation. Ethical genius.
So happens I read that same study. And no, Hee Haw, I can’t cite it for you. If you are interested, you can go google it yourself.
Citations aren’t really required in posts. People aren’t writing their master’s theses here.
Neither is chiding people for their lack of citations really required.
Are you a child?
It’s not that hard to Google for references:
“Psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong of the Toronto University recently reported a startling discovery in the journal Psychological Science: Those who purchased a “morally virtuous” product, like organic baby food, were less likely to be charitable and more likely to lie and steal than those who purchased conventional products.”
http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2010/04/moral-balancing
http://www.future2.org/2010/03/green-consumption-and-ethical-behavior-the-impact-of-moral-balancing.html
A couple weeks ago I visited a food co-op in a very liberal west coast town (I live in a famously liberal west coast city and occastionaly got co-ops and nautral food stores here); the stern and unfriendly looks on the faces there was downright unnerving! I was buying natural products, I was eating a vegetarian meal in their cafeteria, yet I felt the whole time as if I were on the receiving end of withering contempt. That study came to mind, and I had to wonder why it was so strongly manifested in this smaller town than it is in my home city? But even at home I find that the customers in natural food stores/ co-ops seem to be less friendly and courteous than in regular grocery stores.
That’s probably because it sucks working in a small health food store, and they aren’t forced to maintain friendly appearances like in a Supermarket.
That’s frustratingly common amongst lefties/progressives, who feel they can ‘offset’ their horrid behavior as long as they’re doing something ‘correct’ alongside it.
My former roommate was dating somebody who treated basically everyone he knew like absolute trash, insulting them, making threats towards them, etc.
But in his mind, it was all OK, because he used to do volunteer work back when he lived in Socialist Vermont. That made him a better person than all the people he’d threaten, because they DIDN’T do volunteer work. Never mind that THEY never made threats on people’s lives.
And no one showed him one of the alternate uses for a short piece of garden hose?
Around here, that type of behavior is tolerated once. Usually because we’re shocked someone is that ignorant and rude. The second infraction earns the idiot an attitude adjustment.
Nothing new here. That’s just ancient paganism, at least as old as the Egyptians. The “balance scale” idea, that, at the end of our life, our good deeds are weighed against our bad deeds, and if the good outweighs the bad, we go to heaven; if not, we go to hell.
The basic idea is woven into the psyche of most people and religions. In fact, I dare say almost all religions ultimately boil down to this basic idea.
AFAIK, Christianity is the only one that says otherwise. The message is, “You have already been measured against the standard of total perfection. Bad news – you failed the test. There is no make-up exam. Your only hope is mercy. Will you accept it? Or not?”
Vegans, for the most part, fall into two overlapping categories:
1) Self-righteous jerks who, under the surface, hate people, hate the way the world works, and deny or resent God;
2) Hypochondriacs who have no faith in anything other than the material, who desperately fear death, and who think they can live just about forever if they give up the things that make life enjoyable and that make them convivial companions to others.
The Bible is full of references to eating meat, fowl, and fish, as well as milk (for instance, “the land of milk and honey”). Jesus recruited apostles from among commercial fishermen. Nothing wrong with consuming animal products.
Way to adhere to that whole ‘Judge not lest ye be judged’ principle.
That is not all it says.
What you say is only a part of the total spoken by Christ.
The basic exegesis of the several verses which encompass “judge not” indicate that the idea is not to judge unless you yourself can stand up to the same judgment standards. IE if you judge someone as a “drunk and reprobate” your house had better be free of such vices.
If you judge someone as a destroyer of other human beings your hands better be clean.
And so on and so forth. There is NEVER an admonition to NOT JUDGE those who SHOULD be judged. It is “kinda like” the old; “if you don’t work, you don’t eat,” deal. IF you are breathing you better be able to “judge” the lives of other folks. You better be able to “discriminate” between right and wrong behavior and lifestyles!
“Judge not…” has nothing to do with evaluating nor with distinguishing between right and wrong, smart and foolish, etc. or whole sections of the Bible would never have existed. It does have to do with living up to the same standards to which one holds others, so if you don’t want others to judge your morality/ character by what you eat, don’t judge them by what they eat.
Hilarious that you believe in a magic zombie-man who comes back from the dead, lives in the clouds and walks on water but it’s VEGANS you find ridiculous.
And Douche bag Partisan Rightwingers…..
And Self-Righteous Christians…..
I read of a study some time ago – can’t remember where – that concluded that teens who did more volunteer work outside the home were less likely to help at home and displayed less socially acceptable behavior toward their families than those teens who did less outside volunteer work. Obviously I’m over-simplifying what I read quite a bit, but it seems to fall in the same bucket as your vegans who, having “done the right thing” in this one part of their life can afford to be less kind/charitable/helpful/etc in all other parts. Gotta love sanctimoniousness in all of its many forms…
So, you call vegans self righteous hypocrites? Have you even read the comments thread of this article?
Anyways, the author’s argument is a strawman. All you have to do is drive by one of the massive feed lots just outside of town to see that most cattle no longer graze, but are fed feed that is grown in fields that could be better used to feed humans.
Thank you so much. I needed someone to say that the article is full of lies.
dear vegan , make sure you get some vitamin B12 or you will go insane.
i know you won’t listen, so enjoy your breakdown and demise.
Dear bob: Enjoy your heart attack.
People who follow a vegan lifestyle – strict vegetarians who try to eat no meat or animal products of any kind – may increase their risk of developing blood clots and atherosclerosis or “hardening of the arteries,” which are conditions that can lead to heart attacks and stroke, according to a new study. Researchers come to the conclusion after a review of dozens of articles published on the biochemistry of vegetarianism during the past 30 years.
In the review, researcher Duo Li notes that meat eaters are known for having a significantly higher combination of cardiovascular risk factors than vegetarians.
Lower-risk vegans, however, may not be immune. Their diets tend to be lacking several key nutrients – including iron, zinc, vitamin B12, and omega-3 fatty acids, Li said.
While a balanced vegetarian diet can provide enough protein, this isn’t always the case when it comes to fat and fatty acids. As a result, vegans tend to have elevated blood levels of homocysteine and decreased levels of HDL, the “good” form of cholesterol. Both are risk factors for heart disease.
http://vegnews.org/modules.php?name=…rticle&sid=121 :
In an enormous undertaking, twelve researchers took all of the biggest and best studies to date on vegetarian mortality rates and pooled all the data together. They took a decade of mortality data from 28,000 vegetarians from Germany, California, and Britain. And found… no survival advantage for vegetarians. What about vegans though? Despite even having lower cholesterol levels than vegetarians, the vegans in the study didn’t live any longer either. Vegans had the same mortality rate as meateaters.
Vegans may increase heart disease risk
By Dr. Allan Spreen on 03/03/2011
Have you noticed how people always assume that vegan=super healthy?
Frankly, I’ve encountered many vegans who are just downright smug. They think they are healthier than everyone else is. But I disagree. I think veganism is a serious mistake. In fact, a new study found that eliminating meat from your diet could harm your health.
Here’s why…
Scientists recently analyzed dozens of vegan studies from the last 30 years. They found that men and women who follow a strict vegan diet (no meat, poultry, fish, or animal by-products) tend to have elevated homocysteine levels. And that’s not good. Too much of this amino acid in your blood greatly increases your risk for heart attack or stroke.
But that’s not all the scientists discovered…
They also found that vegans seem to run a greater risk of developing blood clots and atherosclerosis. They also tend to have lower HDL (or “good”) cholesterol.
I really don’t have anything against vegans. It’s just that I’m an omnivore. Specifically, I make sure to eat a few servings of organic chicken and wild-caught fish each week. I’m not even opposed to eating lean organic red meat (that’s been grass-fed) occasionally.
Simply put, we need the protein and the saturated fats. We also need vital nutrients like CLA, l- carnitine, iron, zinc, B12, vitamin A, and omega-3 fatty acids. But the only place most of us get these nutrients is through meat, fish, and fowl.
Plus, vegans tend to rely on lots of TVP (textured vegetable protein). This is fancy term for non- fermented soy, which is loaded with phyto-estrogens and phytate. These compounds block your absorption of nutrients and disrupt your hormones. Some scientists also link them with cancer.
In addition, if you look at the intestinal tracts of pure carnivores and pure herbivores, humans are somewhere in the middle. We were designed to eat some meat.
I don’t recommend you go out and treat yourself to a rack of greasy ribs every night. But you can — and should — enjoy salmon, chicken, and even flank steak on a weekly basis. You need the protein and the nutrients these foods deliver.
Doesn’t matter what diet you follow, you can still eat crap. Vegans that eat TVP and fake meat for every meal are ‘junk food vegans’. I will admit that I eat the occasional faux meat, though I don’t see how someone can subside on it alone. This diet, like every other, needs to have a large diversity of foods to be healthy. Also, it’s very hard to not get enough protein in a diet. The majority of foods have protein. Greens, beans, legumes…
People like you are why I have no faith in humanity. You do realize that a plethora of vegan foods are fortified with B12, right? Speaking of such, so are MANY foods, since most of the food we eat is fortified with something unless you follow a raw diet.
Enjoy your stupidity.
Unfortunately, those B12 fortifications don’t work for a large portion of the populace. They’re cyanocobalamin generated from algae, rather than natural cobalamin generated by bacteria endogenous to animals (which is how it’s created), and many people don’t correctly absorb this form.
Also, the digestion of cyanocobalamin leaves behind cynanide. So I hope you don’t ingest tons of synthetic B12-fortified foods.
It really irritates me, actually, that B12 is added to so many nut-derived milk products. I have a milk allergy so I drink almond and coconut milk products, but I eat plenty of animal products. Cyanocobalamin can often block the absorption of real B12.
Without ARTIFICIAL vitamin supplementation all vegans will eventually die of pernicious anemia, suffering a whole host of medical problems along the way. By definition veganism is therefore UNNATURAL. There is a reason humans have canine teeth and eyes on the front of our faces (instead of on the sides of our heads like herbivores). It is the same reason we lack multiple stomachs and don’t chew our cud. Humans are designed to be meat eaters.
Humans evolved to be omnivorous. We actually do best with a mix of meats and plant products.
Try eating a diet consisting only of meat. You’re going to get mineral deficiencies and scurvy caused by lack of Vitamin C and minerals found in fruits and vegetables.
Other species of mammals are able to manufacture their own vitamin C. Apes lost that ability and so we must get vitamin C from plant foods.
I’m sure the point being made was that we can’t survive properly without meat, not that we can survive exclusively on meat.
Actually, it is possible to live only on meat provided you eat organs too. Look it up.
Which is why the Eskimos all died out so long ago that we don’t even know about them.
Oh noes! I liked the Eskimos. They were so cute, clubbing the seals and all. Now that they’re gone, who’s going to build igloos??
Actually, they get vitamin C and other important vitamins from eating whale blubber.
You might want to talk to Todd Palin and his family about that. They seem to be all here.
Actually, Inuits don’t eat 100% meat. In the summer times, they gather grass, algae, berries, tubers, and other plant foods, which are necessary for their health.
Which also means that they didn’t die out so long ago that we don’t know about them. A short discussion of Canadian Inuits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CWuovlEJYE
Toward the end, you see that even today there are much greater things for such arctic peoples as the Inuit or Yupik to concern themselves with than dying from what they eat. Using blood pressure as an indicator, the traditional diet of fish, whale, and summer plants afforded them moderate health, better than average European health but worse than average Asian health:
http://sjp.sagepub.com/content/31/2/92.abstract
Health for Inuit populations has also worsened, not because of their traditional diet, but because of the influx of outside cultures and lifestyles, including modern processed foods.
http://sjp.sagepub.com/content/32/5/390.abstract
Oh, away with your inconvenient facts!
Really? You use your canines to kill and to rip meat from carcasses? How are your carnassial teeth? Do you use them to sheer meat from carcasses? Oh, hang on–you can’t open your mouth wide enough to actually kill and eat animals. That’s because your mouth is not evolved for that use, and your canines are pretty much flat little teeth of the same length as the teeth to either side of them. The name of the teeth does not describe their use in humans. Your eyes are in the same place that all primates, most of whom are almost entirely herbivores, have them. You can find reasons to believe you should eat meat, but your teeth and your eyes sure are not among them.
Actualy, eating meat and consequentally cooking the food, is a product of our growing intelligence. Higher brain function requires an enormous amount of energy to maintane. When our brains started to grow we had to sacrifice elsewhere in our bodies and the only expndible parts were in the digestive system. Hense the switch to higher energy meats that carry more energy per pound. Also our body chemistry changed to allow more energy to be delivered to our brains as opposed to our muscles. Our teeth evolved for cutting in flesh but our mouths never adapted to open wide to eat off the “carcass” because by that yime we were using tools and never had to. I cannot remember the name of the chemicle responsible for this but i do know.that chimp musculature is 7 time stronger per pound than a human counterparts. They never evolved away from it.
Biggest reason for eating meat:
Gang up on a deer with pointed sticks, the whole tribe eats for several days.
One animal feeds many people. Meat buys TIME for other in the group to work out things…like better tools, plans, and ideas.
Vs everybody wandering the land looking for their own roots and berries 24/7
Meat is the natural, logical, productive way of the “politic neutral” ascent of human kind…
Vegans will simply die in the wild. Their dietary requirements are too diverse to be supported naturally. You simply cannot “hunt up” enough wild soybeans, sea grass, papaya, brown rice and coconut milk from within “walking distance” of any one place.
Vegans and Veggies can only REALLY be (healthily) supported by an advanced technology society. One that has the excess leisure time to make highly concentrated “pretend foods” from soy and other crap no one would otherwise enjoy eating in its “natural state”, or accumulate foods from such a far and wide area the diet can never be “natural”.
Like Anorexia and Bulimia, rich white girls “diseases” that dont exist in places Somalia and Ethiopia, Vegans and Veggies are hip city folks with no clue how the world actually works
It’s a good thing that vegans live in the wild, huh? We’re still hunter/gatherers in this day and age..?
Seriously. Vegans will hunt if they need to; but in our society they don’t, so they won’t. Do you think hunting is a skill that takes regular carnivorism to maintain?
And people who think that B12 supplements are unnatural seem to forget their cereals: how many vitamins and minerals are they fortified with? How many drinks have added vitamins? Does your salt have added iodine? Does your milk have added vitamins and calcium? Does your bread have added folate?
Anybody with half a brain who’s studied the recent science of nutrition does not eat breakfast cereal.
B12 as a supplement is cyanocobalamin, which competes w/ real B12 for absorption (so forget about all that good B12 from the milk on the cereal) and leaves cyanide behind as it is processed.
Eating breakfast at all, really, is unadvantageous… but that’s completely off-topic here.
No, no, no. That’s not right.
The biggest reason for eating meat is BARBECUE!
In terms of caloric intake, meat was very minor in your hunter-gatherer ideal society. It was often fruitless and and would waste calories, but was essential for the development of douchebag culture.
The point is that humans are unquestionably designed to be omnivores and have been designed to be predators with digestive systems that favor meat and the binocular vision found in predators. We do not have multiple stomachs and we do not have to chew our cud in order to produce sufficient calories because we eat a high protein (ie. meat) diet. The indisputable fact remains that humans will all die slow and painful deaths, going insane along the way, without vitamin B12 which is only naturally derived from animal sources and is absolutely essential to human life. True Vegans must either cheat on their diet or ingest ARTIFICIAL laboratory created B12 or they will all suffer a horrible fate. Therefore Veganism is an UNNATURAL state for the human species and anyone who touts Veganism is by definition either very poorly informed or an idiotic. I learned this in medical school by the way.
A person, by definition, cannot be an idiotic. You should have learned that in grammar school, Doctor.
The “humans are designed to eat meat” is the most fecetious of them all. We’re designed to do a lot of things that I’ll bet you don’t do. We’re designed to get pregnant at about age 13 and then die at 50. We’re designed to be an agrarian, active people. I bet you sit at your desk all day and eat what other people have killed, no? Having a mercenary relationship – paying illegal immigrants to kill your food for you – is FAR, far from what we were ‘designed’ or ‘meant’ to do.
Agrarian? You must be joking. Humans have been around for much longer than agriculture. Much, much longer.
This is incorrect. B12 deficiency is rampant in most people including omnivores. You may think you get your B12 from animals because they naturally carry it in their bodies. False. Factory farm raised animals are given B12 supplements. As a meat eater, you get much of your B12 from the animals supplementation.
That’s an incredibly good argument for pasture-feeding. B12 is only needed for supplementation when cobalt is absent from the animals’ diets, which only happens when they are fed grains instead of grass.
http://www.ancare.com.au/data/usr/vitamin_b12_deficiency.pdf
Canine teeth do serve a function. Yes, i rip the flesh from the bone of the food i am eating: a chicken wing, a steak, a pork chop. Chewing on stuff.
Why our our mouths not big enough to choke a cow? Because we have brains, hands, tools, and ultimately weapons, and cooperation to hunt.
Our eyes are forward to perceive depth perception. Whether it be to chase a hunt, or to drive a car. Or read this page of silly comments.
Apes are also known to hunt and eat meat. Mor recent studies show that they can fashion weapons with which to hunt.
How did mankind survive 10,000 years ago?
“Your eyes are in the same place that all primates, most of whom are almost entirely herbivores, have them.”
Actually we’ve found that primates aren’t as herbivorous as formerly thought. It’s been found that almost all monkeys eat insects, grubs and bird eggs when given the opportunity. Chimps have been known to go on hunting expeditions. And they and Baboons are a positive threat to human babies. In Japan, monkeys that live near the sea shore have taken to eating clams and crabs which they dig up.
Tell that to the panda and the fruit bat, who both have very scary looking pointy teeth, and eat only veggies.
(HINT: The idea that tooth shape is indicative of diet is an old wive’s fable.)
That said, this column has gotten me hungry for a good steak!
“The parallel in human terms would be slavery, which no rational person thinks is ethically acceptable.”
I would rather compare it to abortion.
Many, if not most, of these types are also big biodiversity (PETA too?) believers that all species are equal and man is no better than a cockroach or a rat -then they, in total contradiction, demand that we humans act, unlike those other equal animals, properly by avoiding eating what tastes good, because of moral and ethical demands. Show me a hungry tiger with ethics and I’ll agree.
I suspect that they have just done as most who have confused morality -made themselves their own gods.
Also, I have a problem with their definition of “sentient species”.
Who defines sentience? Is a dog or cat sentient? How about a dolphin? Don’t forget, they spent literally decades trying- and failing- to prove that cetaceans were as smart as humans, starting with Dr. John Lilly (who, IMHO, should have done a bit less experimentation with LSD-25).
Are chimpanzees and gorillas sentient? Depends. The Yerkes Primate Institute taught a chimp to “talk” with a machine using switches to light up pictograms (it shows up in the crypto-science documentary “The Outer Space Connection”, 1974-75, narrated by Rod Serling), but I’ve always wondered if that was just imitative behavior. I’ve also wondered if the fact that they were operating on government grants specifically intended to fund a “search for animal intelligence”, might not have affected the “impartiality” of their work. (As with AGW, reseachers tend to “find” whatever pleases whoever pays their salaries.) In the wild, I’d say the jury is out until a higher simian actually builds a fire with no help from a human.
I’ve always felt one good rule would be that any species which can ask for equal rights should be granted them. But first, they have to be able to ask.
Which means right now I’m looking a bit suspiciously at the gut box of my computer as I type this. Is that giggling I hear?
cheers
eon
Another definition might be “the ability to reason.” Which would neatly drop ethical vegans from the ranks of the sentient.
Damn, you just dropped a majority of the human race.
Another definition might be the ability to learn from previous experience. Can a bear teach her cub something from her own experience so that the cub will grow up differently than its mother did? Turns out a bear’s life and understanding are the same now as ever; no modification of thought from one generation to the next.
Of coures the lunatic protesters camping out in the streets have learned nothing from their parents, or ANYONE in the past for that matter.
Seems my theory has fallen tot he ground.
I think you are mixing up Sentient with Sapient. Sentient just means conscious, or having consciousness. Sapience is being able to reason, or have wisdom, which makes most vegans merely sentient themselves.
Actually, sentience is defined by self awareness and not by the ability to speak of reason. Self awareness is detected through the classic mirror reaction experiment. So far only a few animals have passed namely elephants, chimps, dolphins and African gray parrots. Gorillas, Orangs, dogs and other carnivores didn’t make the grade.
Just for completeness: add Octopi to the list.
I’ve noticed that kittens will look in the mirror for a long time, but older cats won’t. I’m not sure that it is a lack of sentience, but cats identify others primarily by scent- the mirror has none, so it doesn’t register to them as anything alive.
“Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences”
In modern philosophy it is taken to mean consciousness. In modern science it is taken to mean feeling – as in, sensation (both from the Latin sentient-, sentiens, present participle of sentire to perceive, feel)
By and large, I agree, but I do have a little quibble: Tigers don’t have humans penned, waiting to be eaten. (The exception may be middle management in large corporations… I’ve heard stories of tigers eating one of them a day, and nobody noticed).
When I was a young boy my grandfather gave my brother and I a pair of pellet rifles. We immediately went to his yard and began plinking at squirrels and birds. When he saw what we were doing he scolded us and told us a story.
He grew up on a farm. One fall when he was a boy his father and two neighbors were preparing to slaughter hogs. While his father was building a fire and preparing a table and boiling water he and two of his brothers went to the hog pen and began shooting the hogs with slingshots for amusement. When his father noticed what they were up to he came up behind them and without warning began switching them. In his words ” Gawd he tore our asses up!”. My grandfather protested that tormenting the hogs did not matter as they were about to be killed. He said that what his father told him then made more of an impression on him than the switch.
“Boys, those animals are gonna give their lives so that you can keep yours. You WILL respect them!”.
Then my grandfather told us something else that sunk in. ” Life is hard enough for those critters without some kid shooting at them while they try to eat.”
In the years since I have heard and read other versions of that story, so I am not sure if it actually happened or if he was just passing down wisdom in the form of an old fable.
I once told that story to a vegan. The lesson in it completely escaped him.
Any good hunter knows that you kill your prey as quickly and humanely as possible with a minimum of pain, and that you always track down and dispatch wounded animals.
Like most right actions, it also makes cold-blooded sense — the hogs are almost certainly easier to slaughter when they have not first been tormented.
He should have said, “What did it matter that I whipped you? You’re going to die someday anyway.”
Good line.
That event supposedly occured in the 1890′s in a very rural part of Louisiana. My great grandfather had no education to speak of and spent the vast majority of his waking life working the farm. There was no time or desire for pondering the philosophies. It is a marvel to me at how much stock is put into formal education when history is rife with wise men who rarely or never sat in a classroom.
I generally don’t begrudge another person their delusions, so I don’t get too wound-up about vegans, unless they’re haranguing me to join their ranks. Only then do I enjoy popping their deluded ‘bubble-boy’ and ‘bubble-girl’ group-think. But, hey, I only attack when I’m cornered, I don’t make a sport of it.
But the important aspect of what vegans represent, at least for me, is a disturbing glimpse at a process I think of as the “wimpification” of the Western world. It’s a devolutionary process in which supposedly advanced people, raised with the best nutrition, security and standard of living known in history of our species seemingly turn their backs on it and consciously choose a lifestyle which regresses to a less advanced manner of living and thinking, ostensibly in the name of “progress”. You know who they are – they’re the vegans, as Mr. Clark has ably described them; they’re the extreme Climate Change adherents who would cut us off from the energy which drives our society without any viable alternatives; they’re the unwashed crowds expressing their thoughts with signs, hand twinkles and crowd echolalia. I’m sure you can think of other examples.
My own theory is that these folks, rather than representing that next step forward for Western man, represent devolution. The unwinding of the high intellectual pinnacle which Western man has mounted; a slow ceding of intellectual dominance. It’s almost as if they’re the personification of the thought “we can go no further – we must give up and turn back”.
Have you read “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells?
The de-evolution you describe results in the Eloi. Who end up as food for the cannibalistic Morlocks.
The question is, if humanity devolves into two such widely divergent subspecies, is a Morlock eating a nice haunch of Eloi really a cannibal? ;-/
cheers
eon
Martin Hale,
Thank you for- echolalia,- brilliant description for the not so bright being manipulated by deviants.
11111 , 11111, Two up twinkles for Martin Hale
Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Love it.
Martin, I’ve been an ethical vegetarian for more than eighteen years. While I wish everyone would become one, I have yet to harangue other people over their eating preferences. I figure I’ll just lead by example, and, when people see I’m not psychotic, they might just follow it.
It’s only when someone presses me on my reasons for being a vegetarian and wants to start an argument on it that I will throw down.
Ditto. I don’t even mention that I’m a vegan unless someone starts questioning my food choices. The only time I’ve ever opened up about why was when someone in to grocery store said “you know natural selection means you’re going to die out faster. Why don’t you just eat meat? It’s dead already”.
Otherwise, I keep to myself and ask that others do the same.
The killing of animals not only pertains to modern, high-production agriculture, but to subsistence farming where the damage from rodents and other animals can be even more serious leading to starvation of the farmer and his family in a bad year.
Or as recently happend in the high andes of south america, the farmer chooses between feeding his subsitence livestock or his children as there isn’t enough for both in a bad year. In some cases, it was the children that went hungry, because if the livestock were dead, in the following year, they’d all starve.
Hey, it’s symbolic! I wonder if they realize that all commercial foods have a tolerance for insect parts? They’re inhaling dust mites. They scratch bacteria and shed cells off of their skin. Anyway, in reality, if it comes down to it, they’ll eat each other as quickly as any “ethical” but starving creature.
There were reports a while back, of expatriate Indians developing deficiency diseases although they had been careful not to change their diet after leaving India. The reason was traced to the fact that Western purity standards for grain are higher than those of India. Back home, without realizing it, they ate enough insect body parts and rodent excreta to satisfy their trace nutritional requirements.
Thanks for the valuable information.
I had no idea.
I have a few smug vegan acquaintances who, given what you’ve provided, shouldn’t be so smug.
Thanks again.
Thanks for shedding light on the animal rights movement. I thought it started when all the hippies/celebs went to India in the 1960′s to study their religion. My old geography teacher in grade school had served there during WWII and he said millions were starving to death, but would not touch an animal because of their belief in reincarnation.
I respect everyone’s right to live as they see fit, as long as they don’t use their powers to restrict my rights. These people crossed that line years ago. One unintended consequence of their persuading Congress to outlaw horse slaughter, despite ranchers telling them it was a method of animal control, is overpopulation. Now, several years later, horses and donkeys are overwhelming SPCA shelters and the govt is traveling the auction route, begging people to adopt the wild burros and horses from public lands.
Very enjoyable article. Thank you. I’ll probably be smiling all morning over this. Or laughing.
Ward Clarke ,
I like your uncomfortable description ‘blood trail leading from farm to plate’, quite apt.
The thing about vegetarians/vegans that’s always puzzled me is stuff like meatless hamburgers, “vegan soy dogs,” etc. If eating meat’s that unethical, why try to mimic the experience? Seems roughly equivalent to an ex-cannibal who still likes to mould his ground beef into the shape of a human arm.
I know! The list of meat-like products is endless and laughable, from soy dogs to lentil loaf. Why don’t they shape their little soy bits into replicas of corn ears or plump eggplants? Clearly a case of meat envy.
Made me think of a friend, who at the height of her veg-frenzy spent days creating a vegan turkey-look-alike for Thanksgiving. It was perhaps the most spectacular of her many disastrous vegan meat-envy meals.
It’s so ironic. Vegans eat those fake-meat products (Morningstar Farms TVP burgers and whatnot), which are nothing but processed crap food, while claiming that their diet is healthier and therefore superior to that of meat-eaters.
I have a vegan acquaintance who rales against Christians who proselytize, yet can’t wait to hammer other people with his own food ethics. Thanks to whoever it was that described it as jihadist. Totally apt.
I actually love that stuff. I much prefer soy burgers to hamburgers. There’s something great about not biting into blobs of grease, or hitting a piece of gristle or bone. And, yes, I do feel less guilty eating vegetarian dishes than meat, false as that feeling might be.
But, I also realize that until we have Star Trek food replicators, there is no way to live without killing something. Pet food is made from slaughtered animals, and carnivorous pets put on vegan diets (yes, they have them) by well-meaning humans commonly suffer from awful deficiencies and diseases, and shortened lifespans.
I do think we need much stricter laws concerning the care and slaughter of animals. The fact that you’re going to eat them doesn’t mean you have make their lives miserable.
Defining sentient? It means having consciousness and sensations. All living creatures with nervous systems are sentient. I try never to harm anything needlessly, but I do put stuff on my pets to keep them flea-free, and I do have the yard sprayed to keep away fleas and fire ants. The alternative would be worse.
Veganism in the West is a luxury, especially for those buying only organic food products. Most people in the world can’t afford to live this way. Living strictly green is phenomenally expensive, unless one nests in a hovel, covered in bed bugs.
Generally sentient means self aware. Animals aren’t self aware therefore they aren’t sentient.
You are wrong, kindofthepeople. Of course animals are self aware. Your statement is a myth passed down primarily by religious people intent on proving that animals are somehow unimportant compared to humans.
I once read a book by a fundamentalist Christian that argued that animals don’t feel pain, but simply appear to through reflex actions. This was to prove that the god of the Old Testament wasn’t cruel for demanding animal sacrifices or for permitting the killing of animals. It was a stupid argument.
Many pro-abortionists assert that human embryos, fetuses, and preemies are not self-aware and/or cannot feel pain. They tell themselves or they couldn’t live with themselves.
Ask an animal behaviorist or just an everyday veterinarian if animals are or are not self-aware.
I saw Natalie Portman go through this business and I say that the whole thing is just ego and desire to control others, I now have no respect for her she just wants to boss others and feel superior.
We all live at the expense of other creatures, but you do not see Vegans wear masks and filter water like the Jains to stop the endless murder of microscopic organisms.
DB, your comment sparked me to wonder if Ms. Portman was conflicted at the idea of doing the ‘natural’ thing and breastfeeding that baby she whelped recently. If you really believe that all animal products are unethical then by rights that should include mother’s milk. But mother’s milk is THE natural food for infant mammals. Quite the quandary for the “ethical vegan”, eh?
This subject came up on another forum. Vegans often have to bottle feed because they CAN’T breastfeed, as in, a woman’s body has lost the ability to make milk. You’d think that would be a clue for them . . . .
Actually this is not true. I have a friend, who as part of her degree, studied breastmilk and the effects that different foods have on breastmilk. And it has been proven that veggies and vegans have one of the best and healthiest types of breast milk. Far above those of meat eaters.
BS.
I’d just like to add that this is not ‘BS’. Whilst I don’t have the knowledge of this personally, my friend is a scientist and compiled an abundance of research on the subject. I am more inclined to believe the word of a scientist than the word of a person gaining their knowledge purely from reading forums.
This is patently false. Do some research
http://theweek.com/article/index/213729/vegan-breastfeeding-a-deadly-crime
Martin, staying within one’s species for milk does not constitute using “animal products.” Human milk IS for humans, just as cow’s milk is for cows.
“Boils down to ego and desire to control others…”
That’s it, in a nutshell. The lazy man’s virtue aspect, by the standards of that great moral religious movement that is environmentalism, is just icing. Peel everything back and it’s all about self.
South Park nailed the smug mindset fairly well with the season 10 episode Smug Alert when Randy begins driving a “Pious”. Easy enough to find a few clips on Youtube or the full episode at the Southparkstudios website.
I loved it when the auto insurance companies realized from their states just how much those “pious” drivers were costing them and unilaterally raised their rates.
There’s nothing ‘ethical’ about separating yourself from nature nor from basic human traits.
And being vertebrate-centrist is really a form of bigotry.
Vegans and vegetarians always look like bitter and angry people. In their bitterness and anger, they feel compelled to try and convert everybody around them to become vegans or vegetarians. I feel like throwing them a steak or two. If the tried it, maybe they’d be a lot happier. And I don’t even want to think about how many smiles I would get if they tried some of my pork chops. Mmmmmm, pork chops from the grill. That can’t fail to bring a smile to people. It’s a pork think with me.
Meat. It’s what’s for dinner.
AH….I need to deviate from my normal mode of writing, as this article mentions a certain professor of law (Gary Francione) at a certain law school that I happen to be particularly familiar with. This professor is an extreme animal rights activist. For years he has run the Rutgers Animal Rights Clinic (it may go by a different name nowadays). If Professor Francione is the example of what veganism is and what it means, then believe me, veganism is a pagan religion based upon a self-defined moralism that would make the rest of use lurch in our pants. I witnessed him verbally berate a student in a very public and border-line violent way for just questioning his position. His acolytes refer to him as a “genius”, as has a popular Rutger’s alumni magazine (run by border-line Maosists). The Clinic is so nutty that every year (maybe still) it sought an injunction against the deer hunting season in NJ. One year they were successful (at least for a while). I never saw so many diseased, sick deer roaming the suburbs as I did that year. When some of the Clinic chronies were exposed to that fact, the typical response ranged from “you’re lying” (from the typical city dweller), to “we need to go through this process to restore balance” BS. These are all very sick people. Their “vegan” ideology is simply a small, incoherent branch of Marxism, which Whittaker Chambers himself called a religion that crushes the soul and hates humanity. Disregard these people, but do it nicely, as they may come around in the future. Oh, one more thing: I hate Tyson Farms!
Thanks for that deviation: another 200 posts pretending to be the guy you hate can be easily done in the future by merely linking to a YouTube video of a cricket rubbing its legs.
Dear Jane: did you seek my post out? You do that, don’t you? You scroll through all the comments to see what “LovelyEarth” posts, don’t you? Flattering. Heres the catch….the last post was a farce. I’m a vegan. Got you Jane. Again….
Look up these words in the dictionary: ‘new,’ ‘repetition,’ and ‘creative.’
At the county fair this year, I observed a family of Vegans. I knew this because the woman (I don’t know if she was actually married) was wearing a T shirt with the word Vegetarian and the middle letters crossed out so that it read “Vegan: Animals don’t want your excuses.”
The man, presumably the father, went to the cafeteria to purchase some food for the family (including an infant). The couple obsessed over whether there was butter on the string beans. Meanwhile I sat quietly a couple seats down on the long table, eating my fried chicken.
When they left, my wife having noticed the same thing, turned to me and asked “Of all the places they could visit, why would they take their kids HERE? To see dairy cattle whose milk they can’t drink? To see pigs being raised for slaughter? To see Sheep raised for wool they can’t use?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, “but I think they feel a need to be morally smug around a bunch of us ‘unwashed hicks’.”
It’s too bad most people do not know where their food comes from, how it gets to the supermarket, or what all those mysterious ingredients listed on the side of the box are. There is a tremendous amount of urban legend about this sort of thing. Witness the Alar scare with apples.
Vegans are ignorant. But they’re not alone. They’re detached from reality in the same way that Green Energy people are detached from the sheer scale and efficiency of energy delivery, that environmentalists are detached from what ordinary water supplies often contain (arsenic, radium, and even uranium are occasionally found naturally in water supplies).
The battle for people’s minds is a battle of myth versus reality. Those who believe will not listen to facts. Those who deliver the facts are often dismissed as evil industrialists, dirty farmers, or some other form of outcast.
We have an image problem that the left has created for us. If we are to ever have an open, honest, discussion, we will have to overcome this image.
I have observed that the whole point of being an “ethical vegetarian” is to harass your co-workers at lunch, and your family on the holidays.
I can tell you from my experience as a vegetarian that meat-eaters tend to harass vegetarians, not the other way around.
I remember having both pro-life and vegetarian bumper stickers on my car. It would confuse people who like to pigeon-hole people (as most of you seem to want to do).
Seems most of you are stereotyping vegetarians and vegans in the same way that the left stereotypes Tea Partiers. (Hitler references? Really?) I’ve been an ethical vegetarian for many years; I also voted for GWB twice and I think Al Gore is a smacked tail.
An article about veganism and its moral justification cannot be credible if it doesn’t even mention factory farming. The author repetitively refers to numbers of animals and insects killed as the inevitable result of crop farming as his key argument. However, the moral arguments against factory farming are compelling, and they are not just quantitative, and there’s a big difference between inadvertent, unavoidable deaths and purposeful torture followed by deliberate killing. Factory farming has arisen since the mid-20th century with efficiency leading to extremely inhumane conditions. Chickens, hogs, and cattle are warehoused in pens where they cannot even turn around. Many people are becoming more vegetarian and vegan because of recent books and films such as “Fast Food Nation” and “Forks Over Knives”. The health reasons alone are compelling, as the latter film shows.
As a conservative, I’m ashamed to see the biased tone of the article and the pile-on yahoo nature of the comments. If you want to really explore the moral justification of vegans, read a book by a fellow conservative: “Dominion” by Matthew Sculley, formerly with the Bush administration.
You have a point: one can marshal serious arguments against many elements of modern meat production. But if those arguments aren’t taken seriously, it’s because of the average vegetarian/vegan. If I were you, I’d be madder at them than at any of the self-amusing posters here.
It’s kind of like OWS: there are actual, cogent points one could make against large U.S. corporations, which cannot now get taken seriously because of the crowd that now opposes them, and the fatuous arguments they’ve chosen (when they’ve chosen any). The worst enemy is bad allies in large numbers.
Now, who in the world could you be? Who claims to be a conservative yet without fail advocates kooky left-wing positions? Who adopts a name that they think will add credibility to vacuous arguments? Whose arguments consist mainly of pointing to ‘authorities’ yet are bereft of facts and solid reasoning? Gosh, such a puzzler. It would probably take a physicist to figure it out.
I dont need to read a book on this subject. I was raised on a farm. I have worked on farms. I have worked in mining, oil, manufacturing and construction. I know everything about the things we eat from birth to bbq, from seed to salad. The things you own and use, I know every step on their journey from mine and forest to your clammy hands.
Here is a tip. The vast majority of the cost of everything you buy is the cost of the energy it took to produce it. Dollars are the measure of how much impact production has on the ‘environment’, not green labels. ‘Green’ and ‘Organic’ products cost more dollars because they cost more environmentally. If you really want to minimize your effect on ‘the planet’, be frugal and buy the cheapest stuff. My bet is that you do neither of those things.
Way to smoke ‘em out LaSuthenboy. He can change his name, he can put on any camo he wants, he can paint his face or even hide behind a ground blind. But without an effective scent blocker he’s just another stinky troll who will never blend in here among the faithful.
Opting out of the cruel factory farming system should not be regarded as left-wing or right-wing. If you mede the effort to Google “Sowell Disciple” you would see a history of posts – solid conservative.
Your family farm upbringing deserves respect. You did not grow up on a modern factory farm.
On your last point, my post had nothing to do with “green” – only cruelty to animals.
Factory farming is not cruel, as the product produced is not human.
Leave anthropomorphism to the children’s books, where it belongs, and GROW THE HELL UP.
So it’s not possible to be cruel to animals? To suggest otherwise is anthropomorphizing? You are living in your own, small world, and not even aware of the irony when you then use all caps to tell me to grow up just because I don’t subscribe to your uniquely pathetic view of the world.
“Now, who in the world could you be? Who claims to be a conservative yet without fail advocates kooky left-wing positions?”
It’s a bit daft to believe that all people are either conservative on every issue in the world or liberal on every issue in the world. Real people have their own combination of views across the spectrum, unique as their DNA.
I agree that if most people knew how their meat was produced by factory farming, they would give it a second thought.
What is the solution? Free markets. If you are willing to pay a bit more, you can buy free range chickens. Eating healthy animals is obviously better for you than eating the factory farm chickens which must be harvested before a certain age. Beyond that age, they die en masse, so their harvest time is critical. There truly must be a better, more humane way.
In the First World, people are now wealthy enough to eat meat regularly since Paleolithic times. Your attempt to guilt them into eating bran and cabbages to gratify your elitism will fail as miserably as you have in other respects.
Anyone who uses the word “torture” with respect to factory farming has no idea what the definition of the word is (or does not care). If you don’t think the animals are being treated humanely, or you want to use the word cruelty, that is one thing, but using the word torture is absurd as people who disagreed with us going to war with Iraq calling Bush a “war criminal”. The sloppy rhetoric and ridiculous analogies used by true believers of all types never fails to disgust me. For a discussion of at least some of the issues raised by Scully can be found here:
http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Correction-Not-Animal-Rights.-Human-Duties
I see no mention of veganism, or ethical veganism, which is what Mr. Clark is writing about. Legitimate ethical concerns about the treatment of animals in factory farms do not lead to the extremist position of consuming no animal products.
Greg managed to put it far better than I did. Under it all, there’s a reasonable discussion to be had on this issue–one that vegetarians’ thumbless polemics have ensured won’t be had.
You’re right – I should have used “cruelty” rather than “torture”.
I agree. This article makes some good points when comparing wild venison raised on land unsuitable for farming to corn. However, I find it odd that he then points out that vegans have another step to do when avoiding animal harm, when I don’t know any meat-eater who only eats wild venison or any kind of meat only grown on land unsuitable for farming with no farmed crops fed to them. They all eat meat raised on factory farms fed the corn and soy he’s saying kills so many animals.
So, the vegans, then, still have it right. By skipping the inefficient process of turning corn and soy into dairy or meat, they are avoiding animal harm.
There’s a major difference you left out – the meat eaters aren’t making any moral claims as to whether eating meat is right or wrong. Vegans are.
Grow up, child.
Enjoy that lettuce, Ethical Vegan! It gave its life so you could act morally superior to those of us who actually eat a balanced diet of meat, cheese, eggs, and vegetables. With full natural fat, too!
I love love love this article. I don’t like being judged for my food choices and this article is exactly what I’ve been saying for years. I appreciate the holier than thou attitude that gets thrown in my face for ordering whole milk in a latte at Starbucks.
My favorite Vegan: I worked with a woman who is a proud and loud vegan. I once asked her about the leather seats in her beautiful BMW…..she called me names and stormed into the bosses office to complain about a hostile work environment.
So the truth is that it is not what goes in the mouth that (ethically) defiles a man but that which comes out of the mouth that defiles. I think you’ll find a greater majority of the behavior and pc police hate people and this hatred defiles them. Their declaration that it is a sin to kill or hurt an animal is a lie and contradiction to the command of God, who gave all these things for food giving mankind dominion over all of these things.
Matthew Scully – Dominion
From a conservative (he was a speechwriter for George Bush) and christian (Catholic) perspective, he shows you just how very wrong you are.
I agree, the entire premise trivializes morality and ethics. Consider if you will the parallel nonsense of religion. In the case of the Jews, one is born, and in some cases mutilated into the chosen tribe of God. In the case of Islam, the minions of a brutal warlord are the chosen ones of God. In the case of Christianity, the minions worship a monster that will burn most souls in eternity and instead of standing up the such a viscous creature they actually celebrate that it won’t be them.
No attempt at morality nor ethics, just be a member of the right group…or the left group… :: ))
Morality and ethics are just opinion disguised as superiority. My parents and theirs before them believed in the “nonsense of religion”. Out of respect for their beliefs, I try not to belittle the religious beliefs of others. Enough to say you are an atheist or agnostic. Those who do, invariably amuse me by spouting science as their justification for doing so. After all, what can be more ridiculous than the “scientific” Big Bang Theory that out of nothing came the universe, which is almost as religious as religion itself. Thomas Jefferson once said, “What care I whether my neighbor believes in ten gods or none?”. Your attempt at exhibiting superiority through religion-bashing is not impressive, to me at least.
Well said.
The Big Bang is a fact. It is also a fact that we do not know how deep the layers of creation go.
What creates universes? What creates the things that create universes?
None of theses facts and questions are religious.
When a scientific theory promises you Heaven or threatens you with Hell, then it will be religious.
“The Big Bang is a fact.”
I’m not disputing whether it’s fact. If so, why is it called The Big Bang THEORY”? And I would not belittle you for believing in it. All I wanted to do was point out the contradictions, the supposition that out of nothing came the universe. When a scientist can logically explain how something is created out of nothing, I will listen.
I’ll rephrase. It is a fact that the Universe is expanding. The Big Bang Theory explains this fact.
How does something come from nothing? Who’s says it did? The Universe came from something that is not the Universe.
Within this Universe something can’t come from nothing, most likely. But, who says that’s always so?
Quantum Entanglement is a pretty strange thing, at least as whacky as something coming from nothing, and it is real.
How is it you can believe in the supernatural but then be so skeptical of odd natural phenomena?
I don’t believe in the “supernaturaL”. Apparently, you have misunderstood me. I drift between atheist and agnostic, But I don’t disrespect my parents, ancestors or their beliefs, just as a matter of respect. My parents believed in God, so I’m supposed to call them idiots? Convince me that the Bing Bang is fact and not a theory, then we can debate. Bing Bang is still a THEORY, or don’t you know, no matter what you say. There have been too many “inventions” of “dark matter”, “dark energy”, “dark gravity” etc. to make the math add up to make me a believer. On the other hand, I can’t say it’s not true. Apparently, you are convinced.
My mistake regarding the supernatural.
As for the big bang – the expansion of the Universe, the cosmic background radiation, the abundances of elements, etc. are all explained well by the Big bang Theory. That’s what theories do and are. They explain. They are not hypotheses, not mere educated guesses.
Dark matter is not just some crazy notion scientists dreamed up some drunken night. It is a proposed explanation for gravitation effects that can not be accounted for by baryonic (normal) matter. Also, the Big Bang Theory needs to explain dark matter not the other way around. Dark energy is proposed as an explanation for another observation. Namely, the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. Something is speeding it up. It’s not exactly crazy to say it’s some newly discovered form of energy. Aren’t we allowed to discover something new?
Do you want a full and step-by-step explanation for the expansion and composition of the Universe before you will accept or even entertain a theory that explains an enormous amount of data? We don’t have that yet.
The Big Bang Theory should not be used to deny the Bible, but rather to explain it. The Bible says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.” Very simple, but also very little detail. So the question then arises, “What would it have looked like if you could have observed God creating the Universe?” That is the question the Big Bang Theory is proposed to answer.
We know God created all things, visible and invisible, and that which is visible is made out of that which is invisible. We can’t see subatomic particles, but we can measure them and their effects by other means. Antimatter has been mocked by the ignorant as the imagination of delusional scientists professing themselves to be wise, but antimatter is quite real, though difficult to produce. It has been observed and measured, so its existence is not speculative. What is speculative is the idea that there exist stars and galaxies made of antimatter- this we can never know because they would, from a distance, be indistinguishable from stars made of ordinary matter, as they would be subject to the same gravitational, electric and strong force interactions.
@myth buster
You state “we know god created all things”. We know nothing of the sort. Many claim this, but lack any proof whatsoever. (Occam’s Razor, etc).
What the Scientific Method enables honest, ethical researchers to state is the facts that are known and the degree of certainty of those facts, and then to develop theories based on these facts, openly admitting the “weak spots” in such theories.
If you feel better saying Science merely explains how god did what he did – that’s fine for you. The rest of us would aren’t afraid to say “I don’t know” when it comes to what can’t yet be explained.
Saying “I don’t now” is the first step in intellectual honesty.
Stand up to God? You puny human, what do intend to accomplish by your pathetic resistance? It is self-evident that destroying things is easier than creating them. Can you destroy the Moon? A tiny, lifeless fragment of Creation it is, but you couldn’t destroy it with all of the firepower in the world. Yet you think you can stand up to the God who made not only the Moon, but the entire Universe as well? Go ahead and try! You’ll just be another corpse for the buzzards at Armageddon!
You’re pathetic. Your pride, the pride you share with the bulk of humanity, is the reason why most humans are destined for Gehenna. You have delusions of grandeur, and you let them cloud your own reason, so you can’t see that your sins are already eating away at you, and chief among them is your pride. Go join your father, you son of the Devil! It is he who first said, “I will be like the Most High.” Lucifer could put up a much better fight than you, but God just thinks he’s pathetic- a rebel who can’t swallow his pride and plots the destruction of the world out of spite.
You hurl blasphemes at God, but you can’t see that the only thing you’re doing is destroying yourself. Slowly, but surely, you plot your own death and damnation. You hate God for judging rebels, but you’re the one declaring war on Him. Why do you pick a fight you can’t win?
Heh, I don’t know that we couldn’t destroy the moon, but I know we’re doing a fabulous job of destroying the earth
.
I photographed a young Scottish yoga teacher as a model who was a vegan. She had open sores on her legs, feets, hands. Thankfully I have Photoshop.
Symbolic actions which do little actual good? Hmmm…sounds like liberalism.
” Pheasants and rabbits are routinely killed in planting and harvesting, and rodents are killed by the thousands using traps and pesticides…The ethical vegan, when confronted with these undeniable facts, collapses. Their reaction, in almost every case, is to do a rhetorical lateral arabesque into a new claim, that their vegan diet somehow causes “less death and suffering” than a non-vegan diet, a ridiculous and unsupportable argument.”
My neighbor has the solution to these moral issues on his bumper sticker:
“Vegans taste better!”
That way both meat eaters and vegans can be 100% confident they aren’t killing animals.
I once had a run in with a vegan who happened to be part of a walking club I belonged to nearly 40 years ago.
She was evangelising everyone with her new found veggie righteousness. She tried various guilt issues with me, including this one.
“How would you like to work in a slaughterhouse then?”
“Not particularly” was my puzzled reply.
“Well, what right have you to expect others to do your bloodthirsty killing for you then?”
Mmm, I thought, and then responded with. “Would you like to work in a sewage processing plant?”
“Don’t be stupid, of course not”.
She stormed off when I told her that if she didn’t like the idea of working in a sewage plan she had better stop going to the toilet.
I have found that most self righteous people never try to join the dots to the logical connections or conclusions of their arguments.
Seems like she had a bone to pick with you.
Seems most of you are stereotyping vegetarians and vegans in the same way that the left stereotypes Tea Partiers. (Hitler references? Really?) I’ve been an ethical vegetarian for many years; I also voted for GWB twice and I think Al Gore is a smacked tail.
“She stormed off when I told her that if she didn’t like the idea of working in a sewage plan she had better stop going to the toilet.”
I know you think you have a cute little retort here, except for the fact that a good number of people become vegetarians after visiting (or viewing footage of) a slaughterhouse, whereas people don’t stop taking dumps after seeing a sewage treatment center.
Because they’re squeamish little hypocrites.
So you don’t use toilets, Rob? Because that was my point. People don’t stop using toilets even if they were to see sewage treatment, but many do stop eating meat upon seeing a slaughterhouse because that’s something they can easily do without.
Now try to pay attention, son.
I once worked at a slaughterhouse. I found it was quite humane and I learned a little on how to get a better cut of meat.
Fourteen years ago, when some previous neighbors slaughtered one of their cows, they gave us some meat from the previous slaughtered cow. It remains the best beef I’ve ever eaten.
Nice story, but sadly I’m the argument to it. I’m a vegan because I couldn’t kill animals for myself and refuse to have a mercenary relationship to do it. However I spend four hours every Sunday at a sewer treatment plant – it’s run by volunteers in our township, and I won’t let someone else do the dirty work if I’m not willing to.
If you don’t believe me, look at some information for Elmhurst Twp, PA.
****An ethical principle is usually a pretty simple thing. If the willful murder of another human is wrong, then it is wrong in every circumstance.****
There’s a difference between “killing” and “murder”. I wish all were aware of that.
Thanks to all who posted here for the insightful, witty and funny comments. It’s the best read I’ve had in a couple weeks.
Vegans are merely predators whose chosen prey can’t run away…
…or feel pain
I suspect most actresses who are vegans do it so they can refuse most foods on the catering trucks and the lavish spreads in the VIP rooms and fancy parties, and thereby remain thin (as required)
Certainly preferable to hiding anorexia or bulemia.
The fact that vegetarian food is undeniably and consistently of higher quality and nutrition than omnivore food is definitely a benefit of being vegetarian.
I only eat vegetarian animals.
I always wondered what happens when vegans get ticked off at people. Do they have beef with them, or a tofu replacement?
I’ve also found that most vegans haven’t seen the film, “Food Inc.” That film discusses not only the inappropriateness of feeding grain to cattle (who are naturally ruminants, not grain eaters), but also the degree to which chemicals and pesticides are present in our vegetables, particularly in GMO crops, and how our government is enabling corporations like Monsanto to poison our food and drive organic farmers out of business. The meat from a grass-fed cow is literally different from the meat from a grain-fed cow, and I don’t just mean in taste – different in its composition and its benefits and effects on the human body. Vegans always refuse to acknowledge that, stating that it’s immaterial, b/c they don’t want to eat “anything with a face.” Yet they are uniformly unconcerned about GMO vegetables and the pesticides and herbicides that are in them – chemicals that not only enter our bodies and cause cancer, but also sterilize the soil, ensuring that future crops require ever more fertilizer in order to grow. I suspect Warren Buffet knows this, given that he is now trying to invest in farm land. The day is coming when there will be no land suitable for growing food – and that’s a far more frightening thing than eating a nice steak for dinner.
Geez the omnivores are certainly defensive & vicious in their responses to this article and it isn’t from sympathy to anything that was harmed. Like it’s their business what other people eat. Perhaps they want to look at how environmentally harmful their diet is to themselves & to others. The more you look for the truth outside yourself, the further away it gets.
Or perhaps vegans and vegetarians can admit the harm that their diets do to themselves and their children, and how utterly immoral their planned use of political power to outlaw the production and consumption of animal products — not only meat, but dairy, leather, and wool — is.
But no, that would require intelligence, education, and self-respect on their parts. All they have is the smugness that comes from eschewing meat.
In the northern latitudes, like Siberia, there is no human life without fur.
Every kindergarten child, poor or rich, has fur-lined boots, because there is no reasonable substitute for protection from the elements in such a harsh environment. Synthetic materials become brittle and simply tear apart at -40 degrees C. The notion that they should not use fur is laughable to people who are firmly in touch with reality.
This is simply nonsense. Fabrics are one of the few things that doesn’t seem to break down at low temperatures, but many synthetics do just fine. I’ve worn polar fleece (polyester) and nomex fleece (nylon) at -50C, and it did just fine.
Of course, those weren’t an option in the past, and I’ve got nothing against using fur or leather (and merino wool or silk make good base layers), but it’s just not accurate to say that modern synthetics won’t perform at low temperatures.
I am aware of the high-tech clothing (perhaps you are Canadian?), and I was alluding to that when I said “reasonable” substitute. Most people living in Siberia can’t afford the high-tech clothing. Ordinary synthetic fabrics, not made for low temperatures, do become brittle and can’t be used.
I guess the larger point here is that when you’ve got a generation who have had it so easy all their lives, and have never really experienced sustained hunger, infectious diseases that used to claim so many lives, and never grappled with the elements and animal predators, they may very well devolve into a fantasy state of mind that is detached from reality.
No, Calos. If you read carefully, the objection is to the self-righteousness of the vegans and their insistence that they are helping the planet and that we are not. In reality, of course, “helping the planet”, or “not being cruel to animals”, = satisfying Gaea; all vegans are ultimately Gaea worshipers.
Most people here have no objection to somebody being a vegan themselves, so long as they do not expect me to pay for the medical consequences of their poor diet, and do not disrupt hunting season. However, many vegans are “true believers” and insist that not only will we go to hell for being cruel to cows, but that we are destroying Gaea in the process and thus need to be stopped at any costs – e.g. the terrorist tactics used by ELF and PETA.
Heaven forbid someone disrupt your hunting season! How dare they ask you to stop hurting innocent animals when your sadistic impulses get off on it. Why, before you know it, they’ll be telling you that you can’t marry someone of your own gender, even though it doesn’t hurt anyone, because some grumpy old bloodthirsty foreskin-obsessed god forbids it! Oh, wait . . . .
Bigot, much?
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
Theodore Roosevelt
26th president of US (1858 – 1919)
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
Theodore Roosevelt
26th president of US (1858 – 1919)
You have a back yard and means for planting your own harvest. there’s what you have. there’s what you can do. there’s where you are.
I also have cash that I can exchange for cheeseburgers. Booyah.
“The ethical vegan, when confronted with these undeniable facts, collapses. Their reaction, in almost every case, is to do a rhetorical lateral arabesque into a new claim, that their vegan diet somehow causes “less death and suffering” than a non-vegan diet, a ridiculous and unsupportable argument.”
At first, I was going to argue against the point that a vegan’s claim was ridiculous and unsupportable, but after a momment, I realized the flaw in my argument. If a vegan ate only the same quantity of vegtables as a non-vegan, they could claim to have les of an impact due to the fact that butchering an animal to bacon to your salad would result in one more death than the vegan’s diet. But the flaw in this argument is that the vegan eats more vegtables than we omnivores. Eating more vegtables means more harvesting of vegtables, which means more animal death caused by harvesting machines…
This, of course, only leads to one conclusion… vegetarians and vegans diets result in MORE animal death than the rest of us…
Some say there is a difference between death and murder, and this is true. However, any action taken which one is aware that death will be caused as a result is usually called murder, and mechanical harvesting is known to cause animal death.
So that means vegans cause MORE animal murder than the rest of us…
Carnivores eat way more vegetables/grains than vegans but they do so indirectly. It takes a lot of corn/grain to produce a single pound of meat. It would be much more efficient (and cause less suffering), if you simply directly ate the food you’re feeding animals yourself, as herbivores do. This entire article neglects that very basic, 8th grade science, aspect of animal agriculture. If you need a un-biased source on this: http://www.extension.org/pages/35850/on-average-how-many-pounds-of-corn-make-one-pound-of-beef-assuming-an-all-grain-diet-from-backgroundi
Jacksauce, have a good look at this:
http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/data/1mc/
Wow – well done. Rational thought and actual information… I’m bookmarking this.
At the heart of their argument, however, is what they believe to be compassion. The problem is the compassion they practice is based on their personal feelings on the matter, and not the actual data on the matter.
This extends to other areas as well. If there is a local vote to increase funding to public education, and you can prove that increased funding coincides with worse grades, that does not matter. It ‘ought to work’ a simpler way – more funding means more teachers and smaller classrooms. When then presented with data showing smaller class sizes coincide with worse grades, you’re branded a heretic and the data is dismissed as some information ‘made up’ by a whack-nut.
The “way it ought to work” is very different from “the way it does work.” In various friendly debates, this larger point rarely sinks in, and instead I am to laud their position for being the more compassionate of desired results, and not the more compassionate of actual results.
Nicely done.
It’s pretty much impossible to not use animal products. Yeah, you can avoid eating them, but they are in many, many other things. Vegans exploit animals, too. We all do.
Anyway, cow poetry sucks.
Not nearly as much as modern poetry.
A few years ago, my daughter had a pet Guinea Pig, Teddy, that she fed fresh veggies (spinach, radishes, carrots) from the grocery store. One time, we tried feeding Teddy organic veggies. Teddy turned her nose at them.
Normal life expectancy of a Guinea Pig as a pet is 3-5 years. Teddy lived eight years and was healthy up until the last few days.
Being a vegan is a lot like those people that drive those “Smart Cars” in their first collision they will end up horribly maimed or dead, bat they were saving the planet.
Listen to Rush Limbaugh for a Parody of an Elvis Presley song about a Yugo and you-ll see what I mean. Or click the link below!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqTKZgEW8pM
best way to save the planet is to put a gun to your mouth and pull the trigger.
Right now I just want to save my job but with our current President it is really tough!
“He considers it man’s evolutionary duty to devour other species. My husband will never kill anything he is not prepared to eat.”
“That’s a pretty good practice,” admitted Marx Marvelous. “If everyone cultivated that habit there would be fewer murders and no war.”
“Or a boom in cannibals,” said Amanda.
- from “Another Roadside Attraction”
It’s kind of pathetic how many people are using this as reinforcement for their personal lifestyles. Live the way you’re going to live, vegan or otherwise. Just accept responsibility for what you do. All of your actions have repercussions.
…. and don’t foist one’s preferences/lifestyle on anyone else
“The ethical vegan, when confronted with these undeniable facts, collapses. Their reaction, in almost every case, is to do a rhetorical lateral arabesque into a new claim, that their vegan diet somehow causes ‘less death and suffering’ than a non-vegan diet, a ridiculous and unsupportable argument.”
No, it’s quite a sensible argument. If you grow grain, for which mice and other animals are deliberately killed by pesticides and/or caught in the machinery, and then that grain is used to feed livestock, who are then killed (which is where most meat comes from), then that’s obviously more of a “death toll” than growing the grain and having human beings eat it directly.
I agree. The author of the article doesn’t seem to understand degrees of misery and suffering. Note that most of the letters blasting or belittling vegans are from meat eaters who obviously resent people who at least TRY not to harm animals to feed themselves, often at great expense. Note also how defensive they are about their meat eating, though nobody is telling them they can’t eat it. Clearly, they’re trying to convince themselves they’re on the right track.
Most people cannot afford to be vegans, so why make an issue over them? They’re avoiding meat for the benefit of their own consciences, not anybody else’s. If they make some meat-eaters uncomfortable, so what? People who mistreat animals are a million times worse.
“though nobody is telling them they can’t eat it”
Are you really this ignorant? This blind to modern life?
Foix gras is ILLEGAL in California, because of petty tyrants who think they can impose their vegetarian “ethics” on the rest of the population. There are CONSTANT campaigns by PETA and CSPI and other crank outfits against restaurants that serve inexpensive, wholesome foods that are based on animals.
We know there are plenty of “ethical vegans” who would gleefully ban every contact between humanity and animals, because we hear from them ENDLESSLY. We’re not paranoid — WE’RE AWAKE.
Until vegans and vegetarians are a majority, you’re fears are ridiculous. The propositions banning foie gras or veal crates in California were unilaterally supported by vegans, vegetarians, omnivores, and carnivores alike: the issue is the treatment of the animals, not the eating of them. I’d rather have radical liberal vegans telling me what to do with animals than rather conservative Christians telling me what to do with my body or who I can marry.
Vegan is merely another cult in the religion of environmentalism. Like most of its offshoots, it has no basis in fact and is more intended to allow the practitioner to feel moral superiority over his fellows. like most liberal philosophy its major tenet is that it sounds good; do not bother me with actual results. e.g. the fact that the War on Poverty is a demonstrable failure matters not a whit. All that matters is that there was good intent!
This strikes me as ideologically muddled. I classify myself as a conservative precisely because I have such contempt for consequentialism. Liberty ought never be sacrificed for “the greater good” yet this is what a results-oriented philosophy endorses. I will take liberty (as a process) over justice (as a result) every time. Liberals are the ones who (unwisely) begin with a desired result and reverse-engineer a policy. Conservatives are the ones who embrace a process and let the result take care of itself.
Those who embrace vegetarianism on a personal basis because they value compassion as a process deserve none of my contempt even if the results are imperfect. Only those who attempt to impose their morality via legislative or judicial decree deserve contempt. I frankly see no one trying to outlaw meat consumption; I only see people trying to influence voluntary behavior. I certainly have no problem with that; on the contrary, I applaud it. Anyone who attempts to increase the level of compassion and consideration in this world has my respect.
this author makes a great point! if you cant be absolute in your effort to be ethical and environmental friendly then you should just not make an effort at all.
Nice article. I’m a bit confused at the angry comments here — seems like a lot of people must of had their dogs run over by a vegan or vegetarian or something, but the article was quite a nice read, and generally reinforces my feelings on the matter of ‘moral’ veganism, vegetarianism.
I still have no problem with someone making the choice of either diet, like any diet its a person’s free choice, and as long as they’re not eating people or something, no harm to anyone but maybe themselves. But to be high and mighty about being more moral with one’s diet (non-meat or meat-based either) is just sad, and more of a means of drawing attention to ones’ self than a true political statement.
I someone wants to be vegan fine. But why do they insist I also be vegan. I don’t want to force them to eat meat. Only thing I can think of is misery loves company.
I would think their reasoning would closely follow the same reasoning of a pro-life person who does not believe in the right of choice when it comes to what they perceive as killing a baby in the womb.
It is a matter of assumptions and the main assumption that vegans seem to have is that animal life can be considered as precious as human life. Which is why this debate between vegans and meat-eaters will never really be explored decently as long as the debaters hold contradicting assumptions. A discussion on further issues when the underlying assumptions are contradictory is just gross or subtle bashing.
I agree that vegans (or any adherents to a doctrine claiming to better anything–the world, world hunger, the whales etc) can become conditioned by their own superior ethics, but this is because they are following a pseudo-religion (just like sometimes overzealous Christians damning everybody to hell as if they’re Gods archangel do).
True spirituality demands for one to give all respect to others while expecting nothing in returns. By this reasoning, if I offer respect to animals by not killing them for my food I shouldn’t expect any respect back from people because of this. And if indeed I want to lobby for the animals (who can’t speak for themselves and cannot protect themselves) I better do it in such a way as to actually be effective, not antagonize my interlocutors and thus reinforce their (what I consider to be) destructive habit.
Kind of a rant, but hey…;)
Wolfman is correct to point out that vegetarian ethics often mimic pro-life ethics, which is why it’s crazy that the two groups are so often pitted against each other. While one need not be in one cause in order to be in the other, both causes entail the same concept: defending those who cannot speak up for themselves.
It’s also true that many vegetarians and vegans are tone-deaf in the approaches they take (and I’m an ethical vegetarian). Throwing red paint (and very few activists do this) onto a fur coat worn by someone on the street is not going to convert someone to the cause of animal-welfare. In fact, most likely the coat is insured — which means it’s replaced, which means more animals are killed.
Why does what anyone chooses to eat, threaten your existence? If you choose to eat or not eat something that i choose to eat or not eat, does that make you feel better about your life?
In case no one has pointed this out yet, the glaring flaw in the author’s argument is that he ignores the amount of feed that is grown to produce livestock. His example of killing a wild deer vs. eating a pound of rice is ridiculous; a tiny fraction of the meat consumed in the U.S. is caught in the wild. In addition to the death of the cow that gives you the steak dinner you buy in a restaurant, you need to add in the deaths of the animals killed producing the tons of feed necessary to produce that cow. That number is undoubtedly larger than the number of animals killed to produce a vegan meal. You can live on a lot less grain than a cow. Come on people. Critical thinking.
Nearly everything will involved animal killing for it. For “Ethical vegan” you must grow your own food or eating foods that comes from indoor grow that had zero animals entering it, also zero insects so no toxic pesticides are used. i.e greenhouses etc.
Also it doesn’t makes a vegetarian nor vegan hypocrites if they eat plants while the farmers who made them have to cut down stuff and kill animals.
What makes someone hypocrites in my views.
If someone oppose the killing of plants but eats vegetable and fruits they are hypocrites.
Many people who bashes at vegans and vegetarians for taking the life of a plant are hypocrite because if they say that it means they draw their line at EVERYTHING, oppose killing everything. They’d starve to death.
Many redneck hicks always bashes at vegan and vegetarians by saying you murder plants but they are no better because they murder these plants too makes them hypocrites.
ALSO
If someone oppose horse slaughter for its meats, protest to have horse slaughter outlaw etc but eats the meat they are hypocrite.
If example a person oppose killing animal for their skin but wear leather shoes. It would makes them hypocrite.
I oppose leather and fur. I wear ZERO leather. I use ZERO leather on my products etc. I never use fur. I don’t oppose sythetic furs but I don’t really encourrage it nor wearing it. I’m rather about neutral in fake-furs. Is just not my style..
I don’t oppose wool because the sheep doesn’t have to be killed for wool and plus they don’t dump tons and tons of toxic preservatives in wool such as formaldehyde, chrome and other toxic preservatives.
If fur companies complain about fake fur made from oil they are hypocrites because modern fur coats are on polyester coats and man-made coats with real fur parkas. Also it uses more energy than fake fur to gather, process and ship.
I am a meat eater myself btw.
If I would complaint like saying “It’s inhumane and unacceptable to kill cows for meats” And I eat them it would make me a hypocrite. I prefer “family farms” because animals have more freedom etc. Factory farms I oppose them. If all family farms goes extinct and only factory farms provide us our meats. I’d give up meats and I would become a vegetarian or even a vegan.
So it doesn’t make a vegan or vegetarian a hypocrite if they eat vegetable and fruits when animals were killed in farming. Because they didn’t kill them.
Or otherwise it would make someone hypocrite if they use treatment for hypothermia when cruel Nazi human experimentation on innocent jews was done to gather the information for the treatment of hypothermia. When sick person didn’t conduct human experimentation by themselves to get themselves treated.
Also some people are vegetarian or vegan for medical reasons. Ringo Starr example has a stomach condition and he cannot eat meats or he will get sick.
Also some people are vegetarian or vegan for ethical reasons like animal rights etc.
Sorry, I just have to state that this is one of the most ignorant and non-fact based articles I have ever read. I won’t gratify it with anything else. Peace.
Couldn’t help but notice you couldn’t actually rebut anything it said.
For those of you who believe the author is over-reacting and causing a tempest in a teapot, remember: Your average vegan doesn’t fill the hours in the day toiling at some job or profession like the rest of us. They are celebrities, activists, and trust babies (yes, yes, there are some that actually do work, but — get real — they are a fraction).
These people have plenty of time and money to spend “protecting animal life”. This reduces to class action lawsuits forcing new food-production regulations. The case of the “green waterfall” preceding the harvester can easily be employed by some smart, ambitious attorney to force major “improvements” to harvesting. None of them will be economical, however.
Unless this idiocy is confronted and shamed into silence, we’ll all wind up paying substantially more for food so that some washed up celeb like Daryl Hanna can preen on Extra! about her successful campaign to save bullfrogs.
If the West’s food production capacity is hobbled to placate some weird sense of ethical scrupulosity in the minds of people who have money to burn, millions of poor throughout the world will starve.
Just so you know, the world would have more food for humans if we weren’t using grains and seeds to overstuff animals.
Reason of millions of poor starving is because of human overpopulation, they have over 8 kids which is horrible of having kids when people are poor is disgusting they should enforce population control such as CONDOMS, birth control etc. Also the people who rape the women should be shot. Rapists don’t deserve to live. Also the poor people breeds like rats and exceeding habitat capacity. I find it really disgusting when people preach at wildlife saying we hunt and trap or animals will overpopulate, starve and disease horrible death.
Our species are hypocrites because they do the same thing and throw their problems on others. If they hunt and trap the healthy to “claim to control disease” it wont work it will leave the sick out and make more healthy sick with mange etc.
Man should deal with their population problem before preaching at wildlife. If wildlife could talk and be at our level of consciousness they would say we need to cull the poor starving or they will overpopulate, die of a horrible death from starvation, diseases and famine. Also killing a lot of native wildlife, mass slaughtering of songbirds from cutting / burning down forests, grass land. Endangering many species. Many species are endangered because of poor people overpopulating, the lives of an endangered species is more precious than the life of the poor people because they are rare and its life is more precious there are almost 7 billions of people.
Overpopulation of people kills tons of songbirds, kill tons of NATIVE wildlife and including harming us and themselves. If we run out of trees.
The rich, mid class and poor and also wildlife will suffer the deadly consequences. Such as making Earth UNHABITABLE.
Sadly soo many people lacks in awareness, are ignorant and egoistical.
That’s a deadly lie. There is no overpopulation. The output of our current farms could feed 9 billion people, while the population is just shy of 7 billion. Land that could be converted to farmland has the potential to feed another 70 billion people. There is no shortage of food, nor is there any foreseeable shortage of arable land. What there is a shortage of is infrastructure and peace, that food that is grown on farms today can be delivered to the hungry without rotting or being destroyed in transit.
We’re not alone on Earth. There are animals too.
Farmer has to cut down large amount of forests to grow crops and raise cattle etc.
What do you think they clear cut??
Water???
No the forest, wildlife habitat destruction.
Africa’s countries has severe deforestation and other over populated poor countries.
There is overpopulation if habitats are getting fragmentized and human encroachment.
Earth has exceeded habitat capacity.
Is not just man living on Earth.
There are wildlife, insects etc.
Why are species vanishing and becoming endangered?
Human overpopulation.
We’re commiting genocide to different species because of our anthropocentrism and speciesism views. Our species will not survive long enough to reach the time we will be able to travel outside our solar system and finding other planets on the goldilock zones not occupied by other lifeforms.
Man needs to learn to be responsible to take care of Earth before colonizing other planets or otherwise we will do the same mistake.
Earth still have a long road ahead but we’re shorting it by destroying all life including ourselves with our egocentric and self-destructive views.
C’mon, man, cut it out. We already established that it’s a myth that you were vegetarian. Seriously, it may make sense to you to eradicate the millions of people who disagree with you in order to save a few species of animals; but it’s the diseased product of a totalitarian mind: If we could only get rid of all the meat-eating Christians, hicks and third world poor people who refuse to use condoms, we could create a paradise in which vegans, cows, and bunnies all live in harmony.
I recommend you start the depopulation with yourself.
I don’t really agree with that, either. People throw away millions of pounds of food each year, and misallocated resources and corrupt governments lead to poverty, not “overpopulation.” But it is true that we’d have a lot more grain, for example, if we weren’t using it not to FEED animals but rather to OVERFEED and FATTEN them.
The WORLD is NOT over populated. Only certain areas are.
Go here and see for yourself:
http://flowingdata.com/2011/07/27/if-the-world-lived-in-a-single-city/
Got any facts to back this up? I’m a vegan, I make less than 20k per year working my ass off, and I’m insulted by your comment. So lets turn it around…the majority of people commenting on this article are uneducated, blind jerks who can’t think their way out of a paper bag. Maybe some are smart, but clearly most aren’t – particularly since any person with a brain can see the huge, glaring fallacy in the author’s argument.
(I’ll give you a hint: what do cows, pigs, and chicken eat?)
Don’t be insulted, because by the standards of most of the world, you’re rich. You’re just not filthy rich like the middle class is, or obscenely rich like what we Americans have become accustomed to calling merely rich.
Page up and you’ll see hwk’s insinuation that vegetarians are all “trust fund babies” who don’t work. By talking about the American living standard as compared to others, you’re trying to move the goalposts.
As others have mentioned, sentient is being defined incorrectly here. It means self-aware. In other words, do you know that you exist? Animals are not sentient.
Maybe in your anthropocentric / homocentricity religion.
In moral views and conscious views animal are living beings. They are sentient.
Why because they can feel, feel pain, react to hostile things i.e predators, danger.
If you start a fire will the animal stands there like a robot and let itself get incinerated?
Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences.
Our species are egocentric and think they control something.
Animals may not have high conscious as us but they have the right to live.
Maybe if we ever encounter extraterrestrial lifeforms that are superior as us they may see us as (animals) and hunt us for sport or fun.
Or maybe they will be civil and respect ALL life forms.
Animal rights are more civil than a normal person because they respect all life.
If you think you’re no better than an animal, sacrifice yourself for their good.
Learn posting relevant thing hillbilly.
Mark, you simply don’t know what “sentient” means. To be sentient is to have the power of perception by means of the senses — in other words, to be subjectively aware (conscious, aware, but not necessarily self-aware). In particular, it is generally agreed by scientists that all mammals and birds can feel pain, and probably other vertebrates can too, plus invertebrates like squid and octopuses. So all those animals are sentient.
Killing a chicken is no different than turning off a computer.
Just messier.
If you really want to know what you should eat, look at your teeth. Humans have omnivore teeth. Vegans are denying their true nature.
if humans had were meant to be omnivorous as ‘eman’ stated, they would be able to digest raw meat, like any other carnivorous or omnivorous animal. Want to accept your “true nature” id love to see you go in the wild, catch an animal on your own, and eat it. Not only would you not be able to do that,but you also would probably be grossed out by skinning and gutting an animal as im sure youve never done it yourself or been to a slaughterhouse. Think about it: when you see an apple your first thought is to take a bite, is that what you think of when you see a cow? Thats your instinct and your true NATURE.
The Jolly Blue Giant is so ignorant that he’s never heard of carpaccio, ceviche, or steak tartare. But that’s no problem; we just have to hold the vegans off until thy die of pernicious anemia.
yeah, good point. the vegans should die out from anemia in no time, meanwhile all the retards stuffing their faces with mcdonalds and kfc will probably live long prosperous lives.
We CAN digest raw meat. We have no problem digesting raw meat. Eating raw meat could sicken or kill you, but not because you can’t digest it properly. All the problems with raw meat stem from the fact that bacteria and parasites can be transmitted through the consumption of raw meat. You have the same problem with unwashed vegetables grown in manure- you can metabolize them fine, but they can transmit disease.
that nature based on teeth point was ridiculous. People who are on the Atkins diet dont eat carbs even though their bodies can handle carbohydrates with no problem, are they ‘denying their own nature’?
Let us contemplate the considerable impact a single cow grown for slaughter has on the environment. How much corn is planted, grown, protected with insecticides and then mechanically harvested to support the life of that one bovine? This one little tiny fact shoots holes through this entire piece. Feed the corn to people and ‘bam!’ you just saved one sentient being. Now I’m no vegan and in fact I’m a hunter, but come on lets expose this crap for what it is, pandering bullshit wrote to extrude emphatic nods of approval and ‘yuppers damn hippies’ from a bunch of drunken right wing conservatives. Live free and think free. Just because someone has a different opinion doesn’t mean that they didn’t arrive at it through logical deduction given the inputs they had.
Well said. I’m a vegetarian because I couldn’t stomach hunting and killing an animal…I figured it was hypocritical to expect someone else to do it for me, when I couldn’t do it myself. I wish more people would hunt – the closer relationship we have to our food, the better.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on this one. I have been vegetarian for 10years and have recently made the rational choice to become vegan. I have never and will never condemn anyone for eating meat. I believe in choice. It is my choice to not eat meat just as much as it is someone else’s choice to eat it. My choice stems from the fact that I feel uncomfortable with the thought of eating something that was once alive.
I was actually having a similar conversation with my work colleagues the other day. If you are not prepared to watch it die or kill it then why be prepared to eat it? If I were to ever choose to eat meat again I would have to be comfortable with killing it myself. I would also mention that I would not only eat chicken, cow, and pig. My one problem with some meat eaters is their selectivity in doing so. I know a girl who was veggie for years and then one day she went back to eating meat. She will now eat absolutely anything and I think kudos to her. Her reasoning is: why eat a cow and not a horse? What’s the difference? There isn’t. If you are prepared to eat one animal you should be prepared to eat another. Meaning just because it’s ‘cute and fluffy’ and people have them as pets doesn’t mean that they are any different to what’s on the other end of your fork.
Matt, while I wish all people would stop eating meat and hunting, I do have respect for hunters who actually “elminate the middleman” and hunt for their own food (and feed their families). The real hypocrites are the ones who will yell at you for “killing animals” while they, themselves, chomp down on chicken nuggets and London Broil. When you point out they they, too, are eating animals, they give a response not far from, “Oh, no I’m not! I didn’t have to kill any animals for THIS meat! THIS was bought at the meat counter in the supermarket!” As if an animal was killed if what you see now is on yellow Styrofoam and under shrink-wrap. Aaron Sorkin wrote a blistering op-ed about how evil Sarah Palin is for hunting (for food), while acknowledging that he eats meat. He’s part of the problem.
There is nothing wrong with being a vegetarian for personal reasons, but to say it is a sin to eat meat is explicitly condemned by the Bible as a heresy (that is, it is heretical to say that eating meat is intrinsically sinful; it would be a sin to eat meat in violation of a sworn oath not to or to participate in idolatrous worship using said meat or knowingly eat meat that was stolen, but these are transgressions that have nothing to do with the meat itself and everything to do with the actions of people).
Well, I guess that would depend on the religion. For instance in Jainism and Hinduism (and some forms of Buddhism) killing animals is considered very heavy from the point of view of karma.
The suffering experienced by the exploited animal is said, according to these religions, to be accumulated and released back on the perpetrator (or participator in the perpetration, like the meat buyer) but with a delay, leaving time for the acting person to experience the intended results of their action, like enjoying the karma-heavy action. This delay can even be prolonged to the next life where the person would, apparently out of the blue, would experience the same suffering that they have dealt on other beings. The balance will eventually come to zero at some point.
Interestingly, there was a process of “education” for meat-eaters who had a taste for animals. If they wanted to be socially accepted in the ancient vedic society, they had to indulge only in a certain ritual that was hoped could elevate their consciousness: they would go with a goat and the village priest in the middle of a forest, once a month, at new moon and, in front of the priest, while looking into the eyes of the goat and reciting a mantra saying pretty much “Now I am killing you, but I agree that in my next life you can kill me if you wish”. I don’t know it worked or not, but, at least they had a method
.
Coming back to my main point, with these assumptions given by the scriptures and saints of these religions you could say that killing animals is a “sin”.
What would make their scriptures less authoritative than the Bible?
Some vegans don’t eat meat because they think it’s morally wrong to consume an animal. They go to extremes. No leather, no vegetables that have animals on the farm, etc. These people are idealists. Eventually, somewhere down the line one will find that an animal was hurt. There’s always an externality.
However, there is a second group of vegans/pseudo-vegans that don’t eat meat for other reasons. Perhaps, they don’t trust the meat packing industry. Or maybe they don’t like the way the animals are treated, and would eat animals that were slaugthered in a better way. Others feel it’s spirtually impure, but don’t intellectualize their position. If necessity calls for meat eating then so beat it, but otherwise no.
It can get really complicated. Some only eat meat during a season. Some only eat meat in a cycle. Some cut out every single kind of meat, but they eat eggs. Some don’t eat dairy because they are lactose intolerant, and they don’t eat fish because its loaded with mercury, and they don’t eat mammals because the animal is given anti-biotics, or the meat was dyed to cover up how foul it is, or it was shipped from a dubious source. A few eat meat just a few times a year, but otherwise never (what are they?) The list goes on and on.
I understand why people get upset at the first group, but as for the second group they are a completely different type. There’s no name for them I know of, but I challenge everyone to keep them in mind, and differentiate them from the former group.
okay people, let me just say off the bat, I am a vegan and have been for almost 5 years… and NEVER ONCE have I EVER condemned someone for eating meat. I have NEVER found myself “morally superior” to someone who is not a vegan. I don’t bring it up unless it is brought up for me (“this is my vegan friend”) mostly because of jerks who get offended at the mention of vegan and decide to attack me for my beliefs and way of life. Every vegan I have ever met has acted in the same way as I do. I have never met one who attacks anyone for eating meat. For the most part, we choose to be vegan because it makes sense to us. As for the argument that it’s okay to eat meat because the bible says so… well the bible also says to stone people who are adulterous, any religious argument that is taken up against my way of life I immediately disregard, not because I don’t respect other people’s religions, but because I find it absolutely ridiculous that someone would bring up the way of life lived thousands of years ago to justify their attack on someones way of life TODAY. There are A LOT of things that they did back in that time that are completely heinous now. In regards to the comment that crops used for feeding livestock makes more sense than those used to feed people because corn can grow in unsuitable soil for other crops, well its made unsuitable by the constant over farming of corn for livestock feed. “it requires 50 bushels of corn to finish an animal for our U.S. desired endpoint (USDA choice grade; USDA yield grade 2 or 3; approximately 28% body fat). There are 56 pounds of corn in a bushel, so you will need around 2,800 pounds of corn to produce an animal that weighs 1,250 to 1,350 pounds. This equates to 2.07 to 2.24 pounds of corn per pound of finished animal.” –http://www.extension.org/pages/35850/on-average-how-many-pounds-of-corn-make-one-pound-of-beef-assuming-an-all-grain-diet-from-backgroundi (boom, cited) Now that is a ridiculous amount of corn to feed one cow, you can’t deny that. And just let me clarify right now, I AM IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, TRYING TO INSINUATE THAT I AM AN INHERENTLY BETTER PERSON THAN ANYONE THAT DOES EAT MEAT. I DO NOT THINK I AM BETTER THAN YOU, I DO NOT THINK THAT MY CRAP DOESN’T STINK, OR THAT I CAN GET AWAY WITH ANY OTHER BAD HABITS JUST BECAUSE I DON’T EAT MEAT. Vegans get defensive because we hear this crap EVERY SINGLE DAY whenever our veganism is brought up. I defend my way of life against someone SERIOUSLY EVERY TIME it is mentioned. If that comes off as being a self-righteous jerk, than fine, but I would ask you to question your motives for attacking a persons beliefs and way of life. And to consider being a little more open minded and less quick to judge, always looking for a way to trip us up and prove that it is impossible to be a true vegan, we already know that. But we do what we can to make a difference for whatever reason that may be. I am not hurting anyone by living the way I do. (Sorry this was so long, but there really are not enough people on here defending vegans, its an all out vegan bash right now!)
The bible is based on NORMAL people’s opinion view of the world.
There is no evidence for god.
It shouldn’t be based on a stupid bloody book written by people the person have never met that someone should eat or not eat meats. Should be THEIR opinions.
The bible is pro-slavery and stoning people who commit adultery or a child misbehaving. In the past people were savages, uncivil and treated black people like inferior being. Many terrorist groups in the USA such as Ku Klux Klan, Army of god etc are CHRISTIAN based groups. Christian fundamentalists are bad they abuse their power and lies forcing their dumbass religions on other people.
Also they bigot against other religions and treat animal as “resources”. American Family Association for example is a Christian fundamentalists and a beehive of IGNORANTS, homophobias, white supremacists and bigotry.
Now my argument why believing in god especially taking it seriously is just as stupid as taking Santa Claus seriously.
God is a fictional character invented by a normal person or normal people.
Example”
Normal people invented Santa Claus.
A normal person who is George Lucas invented Jediism.
A normal person who is James Cameron invented na’vi, Pandora and other fictional species. gj Cameron.
Jesus invented god . Yawhee w.e its name.
Some artwork I make some are planets that doesn’t exist. When I drew these planets. Where they come from? Are they real. Is it somewhere in our freaken huge universe?. Nope I invented it came from one place. My ideas. If you believe this planet is real and obsess on it you’re a slave to my ideas and etc. A normal person’s ideas.
So god is the same was Jesus ideas, thoughts. If you believe in god you’re a slave to Jesus. A normal person’s ideas.
Also the bible is a story book based on normal people’s opinions, view of the world and rules etc.
Someone mis-looked a manatee said he saw a mermaid and invented that mythical creature.
I have no problem if someone is religious as long is not destructive, not taken seriously nor causing harm to both humans and animals in the name of their god.
veganism is not a cult belief or a religious thing is a way of life, a moral issues and ethical issues etc.
Many vegan and vegetarian can live long.
I saw some guy from the 1300s on wiki who was a vegan and lived 91. He was vegan for animal rights issues. One of the first animal right activist ever.
91 years old in 14th century???? Is EXTREMELY rare, just as rare as someone living 118 years old today.
Ravi Shankar is a vegetarian and hes 91 1/2 years old and is in good health and still perform.
Obesity in vegan and vegetarian is extremely rare to impossible.
Only way to get fat is from junk food, inactivity (some people) or medical problem.
Also I oppose people bashing at vegan and vegetarian because is wrong. Vegetarians and vegans are normal people just like all of us.
Sadly there are stupid hicks on sportsmen forums bashing at vegan and vegetarian which like I said above makes them hypocrites because they eat vegetable and fruits too. They say you murder plants, these sportsmen hicks are showing their hypocrisy and inferiority. They are horrible people trust me. I watched their forums for ages.
Maybe is why some vegetarians and vegans have a lower opinion on human than animals because people bashing at them gives human a bad name.
Are you 12? You “reason” like you are.
Look at you for a minute blinded by your arrogance and stupidity.
Posting garbage ONLY.
Yes you do, and you’re a bloody hypocrite on top of it. You’re so self-righteous you can’t see how insulting you are. You bash Christianity and take the absurd position that Jesus was an ordinary man. Jesus is either God Incarnate, or else he would have to be either completely insane or one of the most evil men ever to live, certainly nothing ordinary. You say you don’t bash Christians if they don’t take their faith seriously, which really means you don’t bash people who aren’t really Christians, but you bash every genuine Christian.
Spew your venom elsewhere, viper! You’re not welcome here. You’re a piece of human trash with delusions of grandeur, wishing for the genocide of billions of people by suppressing reproduction, and thinking that humans should be subservient to animals. You whitewashed tomb! Do you not know where your logic leads? China’s One Child Policy is where it leads: forced abortion, forced sterilization, and utter disregard for human life. Yes, you and your ideas look pretty on the outside, but have nothing but rotting flesh and decaying bones within, just like a whitewashed tomb.
I dislike it because they treat animal like crap and even if the last breeding pair of a species they value human above it. Its homocentricity.
Also they abused humans both historically and today.
http://www.evilbible.com
I bet you hate “The Peoples Temple” and “Heaven Gate” cult because they mass suicide. So does it make you a hypocrite and self-righteous person for hating it??
NO because they killed people, abused people etc.
So Christianity to me is the same, is abused and an inbalancement of powers normal people abuse.
Christianity was invented by normal people like Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara and Marshall Applewhite.
http://www.zaxtor.net/Christianity_Is_An_Evil_Religion.htm Is not an animal right ranting reason. is a HUMAN RIGHT abuse reason why I hate it.
Look both historical and modern Christian people has done a lot of things that we would considered crimes against humanity.
Especially racist bigots missionary forcing their religion on the indigenous people by raping them and slavery.
Seriously you’re a slave to someone else thoughts and opinion.
Look at Catholicism had sexual scandals and also they oppose CONDOMS and birth control. They oppose it because is THEIR opinions they try to FORCE it on people. NOT GOD OPINION BECAUSE IT DOESN’T EXIST.
I am not a pure Atheist. I have a personal belief/faith I do not worship someone else belief.
I would surely never worship a religion invented by a stranger because we dunno their background.
Don’t say the bible say they are good because it doesn’t mean anything..
I’m not self-righteous like most Christian-Creationist are who treat everything like crap accept humans.
But in reality they treat human like crap by dictating them so it shows the hypocrisy of that stupid religion.
Also in Christianity you’re suppose to love your enemy no matter how crappy they treat you BUT many of these people bash at me and treat me like crap because I hate trapping or sport hunting.
So they are phonies and proving their religion is USELESS.
I talk about the religious sportsmen.
Also In Christianity you’re suppose to even love Al-Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden but republican are pro-wars and kill the bad guys.
So it prove their religions are useless.
In reality you’re suppose to HATE your enemies and even kill them when they pose a threat or commited crimes against humanity such as Muammar. I enjoy watching the video his body getting kicked and waste. Muammar deserves the most horrid treatment as possible after what he done to humanity.
Also I saw on a trappers forums that they said racial comments toward Libyan because of Muammar they called them “towel heads”. People blaming a race or culture because of some bad people is unacceptable. Most sportsmen are white supremacists and racist.
Tman is a beehive of racism.
Racism is a disgusting act.
I said I don’t BASH AT RELIGIONS as long they don’t do harm, take seriously nor do bad things.
Christianity done a LOT of bad things to both animals and humans.
I don’t hate Christian people.
I never said I hate Christians.
I only hate Christian fundamentalists because they are bigots and homophobias and trying to control our lives.
Also Christianity financially exploit people. I have NEVER saw other religions aside Christianity begging for money and trying to brainwash you.
They are filthy rich people.
I am someone with more conscious than most people and seeing human greed is destroying all life on Earth including ourselves.
I vehemently oppose religions that treat both human and non human like crap.
I vehemently condemn Christianity because they They use this stupid slogan “God put animals for us” “God gave man dominion over sea and land”
Man abused his domination over a lie to overpopulate, being hypocrite and destroy all life over greed.
Jesus invented God? Do you know ANY history at all?
I know alot.
Jesus invented the Christian god.
People I dunno their names at the moment invented Anubis, Zeus and Thor etc.
Some normal human invented Dracula.
I invented an artwork of a planet I imagined so does it make that planet real?
Where does it come from?
Comes from me but it does not mean it exist for real the planet. Maybe a resemblance may exist but not that one I made “Artwork”
Like if you draw a planet or make an artwork.
Does it mean it exist and you randomly guessed it?
Where it comes from?
Comes from you, your ideas etc.
SO it doesn’t mean the thing you drew is real.
Example James Cameron when he imagined the Na’vi, Pandora etc from avatar and made a film from it.
It doesn’t mean is real.
Pandora is a moon of Saturn and an asteroid in reality.
But I talk about the planet in Alpha Centauri called Pandora in the film.
Doesn’t mean Pandora exist in Alpha Centauri for real.
It’s an idea from a normal person who guessed that Alpha Centauri has Pandora.
An idea, fiction, story.
So is same for God and bible’s content.
Methinks you protest too much. Eat whatever you like. I don’t think as many give a hoot as you seem to think. Hey, not only can you beat your straw man to death, you can eat it too without being seen as a cannibal. By the way, check out the tolerances for insect parts in the food you eat. You eat meat all the time, vegan. Yummy bug parts are still meat.
http://www.sixwise.com/newsletters/05/06/29/how_many_insect_parts_and_rodent_hairs_are_allowed_in_your_food.htm
Can’t you read??
I eat meat. I said.
I guess your optic nerve is soo narrowed by doing repetitive activities and many joining forums with one meaning. Hunting and trapping.
lack of creativity must be why soo many trappers are brain-deaded and when some post picture with blood in the trapped animal’s paw you say “Nice picture” without FREAKEN looking and investigating the picture for a minute.
You’re just like those annoying youtube spammers saying NICE VIDEOS and they don’t look at it and sends you a link to a malware / phishing site (I will not post the link here).
Also I said you CAN’T eliminate animal use completely.
I do not oppose killing for FOOD.
I oppose fashion, profit and sport killing.
I don’t eat bug because is disgusting (personally) but I do not oppose people from eating bugs unless is endangered species of bug.
Well now, perhaps if you aren’t 12 you might have noticed that I was replying to the self-announced and self satisfied vegan and not to you, Mr. Poopy Head. Pay attention if that’s not too hard for you.
I am no vegan.
I see sportsmen bashes at meat eater calling them vegan because they oppose hunting by themselves.
It’s wrong to bash at them.
bashing at a vegan by calling a meat eater a vegan is wrong.
If you refer as this.
If I said I may become one when all “family farms” go extinct and factory farms dominate is because they are cruel, pollutes more than family farms and pour antibiotic in animals which is bad because we become resistant to antibiotic and the medication will be USELESS.
If we keep immunitize ourself to medications we will die from diseases easier.
The calculations have been done to determine how many animals are likely to be killed due to animal agriculture, based on several population studies. Initially the argument counted against veganism, but an error in the math was pointed out that reverses the conclusion. However, because the production of meat is so completely wasteful and inefficient the comparative effects counts in favor of eating plants rather than animals. This is not true, perhaps for grass fed beef produced in small quantities by boutique animal operations. But for the vast majority 98% of meat it is true. This issue has been the subject of actual research and peer reviewed scholarship.
Steven L. Davis (2003). The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16 (4):387-394
Gaverick Matheny, Least harm: a defense of vegetarianism from Steven Davis’s omnivorous proposal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16: 505-511, 2003
If you don’t want to read the published research this does a pretty good job of summarizing and presenting it:
http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/data/1mc
It is, of course, at most a presumptive argument as the evidence is not at obviously certain, but it seems to be enough to make the article above mostly unnecessary.
But, the author goes further and claims that the numbers don’t matter since it is an ethical argument (tell that to the Utilitarians!). This seems to rest on a very poor grasp of ethics and ethical argument. Here I’d suggest reading Mylan Engel’s brilliant article
http://www.uta.edu/philosophy/faculty/burgess-jackson/Engel,%20The%20Immorality%20of%20Eating%20Meat%20%282000%29.pdf
and then determine whether it doesn’t matter. Engel’s basic moral principle is roughly that “minimally decent people avoid causing unnecessary suffering when doing so is a trivial imposition.” From this and a few other of our beliefs he believes that we all accept that it is immoral to eat meat. Of course, this might entail that hydroponic vegetables are preferable to others, but at this point we are in the moral weeds. The big distinction is between those who are minimally decent and those who are not.
Why such a divergence between the author’s claims and the actual arguments that “ethical vegans” make? Simple, it’s a lot easier to argue against a straw vegan rather than a real one. The position that the author is trying to refute might be a a form or “spiritualist veganism” that holds that all life is sacred. Ethical veganism typically holds that non-sentient life cannot be harmed and so we can not do wrong in our use of non-sentient life.
In summation,it seems to me that the “human” take on all of this is: Until animal writes it has no rights.
It is easy to ridicule the subcategory of vegetarianism known as veganism. I am not sure it deserves so many paragraphs, let alone a book. By contrast, a vegetarian diet, which often includes animal products such as dairy and unfertilized eggs, has a long history in both Western and Eastern culture. There are a wide range of rationales for it and nothing you have said constitutes a valid argument against it.
Vegetarian eating eggs, milk and other dairy products are.
lacto-ovo vegetarians
There is also a third category of vegan, such as myself:
I do it to lose weight. Ever seen a fat vegan?
I love steak and cheese and occasionally dip back in, but since I’ve been (mostly) vegan, I’ve lost like 15 lbs. It’s the bomb.
But I do agree that there is a false morality to it– only those who are priviledged enough to have the extra income necessary to eat vegan can do so; and there are environmental factors (such as the fossil fuels used in cultivating and transporting vegetable products)of farming that negate the whole holier than thou thing, though ya’ll gotta admit that a truck driving some veggies to a store is a jollier picture than a bunch of chickens crammed in a poo-encrusted cage with their beaks cut off.
I’ve seen plenty of healthy “legally overweight” people, but I’ve never seen a healthy vegan.
As for the mere vegetarians, college dorms are filled with (literally) tons of fat vegetarians. French fries/potato chips/nachos, cheese pizza, Frosted Flakes, ice cream, bean burritos with guac and sour cream…all meat-free foods.
The carbon footprint and energy use of a vegan diet is dramatically less than a carnivorous diet in the western world. Roughly the difference (on average) between standard omnivorous diet and vegan diet is the same as Hummer/Prius in terms of carbon footprint.
Secondly, the vegan diet is ultimately much cheaper than a meat diet. Especially when we get subsidies out of the picture and sensible animal welfare regulations in place, meat will be a luxury in the future. Vegan foodstuffs are far less energy and resource intensive and will in the long run be the only way (aside from growing meat in vats) to feed the planet. Don’t confuse a vegan diet with a whole foods vegan diet.
Oh, bullshit.
Sorry, I didn’t realize I was talking to a published scientist who has studied these things. But, your answer shows me I was mistaken.
http://pge.uchicago.edu/workshop/documents/martin1.pdf
http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm
Of course, there are some, such as you, who have the critically responded to this research and argument in print and in professional conferences, so not all scientists are in agreement, but the argument seems to hold some water.
LTB a ‘buzzballad’ of the ethical vegan arranged around the number by king missile
You overlooked the most politically and culturally titillating aspect of the Vegan way of life: It is based PURELY on whether the animal(s) at issue are pretty to look at and delightful to hold. Vegans and Veggies do not car a whit about saving microorganisms, or silverfish, or cockroaches, solely because they are UGLY. Their entire philosophy is inextricably intertwined with LOOKISM, plain and simple. Super-cute animals (e.g., baby harp seals) to the front of the line for preferred treatment, all others to their deaths.
Ummmm, no. The difference is clearly explained in Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights or Singer’s Animal Liberation–what matters is whether we have good reason to believe that they suffer. I for one find Turkey’s to be unattractive, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about their suffering. Microorganisms lack a central nervous system and it is impossible for them to possess (what we understand as ) consciousness which means they can’t suffer pain and so it is a non-arbitrary distinction the vegan draws, even if at times an uncertain one. Are c
You’ve got it backwards, Stuart. I’m a vegetarian PRECISELY because it’s silly to judge an animal’s “moral worth” or whatever we wish to call it based on whether said animal is “cute” or not, as “cute” is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t kill flies; I capture them and then release them outside. Doesn’t matter whether we think flies are pretty or ugly.
It is the meat-eater, in fact, who often reverts to the argument that it’s not okay to eat horses but okay to eat cows because “cows are ugly.”
I am an equal opportunity omnivore. I enjoy a good cut of horse meat as much as I enjoy a good cut of beef.
Vegans are as hypocritical as the Prius driver passing you at better than 80 MPH in the fast lane.
As far as the main body of the author’s argument… A one minute search could have cleared the air:
“The idea that a vegan diet kills as many or more animals than a meat-based diet is sometimes used as a rationalization for consuming meat, and this idea serves to add uncertainty to the ethical case for a plant-based diet. In an attempt to help clear up this uncertainty, I have made estimates of the number of animals killed directly by slaughter as well as through crop harvesting in order to produce one million food calories from eight different categories of food, shown in Figure 1.”
http://minesgreencircle.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/animals-killed-by-vegan-diet/
But all that is rather irrelevant – The point for opting for a vegan life is the idea of causing less harm. There’s a world of difference between unintentional harm for survival and deliberately breeding billions of sentient being just to kill. No one is perfect – But one should not let “purity” be the enemy of the good. And if that were not the case, all “manslaughter” deaths ought to be charged with murder. Of course “intent” matters.
Animal eating defenders – This omnivore bingo game is for you: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiteme/4170866438/
Half of them are vegetarian?! WHAT? Next you’ll tell me that at least a quarter of them are women/not white/gay. WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END?!
You don’t need to be a vegetarian or even a ‘leftie’ in order to recognise the moral highground you take when you minimise the damage to the world around you, in order to live. It’s common sense, in a world where we apparently value life then to take life for our own means is on a different moral level. But maybe I’m biased, 50% of my relationship is vegetarian (he doesn’t write for the NY Times though….).
The truth is this- If you’re performing an action because you want to morally superior to those around you, then you’ve already failed through your motivation to be better, rather than to just do something that is better. I know vegetarians and meat eaters, turns out whether you chew cow or corn, you can be a real jerk either way.
That was meant to reply to Eric R.
Curse my cavewoman brain.
I can’t help be reminded of how one night i was eating at the counter in a diner when the guy two stools away from me order a “Boca Cheese Burger” with onions and bacon!
If vegans and vegetarians and the PETA crowd really want to solve this problem, both in animals killed to feed them, and those killed to feed others, they need to invent the replicator from Star Trek. Dump all their investments into nano-biotech, instead of wasting it on preaching. The preaching simply isn’t going to work. But if you could buy a little box that produced anything you wanted to eat without harming any animals OR plants, who would bother about killing chickens except Luddites? Same thing with cars–if you could get a Suburban that got 100 miles to the gallon of natural gas, who would stick with 12 mpg gasoline?
Problem is too many of those who adhere to these lifestyles are Luddites themselves, and progress is the last thing they want. And after all, for a large proportion, perhaps a majority, it’s all about the moral superiority anyway. They don’t actually care about the animals, they just pretend to so they can look down their noses at others. It’s hardly unique, of course; self-righteousness is prevalent among most religions and political movements too. Bringing oneself to admit “I am NOT holier than thou,” is a very difficult proposition.
Ward, great to see your name and writing again, not to mention a portion of Diderot’s post (which I also have kept.)
(1) Voices from the VEGAN grave. I was a deer but they cut down my forests for the corn crop. I died of exposure in the harsh winter months.
(2) I was a buffalo but they shot me so I could be out off the wheat fields.
(3) I was a rabbit but they burnt me and my children out of the surgar cane fields.
(4) I was a fish but they strangled me with their poluted pesticide oxeygen reducing crop sprays.
(5) I was a frog but the seven legs I grew would not allow me to go anywhere as the Insecticdes mutated my being.
(7)I was a badger but the harrows got me mid spring.
(8)I was a rare snake but the irrigation system forced me into the hawks eyesight.
(9)I was a sheep but the cotton fields have taken my value and my grasses.
(10)I was a fox but the combines got me trapped in the soybean field.
(11)I was a duck but they drained my pond,drying up my supply line to the little duckies. They starved and I jumped in front of a shot gunner to end it all.
(12) I was a turtle crushed in the bulldozer which made the new granola fields.
(13) I was skunk who never got to the road as the TRACTOR got me on the farm driveway.
I don’t mind vegans til I have to share the bathroom with them at work. Always sounds and smells like somebody brought Elsie the heifer in to use the commode.
You asked for numbers so here are numbers.
http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/data/1mc
You missed the whole point. The numbers are meaningless. If killing animals for food is wrong, then it’s wrong; killing even one animal would violate the vegan ethic. If it’s not wrong, then it’s not wrong. Period.
Also, this study never mentions grass-fed beef, for example, and doesn’t begin to touch wild game. It’s a very shallow, agenda-driven scratch of the surface of a very complex issue. Fail.
Comparing animal suffering and death on factory farms to animal death as a result of harvest is like comparing homicides comitted by drug cartels to human deaths caused by freeway accidents. It’s apples to oranges.
And why? Because it’s easier for an anti-vegan to think about veganism in simple terms of animal deaths related to food – and ignore all related factors such as necessity and intentionality.
The vegan ethic is this: causing unnecessary suffering and death intentionally is wrong. Vegans strive to abstain from causing unnecessary suffering and death as much as practical and possible. To that end, we eat plants instead of animals.
If the author is concerned about animal death caused by agriculture then the proper focus of his essay should be to encourage readers to abstain from consuming the products of farmed animals as well as those plant products that cause the most animal deaths. But that’s not the author’s concern. The author is more interested in bashing vegans and veganism than in doing anything – anything at all- constructive for animals, the planet, or human health.
“The vegan ethic is this: causing unnecessary suffering and death intentionally is wrong.”
But you don’t live up to it. You don’t even try.
“Vegans strive to abstain from causing unnecessary suffering and death as much as practical and possible.”
No, you don’t, Elaine.
“To that end, we eat plants instead of animals.”
You have no idea if you’re having the effect you claim or not. This is not an ethical principle, Elaine; like most ethical vegans, you have no idea what an actual ethical principle is. You’re just following an easy rule that allows you to feel superior to meat eaters.
If you really, really wanted to minimize your impact, you’d go off the grid and grow your own food. That’s the only way you could have any hope of meeting the ethic you claim. But you won’t, because it would be inconvenient. An ethic that you compromise for nothing more than convenience is a sham, Elaine.
Vegans are not perfect — even vegans will contribute to some animal deaths. But veganism isn’t about perfection. It’s about reducing suffering — it’s about doing less harm than more.
Veganism means withdrawing one’s support from a very cruel and violent system. Vegans impact less animals than omnivores, period.
His arguments about corn, rice and soybean farming are futile. Most grain grown in the world is gone to fed farmed animals, not people.
Do you eat rice?
“It’s about reducing suffering — it’s about doing less harm than more.”
That’s what I told the deer ravaging my organic garden – as I prepared to harvest him with one well placed round.
Vaya con dios Bambi.
Black olives coloured by squid ink? Bizzare explanation for ripe olive’s colour.
I’m practically a vegetarian myself, although I do love my hamburgers. I have run into vegans who won’t even eat honey since it is produced by the slave labor of bees.
That’s just nuts. eating local honey can help diminish the effects of hay fever and other allergies. Plus honey is the only food that doesn’t spoil.
Man, vegans are stupid.
For many people symbolism is more important than reality and intentions are more important than results.
Inconvenient Truth
Vegans have the same odds of giving birth to a child with birth defects as a mother who smokes throughout her pregnancy.
Vegetarians have a 14% weaker bone structure.
…veganism, let alone vegetarianism, is neither “natural” to the human condition, nor healthy.
I don’t believe without evidence.
I am a meat eater first of all, not a heavy meat eater but I oppose people bashing at vegans and vegetarians.
Saying stuff without evidence is just as bad as saying unicorns and gremlins exists for real.
Here’s another inconvenient truth. Position of the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada: “Well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence.”
http://www.adajournal.org/article/S0002-8223%2803%2900294-3/abstract
Huamn beings evolved on eating whatever they could, including meat. There is some science behind the idea that when Man began eating meat, his brain got bigger. It’s evolution. Hey!- vegans are against Darwin and evolution! I bet they think the Earth is flat, too! OMG VEGANS HATE SCIENCE!
(see what I did there?)
Jones: There is some evidence for the idea that meat-eating was related to increased brain size. Then again, there’s some evidence against it. See here:
http://paleovegan.blogspot.com/2010/08/rip-eth.html
Whatever the truth, now that you have a big brain, you also have the opportunity to make ethical choices about what to eat.
Evidence? Statistics? Have a look at these graphs and read the accompanying text: Number of Animals Killed to Produce One Million Calories in Eight Food Categories
http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/data/1mc/
Well this is all a load of twoddle. The meat you eat is fed the same damn grains you claim take thousands of lives when harvested. You’re killing far more animals by consuming both meat and veg because your meat ate plant matter that was harvested. A cow will eat far more vegetation, grains etc in it’s lifetime than a vegan can do in a few years.
Also, b12 is present in untainted soil and some plant matter (with mushrooms being the latest discovery). Lack of B12 is prevalent more in meat eaters than in vegans as studies have shown. Veganism also does not predate to 1944. It’s been going on thousands of years, just not had a name. Buddhists is a good example (many are vegans) as are many Indians in India vegan. Veganism is not new, never will be. Canines aren’t there for tearing flesh either. If it was they’d cut through cow hide (alive) easily.
Meat eaters will do anything to put down vegans when they know it is the only way forward. Guilty consciences abound.
Dumb founded indeed.
You never heard of grass fed meat, and you think teeth should be for eating live cows?
You have a source for the B12 studies?
They recently arrested a vegan mother in France. Her baby died of malnutrition from drinking her vegan milk.
Outside of anything else, this article sets up a straw man argument that numerous posters have happily picked up on and beaten to death.
I’ve known numerous vegetarians\vegans in my life (am in fact married to a vegetarian) and not one of them has ever condemned, attacked or in any way belittled me because of my diet (I’m an omnivore but eat meat in moderation). Not a single one. Not one of them has ever looked down their noses at me or tried to convert me. If asked about their diets, they would explain their reason for it and leave it at that. In fact, from my experience being around these folks, I’d say just the opposite of what is being claimed by many here is true. I’ve seen these same people condemned, attacked and belittled any number of times by omnivores simply because of their diet. You would think that these people had just burned the American flag in the middle of a 4th of July parade with some of the reactions they get from omnivores who discover that there’s a vegetarian\vegan in their midsts.
As well as all that, not one of these vegetarians\vegans has ever come off as morally superior to me (or anyone else I see them interact with). Personally, I think the bulk of this perception is based on over-hyped sensationalistic (and inaccurate) media stories with little basis in reality.
That’s not to say that there aren’t smug ones out there with an overly inflated sense of self importance. Sure there are. But from my experience, they must represent a very small minority of the vegetarian\vegan population. Painting all of these folks with the same broad brush just because of the actions of a few is no better than labelling the whole of the catholic church as child molesters based on the actions of a few sickos amongst their numbers.
“Me thinks the [carnivores] dost protest too much.”
More ad hominem than anything else going on here. Sadly people can’t seem to separate an idea from a person stating it.
If someone chooses to not eat corn is that a judgement on corn eaters? If someone chooses to not wear flannel is that a judgement on flannel wearers? If someone chooses to no work out at a gym is that a judgment on gym goers? Or is it a personal choice having nothing to do with what other people eat or wear or do? But just from me to you, I really DO hate all those corn-eating-flannel-wearing-gym-going jerks! Clearly they are morally inferior to me!
Just a reflection: Why is it that people who often bring in to the discussion that there was, and still are, vegetarians with low or no moral side to them, like Hitler, Gaddafi, Pol Pot and others that we would greatly would have benefitted never been born in to this world?
My question is: What is the relevance of them being vegetarians?
There were also men. Is it wrong to be a man?
They sometimes smiled. Is smiling a sign of an urge to dominated others no matter what, no matter the means?
They had 2 legs. Is it wrong to be able to walk?
They breath air. Should I hold my breath for the rest of my life to prove that I am not a psychopathic killer?
The Spanish inquisition asked questions that were impossible to answer yes or no to. This one has logical answer to it:
Is it not time to drop that non sense and step up the maturity of the discussion a wee bit?
It is indeed likely that in industrialized farming of crops, there are numerous casualties of animals that fall victim to the machinery deployed in the process. It’s hard to deny it, and it’s probably true that not many think about it.
However, what the writer probably willfully omits is the fact that these very same crops are far more often used for farm animal feed than for direct human feed. This includes up to 80% of all crops grown in the US. So in the light of this, a person who consumes the end product in animal form like beef or chicken, not only contributes to the deaths of the insects and amphibians in the field during the corn harvest but also to:
a) many times these, as the amount of corn used to get one pound of beef or pork is so much higher than the amount of corn that would feed one vegan with the same calories.
b) to additional deaths of animals that are mixed up with the corn as feed for farm animals – and that could simply be other ground-up farm animals or additional smaller creatures by way of processing the feed.
c) billions of insects that die in the factory dens when the pesticides and antibiotics are applied to the closely confined farm animals.
d) the farm animals themselves at a count of 10 billions in the US alone – per year – and that does not include sea animals.
e) I am sure I’m overlooking a whole slew of other processing- and time-induced killings as the creation of animal food for human consumption is so much more time and resource intensive. And I will not even talk about the endless deaths resulting from the excess fuel, water, air pollution, soil degradation, deforestation, antibiotics use, etc., used to raise farm animals for human food!
Now, in the light of this, to claim that ethical vegans may have more animal deaths on their conscience than conventional meat-eaters is utter and complete nonsense!!
I am not saying that our diet is completely death-free unless we grow our own stuff and practice a Jain-like ahimsa lifestyle, but the attempt to guilt ethical vegans into stunned speechlessness about these “revolutionary findings” is simply laughable.
I am open to discuss what would truly be the lifestyle with the lowest possible death count by tons, and I can objectively support the idea that a person living in the forest who occasionally hunts and only for sustenance, not using factory-farmed meat, and growing and harvesting their own crops and veggies sustainably, may have a lower death toll on their sleeve than a well-meaning ethical vegan who eats conventionally grown crops.
BUT – unless we introduce mandatory spay and neuter of all human animals, it is a highly unrealistic scenario, due to our rapidly growing world population and the lack of any serious effort to halt the total depletion of our natural resources. And we are not even counting the many thousands of species that our glut for meat and dairy products has already rendered extinct – with many more following by the day!
Now, I guess we can say that we ethical vegans try to cause as little harm as possible, even though it is not entirely cruelty-free all the way down the food chain, but to argue that our attempt at causing less harm is hypocritical and overrated shows a very ill-conceived attempt to yet again justify the “American way of life”, which is based on excessive gluttony and total disrespect for all life in general – human and non-human, as we are deliberately killing ourselves and everything around us with our animal-based food choices.
Lucky are those that can afford a lifestyle of complete sustainability and true ahimsa, but for the majority of us ethical vegans, we are at least aware of the harm our food choices are causing and we respectfully try to tread carefully around it – as much as we reasonably can. That is more than I can say about the 97% that constitute the non-veg population in this country.
Well said
-another vegan
Eat a plant, starve an animal.
There are many reasons to consider a vegan diet. Consumers have the right to know where their food comes from and how animals are treated before they reach their plates. This is a good, short video to watch about this topic: MeatVideo.com. Or visit ChooseVeg.com for more information on adapting a more compassionate lifestyle.
Veganism is not only about food. A vegan is someone who, knowing it is impossible to accomplish it perfectly, try not to use animals for their own benefit. The article missunderstands “ethics” for “perfect god-like ethics”. It is as if some peacefull guy who try to remain peacefull is accused of getting angry some time. We are humans, for god’s sake¡
Anyway, even if the article is right, which I think is not, and vegans are all stupid people, what are you proposing then for animal suffering? Any solution? Any idea? Or are you just writing all this to not have to think about the philosophical and ethical problem of animal suffering?
From reading through the comments, I find the prejudice towards vegans and vegetarians quite strange. The one’s I’ve encountered were no different to the average person. If anything, these said commentators seem to be the defensive and hostile ones eager to dish out condescending mockery.
Additionally, you all seem to have little understanding of animal rights theory. If you are genuinely interested in better understanding veganism I suggest you read into speciesism, equal consideration of interests from author such as Gary Francione and Peter Singer.
Also, your ‘facts’ on vegan health seem to be at odds with the plethora of new public health spokespersons advocate a vegan diet as the healthiest diet eg, Colin Campbell, Dean Ornish, Caldwell Essylstein.
Who cares about conceit or arrogance? It’s a human trait that has nothing to do with diet.
Are vegans misinformed, gullible, and misguided? Of course they are… and so are most humans regardless of their diet.
This post does not make a serious ethical argument against veganism. It looks only at the number of animals killed, which isn’t the main concern for any vegetarian/vegan I’ve ever talked to (and I’ve talked to a lot). The far greater concern is the conditions in which the animals are kept throughout their life. So the post completely misses the point of what drives most ethical vegans and vegetarians.
I’ve been a vegan for about 20 years. That’s my choice. I made it for me and my life. You have made choices for yourself. Good for you. It’s good to make life choices.
I have a friend who used to be an omnivore and he used to mock my choice. I ignored it. Now he has been a vegan for two years. He began hinting that me wearing my dead father’s swede coat (Dad was the only animal that had to die for me to have this) was “sending the wrong message.” He’s a self-righteous vegan.
I suspect; specifically owing to the poorly referenced, rice farmer; that this article was the result of the author living with a self-righteous vegan in a post-secondary roomie situation (stir-fry surprise is a staple to the new vegan who just left home.) So, this article seems to be a one-sided response to one self-righteous individual. I hear you man: self-righteous vegans are hard to take. I’m asking only that you ask yourself two small questions: 1) Am I actually adding to the discussion or dismissing something because I resent self-righteous vegans? 2) If I am allowing resentment to be my muse, am I truly allowed to discuss nutrition?
That second point may seem odd, but let me lay some coolio science on you. Resentment is an emotion. Emotions are combinations of neurotransmitters. Addiction is the result of chemicals, such as neurotransmitters, being present in the body in large levels for a prolonged period. Every cell in your body has receptors for these chemicals and, if you fulfill the criteria of the last sentence, when those cell die off and are replaced, they will develop more receptors for said chemical. Eventually these receptors begin to replace the receptors for nutrients. The result is starvation on a cellular level.
Bottom line: Don’t be self-righteous no matter what you eat. Ignore self-righteous people, no matter what they eat.
Now, let the love out folks. It’s just food. Like Leonard Cohen says:
A person who eats meat
wants to get his teeth into something
A person who does not eat meat
wants to get his teeth into something else
If these thoughts interest you for even a moment
you are lost
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REPLY TO comments #98 – #106 The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.
Your arguments against veganism are flimsy and ignorant. As with any mass, mechanized production and harvesting of a food supply, there will be creatures who get in the way and are harmed or killed. And, yes the most idealistic method of food production, would be to produce your own in small quantities to prevent the need for use of mechanical equipment that causes harm or death to creatures, but our societies prohibit such options. Thus, we vegans are left with no alternative other than to purchase our food supply from the local grocery markets. Furthermore, production and harvesting of vegan food sources resulting in the harm and killing of creatures is not intentional, or exploitative as is the meat and dairy industries.
Tremendous issues here. I am very happy to see your article. Thanks so much and I’m looking forward to touch you. Will you kindly drop me a mail?
Impressive how many of the vegans commenting above fail to even recognize the simple fact that feeding grain to cows is animal cruelty on its own. Kind of further proves the point that they have little interest in the actual well being of the animals themselves.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions…
It’s completely disingenuous to compare the impact of a pound of rice with the impact of a pound of WILD venison. What percentage of meat consumed in the United States is hunted in the wild? My guess would be a very small amount. The truth is that livestock are fed farmed grains. Therefore, it IS possible to prove the claim that eating grains causes fewer deaths than eating meat. It takes more than a pound of grain to raise a pound of meat. To say that vegans “don’t even try” is unfair. Stop worrying about what other people do or don’t put in their mouths.
here’s an article with actually sources other than just linking to the author’s own book for sale. http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/data/1mc
this article sounds too emotional and opinionated to be taken seriously.
Does that mean that any emotionally charged debate is inaccurate?
There is a morally relevant difference between intentionally breeding/slaughtering animals and accidentally killing animals when harvesting crops. Tens of thousands of people are killed in car accidents each year. Is it as morally wrong, then, to support the auto industry as it would be to support an industry that breeds and kills humans for food?
Do you see how that’s analogous to the situation of animals accidentally being killed when harvesting crops vs. animals being intentionally killed to please the human taste bud.
Ok first I’ll admit I didn’t read the whole article. I skimmed the first few paragraphs then lost interest. Can I just say firstly, that although it may be near impossible for me to live without using animal products, at least I’m trying. Which is more than can be said for most people. Secondly the deaths that occur to animals as a result of crop farming are largely unintentional. The act of physically slaughtering and animal to harvest it’s body parts is completely different and morally separate to accidentally or unknowingly killing them in crop harvests. Besides, what do you think livestock eat? In order to feed the cattle you need to grow food for them and that food is sprayed with pest control and mice etc killed (one if the biggest causes of deforestation is the creation of farms to grow food for livestock, not human consumption). So it’s not a choice of either kill farm animals or (unintentionally) kill insects and small animals. It’s a choice of either some small animals die or some small animals die and cattle get slaughtered. It’s about reducing avoidable deaths. Besides these small animals aren’t exploited and factory farmed so again, not the same.
Can I also add, and I’m playing armchair psychologist here admittedly; but I feel as though the author is trying to convince themselves first and foremost. Like they feel a need to justify to why they continue to eat meat. Why get so defensive about it? If people want to eat plants or whatever how does that impact you? It feels like they’re just adopting a ‘there’s nothing I can do so why bother’ approach which is wrong. Eating meat is not a necessity anymore. There were thousands of years where it was, and yes in life threatening circumstances even today it may be on occasion. By in western society at least we have more than enough nutritious food to survive on and then some. If you need there are even supplements. So eating meat comes down to a choice, a luxury. And whenever something comes down to choice rather than necessity a persons belief system will influence that choice. You’re choosing death and suffering. And not because you need to, because you want to.
Illogical, irrational and unethical. That pretty well sums up the ethos of the carrion-eaters. (The only thing a modern human without tools could eat in the wild is insects and carrion.) A point thatseems to elude most of the advocates of the “omnivore” diet. Okay by me, enjoy your colon cancer, heart attacks and strokes. Evolution eliminates the misguided.
27 year old man here.
Some people do not eat animal flesh (beef, chicken, pork, fish) just because they do not like the taste/after-taste/way it feels in mouth/thought of eating animal. I’m like that. I don’t identify as vegetarian because that usually implies some categorical ethical objection to humans using animals. I’m not like that. I tried so many times in so many ways to enjoy it but I don’t. I love vegetarian food. I eat chicken eggs from cage free/certified humane sources. I hate cheese. Meanwhile, my medical career requires me to perform a few experiments on mice and rats. I wear wool, sheepskin, silk, cashmere, and leather (shoes and belts only). I love my cats and like to play with my friend’s pet chickens.
Point being…not all vegetarians do it for ethical reasons.