The quick answer is there are numerous small animals running around wheat fields that get killed by the various machines that are used to harvest wheat (e.g. mice).
Humane Society I will start a thread about certain "hunting preserves" sometime soon, maybe - bascially get everyone's take on those places where you can pay to go shoot captive animals for sport.
Shouldn't someone have posted the "why did He make them out of meat" line by now? My view on PETA...um...they are absolutley, positively, the biggest group of losers in the world. When I see the power dancers wearing those shirts it makes me hate the Rockets organization with a passion.
Almost as good as "Prauge....Czech it out!" There was a guy in my dorm, freshman year that had the above phrase on a teeshirt and a seperate one that read: "I LOVE animals....and they taste great too!" Two of the coolest I have ever seen
Please do, as a hunter, I want to trade the captive animals in those places for the hunters who go there. I am a "meat" hunter--I like having Venison, Dove and Quail in the freezer and it is part of my normal diet--ya can't eat the horns...
Not really surprised. This is why I have always viewed the extreme(?) left's fight for civil liberties with suspicion. I deeply suspect they really are unable to tell the difference between human rights and animal rights, or at least refuse to differentiate them. All this kind of reasoning really boils down to is empathy. Unfortunately, empathy is just a feeling. It WILL change with time. What happens if in the future one race of people become notorious for 9/11 type attacks or.... you get the picture. Do their liberties cease because we don't FEEL like they deserve it anymore? I think their arguments for animal rights (and human rights) are very very weak
Compelling arguments from the pro PETA side. To me however, it comes down to what someone said earlier, I think Hayes. With the design of our teeth, it is obvious to me that some greater being intended that we incorporate meat in our diet. I agree that "torture" is wrong but at some point it should take a back seat to basic practicality. I guess I could go as far as to agreeing with their stance on the industry's current practices of treatment towards animals in order to reap maximum benefits but to advocate the outright abandonment of eating animals I simply cannot do. It is who we were intended to be as humans. Just my two cents.
I just gained a whole new appreciation for you. I agree with you in principle, but I personally could never do this.
Cool - I wonder about this - I am not a hunting guy, so far be it from me to suggest I know about this - it seems like a real hunter would be put off by trapping essentially domestic animals and then - almost literally - shooting fish in a barrell. What's the point? I guess my next question is, should they even be legal? I dont know much on this, but it seems amazing. I was startled to read it, because to me, the protoypical hunter is at least out for sport - this seems like stacking the competition so heavily that it ruins the sport of it. As for all the "leftists, losers, PETA sucks" blah blah blah comments, I guess I guess that I feel like you are ducking the argument - that some treatment of animals, at factory farms in particular, is remarkably cruel. Is it okay to for us as a species to treat other species the way we treat chickens, cows, etc.? Yes, humans are sufferring, and it should be stopped. Yes, PETA has weird PR sometimes. Yes, all of us left-of-centers are homosexual abortion-loving pedophiles who want to spend your hard earned tax dollars on welfare for other homosexual abortion-locing pedophiles who do not wish to work. I grant you all of that. But. But but but. Is it okay for us to treat animals the way they are treated en route to our dinner plates? Is that treatment cruel? If so: is cruelty to animals okay? If not: why is it not cruel? Chance, if you dont mind me singling you out - I consider you to be the most-thoughtful-poster-with-the-least-thougtful-post in this thread so far. With all due (authentic) respect, I would be pleased if you would take first swing at that.
Chucky Brown: My initian question would be what exactly are we advocating? *That torture and cruelty towards animals should be stopped...? or *That merely eating an animal is in itself considered torture and must be stopped. I can get on board with the former. There's some cruel practices out there - you're McDonald's live skinning example comes to mind. But if we're outright talking about labeling carnivoreism (is that a word?) as a practice as indecent and wrong - well, I have to back away from the table, so to speak. I think the issue at hand in this thread is the former, but to those advocating the latter argument, I would ask two questions: A) Why do other animals eat other animals? I mean they are programmed to do so, so it must be natural. Then, why is it wrong that we as humans do so? B) What would happen to the ecoysystem and balance in natural animal populations if we adopted outright vegeterian lifestyles. Surely things would run amuck, no? C) Our teeth
Depends on the animal, IMO. I have a real problem with anyone hunting drugged or caged animals, yet I've got no problem with going to a fish farm and pulling them out of the water. Then again, I'm an awful fisherman.
Dammit, I posted a big chunk of one of those studies on the first page! I couldn't have 1.8 billion bunny rabbit deaths a year on my hands, so no vegetarianism for me. Although one of my best lifelong friends has been a vegan since early in college and he is a badass cook (i would say out of necessity but i have other vegan friends that can't cook worth a damn). But I do agree we could reform some of the current practices to be less cruel. Not sure how you get around veal...mmmmmm veal..... but we could make all beef kobe/Wagyu - hell feed them good grain, all the beer they can drink, massages....that ain't too bad in comparison.
Have you ever seen the prices on Kobe beef? It's outrageous. Which leads to my original point: Until we can combine more humane practices with cost efficiency, nothing will change. It wouldn't be practical. If we can find a way to more humanely slaughter livestock for a relatively equal cost to current conditions, you will see a dramatic change. PETA's, or any other animal rights group, should be spending their contributions on this type of research. Until they do, they're really just spitting into the wind.
First, I don't believe any innocent creature "deserves" suffering and I don't place relative value judgments on varying species. And I don't believe human beings inherently enjoy special status because of our special cognizance. Animals can't write poetry or practice medicine but they can't wreck the environment or blow up whole countries either. Where I'm concerned we are all animals, so I won't place a higher inherent value on a human than a fish. I know it's not a popular opinion, but it's a sincere one. Second, I am anti-abortion and pro-choice. I am also anti-meat and pro-choice about that too. But I don't equate the difficult decision of whether or not to carry a baby to term with the difficult decision of whether to have tofu instead of steak. The argument is often made that some women have abortions as a matter of convenience. That is probably true sometimes. I think the incidences of abortion as a matter of convenience are few, but I won't pretend to know for sure. It is a natural fact though that every single time an American eats meat it is a matter of convenience. The only difficult decision there is whether or not to deny oneself maximum pleasure. I think the decision in the face of that is a wildly selfish one. I believe future generations will regard it as a heinous one.
I kind of disagree with the "in the future eating animals will be outlawed etc." idea. While I think should be mindful, hunting is tribal. Life feeds on life. That is fundamental. Even when you just boil water millions of tiny microorganisms die. "Joseph Campbell noticed that in the Neanderthal "cave bear shrines," the cave bear was often eating its own femur. I remember watching him talk about this on the "Mythos" miniseries, saying that this reflected the Neanderthals' realization of the most profound contradiction contradiction in human experience. To live, own must kill. One must eat in order to live, and eating requires something to die, be it plant or animal. From this contradiction, the Neanderthals developed the idea of a cannibalistic, pantheistic God, a unified Creation feeding on itself. From this concept, it is believed all human religions are derived. Philosophical thought was a later refinement of religious thought, which was a by-product of hunting." "One of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives" ~ Joseph Campbell
Great question, definitely the former. It would be very hard to argue, evolutionairly or otherwise, that eating meat has not been adaptive for human advancement. Whether or now we are "meant" to animals which were once living is a distraction from what is - to me - the real argument. Its not <i>that</i> we eat meat, it is <i> how</i> we eat it that, to me, is unconscionable. Where my dad grew up, they killed meat by hand, and said some sort of prayer when killing it, as to acknowledge it was a living creature which held some intrinsic meaning, and that they were blessed and humble to be eating it. I can live with that. I would not chose to do it myself, but I get that. But we are not doing that or anything in the spirit of what we were "meant" to do. I feel like if we say "we are destined to torture and be cruel to our fellow creatures as to save $1.24 on a pound of beef" or whatever, I would say that is a pretty bleak and cycnical interpretation of what is "natural." We do not have be as cruel a species as we are, and I am not about to surrender to our most inhumane practices as "how it is supposed to be." That bleak interpretation is where it gets tempting to compare the plight of brutalized animals to that of brutalized humans - that this argument that "death and sufferring and misery are just nature and fate working their course" is a tool for some incredibly un-natural practices (as are denial, misiniformation, use of language, fear tactics, and diversion). I think that is where this PETA thing was going - that those same tools used to rationalize cruelty to fellow man is used to rationalzie cruelty to fellow animals. And it is inherently wrong. So to answer your question, Cab, definitely the former point is what I am advocating, and discussion of the latter point clouds the issue of animal cruelty.
A. Because they have to and we don't. Further, we have evolved significantly since the time we had to hunt to survive. Our digestive tracts in particular have grown to a length that is more than the most extreme herbivore in nature and our teeth have softened significantly as well. Bottom line though: once we had to (as all other carnivorous and omnivorous animals do now), now we don't. We do it out of choice. B. Most of the animals we as Americans eat are bred specifically for that purpose. If we aren't breeding animals for slaughter, this isn't an issue. I hardly think we're talking about wild animals here.
But all animals die. And in a lot of situations, animal population has to be controlled, in large part to allow healthy growth of the very species we have to control. I find it wasteful to simply let these carcasses rot, as well. There are better solutions than "all or nothing". Like with a lot of forests, they are planting new trees with a specific life span of IIRC 50 years before they can be cut down again. We could easily put a certain acceptable life-span on livestock, as well. If we find research that allow these animals to be treated humanely, obviously not very difficult due to all of the dairy cows living pretty humane lives, then I see it as a win-win compromise for everyone. Obviously you can't appease everyone, but this seems like the best solution to me.
Just for a little fun, and anatomical education, the human physiology is far more conducive to a vegetarian diet. 1. Our teeth are primarily rounded and squared like herbivores. Are canines are no different than those in the great apes. 2. Our saliva produces carbohydrate-digesting enzymes consistent with herbivores. 3. Our colon is shaped in the mold of herbivores, it does not have the muscle that most carnivores do. This is one explanation for the higher colon cancer rates among people who eat meat as opposed to vegetarians. The info comes from this site:http://www.vegsource.com/veg_faq/anatomy.pdf
