The Vegetarian Myth

Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Commander Borg said:
Well i didn´t really decide to not eat meat, as i said i was born as a vegetarian. And because i have never eaten it, i can´t just start now.

Why not? Just approaching this logically, why can't you start something you've never done for your entire life? I never at duck my entire life until a few years ago. I simply tried it - it was easy. Similarly I ate bread my whole life, now I don't. I just decided not to and voila - here I am. I also know people who were "Christians" their entire lives and now they're not. Just because you were raised a certain way, it doesn't mean change is impossible. What seems to be the issue here isn't that it was how you were raised, it's that you don't WANT to, because of the killing of animals. That's a whole different thing.

And if you really love animals it even makes it harder.

But what about this?

"Steven Davis, a professor of animal science at Oregon State University, has presented an argument against veganism, one that has been discussed in cover stories in Time magazine, The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. Davis argues that the least harm principle, a moral concept endorsed by Tom Regan, does not require giving up all meat, because a plant-based diet would not kill fewer animals than one containing beef from grass-fed ruminants. Davis notes that cultivating the crops and plants that make up a meat-free diet also kills animals: When a tractor traverses a field to plow, disc, cultivate, apply fertilizer or pesticide, or to harvest, some field animals are accidentally destroyed. Based on a study finding that wood mouse populations dropped from 25 per hectare to 5 per hectare after harvest (attributed to migration and mortality) Davis estimates that 10 animals per hectare are killed from crop farming every year. If all 120,000,000 acres (490,000 km²) of cropland in the continental United States were used for a vegan diet then approximately 500 million animals would die each year. But if half of the cropland were converted to ruminant pastureland, by contrast, then Davis estimates that only 900,000 animals would die each year (assuming people switched from the 8 billion poultry killed each year to beef, lamb, and dairy products). In this way, Davis concludes, a diet containing some meat would kill fewer animals than an all plant diet."

_http://jyte.com/cl/vegetarian-diets-kill-more-animals-than-diets-based-on-beef-lamb-and-dairy
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Well i am strong against this big farms with all their machinery. I would prefer more people plant their own food. I know that is not possible because of the big cities we have now on this planet, and they are growing bigger. Man has lost the connection to nature. And if people would start to not eat gluten anymore, wouldn't it also make a difference in farming ? Then there wouldn't be any reason for those gigantic crop farms.
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Commander Borg said:
Well i am strong against this big farms with all their machinery.

That doesn't seem to stop you from consuming their products.
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Commander Borg said:
Well i am strong against this big farms with all their machinery. I would prefer more people plant their own food. I know that is not possible because of the big cities we have now on this planet, and they are growing bigger. Man has lost the connection to nature. And if people would start to not eat gluten anymore, wouldn't it also make a difference in farming ? Then there wouldn't be any reason for those gigantic crop farms.

Can you see the bigger picture based on the quote I included in my reply? We live in an environment where we can only live by consuming other beings. Whether they're veggies or animals, that's nature. It's harsh, but it's reality. Even if you're a vegetarian, that lifestyle contributes to the killing of animals. There's really no way around it. The only real choice we have is how we approach it. Do we kill animals in an inhumane way, or with respect? Do we give each thing its due? If you look at the kind of societies that were "in touch with nature", they pretty much all ate meat. But the difference is that hunter/gatherers understood nature, that we only live because of the death of something else. That is a humbling thing to really understand. Not eating meat doesn't absolve a person from this responsibility, just like simply not voting does not absolve a person of responsibility for what their country does in their name. This is an STS world. We can't escape it. All we can do is choose to maneuver ourselves in it as responsibly as possible.
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Can you see the bigger picture based on the quote I included in my reply? We live in an environment where we can only live by consuming other beings. Whether they're veggies or animals, that's nature. It's harsh, but it's reality. Even if you're a vegetarian, that lifestyle contributes to the killing of animals. There's really no way around it. The only real choice we have is how we approach it. Do we kill animals in an inhumane way, or with respect? Do we give each thing its due? If you look at the kind of societies that were "in touch with nature", they pretty much all ate meat. But the difference is that hunter/gatherers understood nature, that we only live because of the death of something else. That is a humbling thing to really understand. Not eating meat doesn't absolve a person from this responsibility, just like simply not voting does not absolve a person of responsibility for what their country does in their name. This is an STS world. We can't escape it. All we can do is choose to maneuver ourselves in it as responsibly as possible.


If you read my first post again you will hardly find me saying anything against eating meat, most of my friends eat meat and as i said before, everybody should be free to eat what he wants. I am not saying eating meat is wrong. But i have a strong feeling against the meat industry and that's what i wrote. They are destroying our nature and our health in the way how they act. For me killing other beings is wrong, but i never said that it couldn't be right for somebody else. Killing somebody else for consumption is a strong STS activity, like the 4D STS use us for generating their negative energy, but that is only my opinion, sure i could be wrong. And even Plants are living beings too, for me it makes a difference if i kill an animal or i take an apple from the tree, a carrot out of the earth, a pumpkin or what ever, because if i wouldn't do that, it would die off by itself. Most, if not all vegetable die in the end of the season. It's different with trees for example. And i also have a strong feeling ageist companies like Monsanto & co, so it is not specially the meet industry i am against, it is the hole food industry on this planet. Maybe some of you got me a little wrong and better understand what i wanted to say now, i hope so.
The other thing i am wondering about is that for a lot of people on this planet it makes a difference what kind of animal is to be killed. Some of them are respected as wonderfull beings and Lot's of money is spend on them, other are only good for consumption. But again, i didn't say that's wrong, i simply don't understand (due to my cognitive difficulties and my smaller brain) So maybe one of you can tell me why an elephant is a better animal than just a cow or a dirty pig. And i am not sure if i as a vegetarian contribute to the killing of animals, because i grow my own vegetables and look very carfully what i buy. I don't buy in supermarkets for example if i can avoid it and prefer little healthfood stores.
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Hi Commander Borg
It's so funny while reading your post(s) I could see myself in the past!Indeed I have been too a vegan "Ayatollah" twenty years ago and the words,arguments and sentences you used seemed to go out of my own mouth; the debates we had at home with friends were always imbued with passion,aggressivity and fighting spirit although we led a rasta lifestyle,growing all our food,smoking(a lot)pot and so on...
During the pregnancy of our second child,back in 89,we fell true vegans,my wife and I.The birth of my daughter faced nearly disaster,and problems with her have been continual all her childhood.When I look back to these years I really can see now how bad we felt at these times,although we strongly believed we were on the right path.
I don't remember what changes have occured but step by step we started again eating meat,firstly our own chicken then red meat from neighbour farms,but I can tell you we feel much balanced and "cognitivly efficient" now than before.
When we've been aware how evil were gluten and dairies same beliefs patterns arose and again we had to do many reassessments.That's the way evolution "Works".Maybe painful but truthful.
Best regards ;D
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Commander Borg said:
For me killing other beings is wrong, but i never said that it couldn't be right for somebody else. Killing somebody else for consumption is a strong STS activity, like the 4D STS use us for generating their negative energy, but that is only my opinion, sure i could be wrong.

Hi CBorg,

I was a pretty hardcore vegetarian as well a few years ago so I can relate to your train of thoughts.

The thing is, for the moment we're stuck in 3D STS and it took me time to realize that by trying to pull out of this reality by chosing an other way to eat than what I am supposed to is also STS.
No matter what you do, you're still 3D STS and you can only try to lean toward an STO profile.

I agree the meat industry is pretty psychopathic to me but the root of the problem is not meat in itself, it's how psychopaths have taken over this world and that we accept this day after day.

Not eating meat seems like a small act for a better world, a political act even, but it does not help much in the end except to maybe ease our conscience that we're doing something, that's how I see but I could be wrong.
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Commander Borg said:
If you read my first post again you will hardly find me saying anything against eating meat, most of my friends eat meat and as i said before, everybody should be free to eat what he wants. I am not saying eating meat is wrong. But i have a strong feeling against the meat industry and that's what i wrote.

You just contradicted yourself. Do you see that? You said:

1) I didn't say anything against eating meat.
2) Everybody should be free to eat what s/he wants.
3) I'm not saying eating meat is wrong.

and then: 4) I have a strong feeling AGAINST EATING MEAT AND THAT'S WHAT I WROTE.

That is, thought number 4 totally contradicted the first three concepts.

The fact is, your entire post was a diatribe against eating meat that did not, in any way, shape, form or fashion, suggest that you thought that everyone should be free to eat what they want. It was a condemnation and a declaration that eating meat was wrong, against nature, destructive to the environment, and suggested strongly that anybody who didn't get that was obviously not a good person. It was just one paramoralism after another.

This is another example of your cognitive difficulties: that you cannot even SEE when you are being incoherent.
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Laura said:
Commander Borg said:
If you read my first post again you will hardly find me saying anything against eating meat, most of my friends eat meat and as i said before, everybody should be free to eat what he wants. I am not saying eating meat is wrong. But i have a strong feeling against the meat industry and that's what i wrote.

You just contradicted yourself. Do you see that? You said:

1) I didn't say anything against eating meat.
2) Everybody should be free to eat what s/he wants.
3) I'm not saying eating meat is wrong.

and then: 4) I have a strong feeling AGAINST EATING MEAT AND THAT'S WHAT I WROTE.

Well i didn´t wrote that, i wonder where it comes from, please read again, you are putting words in my mouth so to say. I wrote that i have a strong feeling against the meat industry, you can look it up. That is a difference. With meat industry i mean chicken farms with 200.000 chickens in one farm, 10.000 pigs who are eating themselfs allready, cows who have never been outside the farmhouse, raised on concrete, etc i guess you know the conditions most of the animals have to suffer.

Laura said:
That is, thought number 4 totally contradicted the first three concepts.

The fact is, your entire post was a diatribe against eating meat that did not, in any way, shape, form or fashion, suggest that you thought that everyone should be free to eat what they want. It was a condemnation and a declaration that eating meat was wrong, against nature, destructive to the environment, and suggested strongly that anybody who didn't get that was obviously not a good person. It was just one paramoralism after another.

I didn´s say most of that, that might be your thoughts. I was talking about the meet industry. Maybe it is a language problem, i am german and sometimes might not find the right words. I guess for you meat and the meat industry is the same, it looks like that.

Laura said:
This is another example of your cognitive difficulties: that you cannot even SEE when you are being incoherent.

Mod's note: Edited to fix the quotation boxes
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Well i looked it up in the dictionary, Massentierhaltung means : n. factory farming, extensive and intensive industrialized raising of animals (livestock, poultry and fish) That's what i meant by meat industry.
That's all i have to say on this topic for now.
I will start stop eating gluten for a while from today on, maybe it increases my thinking abilities.
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

On animal slaughtering, here is an interesting post from Stonybrook Farm:

Recently an environmental science and photography student from NYU came out to the farm to work on a farm to table project. She is also a vegan. In addition to seeing my farm, we planned to visit my local slaughterhouse, and a local farm where I get the grain I feed to the pigs.

After a tour of the farm, we had about half an hour before it was time to leave for the slaughterhouse, so we went inside for a cup of coffee, during which I brought up the fact that she is a vegan, and questioned why she would choose a livestock farm as her farm to table project. Her answer was very reasonable and straightforward: if people are going to eat meat, the animals should be humanely raised and killed. As a vegan, she was willing to accept that most people would continue to eat meat; she just hoped that the animals wouldn’t come from factory farms and wouldn’t be killed in industrial slaughterhouses.

After our cup of coffee, we hopped into her car and started off for the slaughterhouse, which is about twenty minutes from my place. On the way, I reiterated that I thought she would have fairly limited access to the kill floor. My expectation was that she would get to stand in the doorway and take pictures from there.
However, much to my surprise, when we showed up and I introduced the student to the slaughterman running the kill floor, he immediately invited her in. First the student had to don a white coat and a hard hat, which she happily did. She, a vegan, was almost giddy with the excitement of being given access to the whole kill floor.

There were only two rules: 1) One is not allowed to take pictures of the USDA inspector (a USDA rule) and 2) She was not allowed to take pictures of the act of stunning the animal or slitting its throat (a slaughterhouse rule, promulgated not out of a feeling that they have anything to hide, but out of a justified paranoia of potentially being portrayed in a bad light).

As she stepped past the threshold of the door onto the kill floor, I said, “just let me know when you’ve had enough, and we’ll go over to the cutting room.” In order to keep the kill floor from getting crowded, I hung out in the doorway and watched from there.

For the next half hour or so, the photography student poured over the kill floor, snapping photos of everything, only pausing when the slaugtherman brought a new pig onto the floor to kill. But, rather than turn away for the killing, since she couldn’t photograph it anyway, she watched, intently, as the slaughterman placed the captive bolt gun against the pigs forehead and activated it.

BANG! about as loud as a cap gun, and the pig dropped like a stone each time. Then she watched just as intently as the slaughterman put down the captive bolt gun and picked up his knife, which he deftly and expertly plunged into the pig causing the blood to gush out in a huge stream. A moment later, which is why you have to act fast when killing pigs, the pig’s death throes started, which, compared to other animals, is very violent. The pig, unconscious from the blow of the captive bolt gun, and quickly dying and then already dead, thrashes around like mad. It is in fact the most difficult part of watching a pig killed because it is so easy to imagine that the pig is thrashing around because it is in pain (and, I grant the possibility, though remote, that we do not properly understand the physiology of death and the pig is in pain, in which case what we are doing is very much an ethical transgression). Nevertheless, as soon as the slaughterman pulled the knife out of the pig and stepped away, the student rushed in to start snapping photos again.

She took pictures of everything: of the moments immediately following the kill, of the pig being hoisted up by a hind leg to finish bleeding out and then be hosed off, of the pig being skinned, of the pig’s head being cut off, of the pig being disemboweled, of the pig being split in half with a bone saw, and finally of the pig halves being run down the rail to the cooler.

The whole time, too, she was aware that these were my pigs that were being killed. Not the very pigs that she had just seen alive and well on my farm, but the same pigs, nonetheless. They were not abstract pigs. They had faces and attitudes and personalities. They had lives that she had witnessed and documented just before seeing them killed.

I thought she would never tire of the kill floor, and I think she might not have. It seemed that everything attracted her. When not much was going on, she pointed her camera down at the floor and snapped pictures of spatters of blood and bits of skin and fat, the detritus of death.
Every now and then, however, she would look at me, and say, “just a few more minutes.” Until finally, she walked over to me and said, “OK. I’m ready.”
From there we moved on to the cutting room, where for our safety, we had to stand behind the cutting table, between it and the wall. There is a cinder block on the floor, the primary purpose of which is to put the middle leg of the table on at the end of the day after it has been scrubbed clean and hosed off to drain, but it also makes an excellent perch from which to take photographs.

The cutting room is a very different place than the kill floor. Everything is pretty familiar. As the carcasses come out of the cooler, they are quickly broken down into cuts that we are used to seeing in packages at the supermarket. Nevertheless, she snapped away, just as excitedly as she had on the kill floor.
After about a half an hour in the cutting room, we were ready to go. We said our thanks and left.

On the way back to my place we were pretty quiet, but at one point she said, “You know, it wasn’t that bad.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “My first time there, I was surprised at how easy it was to watch my animals be killed. After thinking about it, I realized that it is because the place, the whole place, everything about it, from the tile walls, to the hard hats, to the stainless steel, to the chains and pulleys of the hoists, to the attitudes of the people working on the floor, is designed and organized to do the job. Somehow that design and organization makes it so that on the kill floor, killing seems perfectly normal, natural, even.

You don’t even need to distance yourself from it. You can watch, you can stand there and say to yourself, okay, this is my pig, a pig that I cared for three times a day for five months, you can even recognize the pig — oh, look, that’s that pig that liked to have its belly scratched so much that it would topple over onto its side as soon as you started rubbing it — and then BANG! the pig drops like a stone and the wheels of the machine, yes, a killing machine, start rolling, so smoothly that there is no question whether it is right or wrong. From start to finish it is exactly as it should be. Simply put, it just is. You know what I mean?” I turned my head to look at her while she was driving.

“Yeah,” she said, nodding her head slowly, “I do. It wasn’t that bad,” she said again.

_http://stonybrookfarm.wordpress.com/
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Maybe this lady has been eating meat before becoming a vegan and stopped eating animal products because of health reasons. There are lots of different reasons why people decide to not eat meat or milk products anymore as you will know. But she must be a quite interesting person for sure.
Thanx
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Commander Borg,

Here is a woman who has been in your shoes, but has since stepped back. It might be worth a listen.

With best regards,

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/grok-the-talk/2011/01/26/the-vegetarian-myth-with-lierre-keith-hour-1-grok-the-talk-12711

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/grok-the-talk/2011/02/03/the-vegetarian-myth-with-lierre-keith-hour-2-grok-the-talk-1124
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

I have been listening to the radio show with Lierre Keith and a lot of what she said makes sense. I am totally with her what she says about the problems with agricultural farming. But what i have been reading until now is that most of the farming (mainly corn and soy) is grown for animal consumption. It even is now mostly GMO. In Brazil they cut down the rainforest to raise cattle or plant soy to feed the cattle. The environment there is not optimal for growing soy so they need huge amounts of fertilizers and pesticides what sure is not the best for the soil. Even here in Europe most of the corn is not grown for human consumption. Where i live there are Corn fields everywhere, all around. This is mostly harvested to feed animals. I wonder if it is the right thing to feed cattle with soy and corn, usually i guess they would eat grass and herbs. They also produce fuel from plants now.
The problem might not so much be eating meat or not, the problem is the industrial farming, that is killing everything. Lierre Keith is also pointing to this issue in the second part of the show.
 
Re: The Vegetarian Stance

Commander Borg said:
The problem might not so much be eating meat or not, the problem is the industrial farming, that is killing everything. Lierre Keith is also pointing to this issue in the second part of the show.

That's exactly it, Commander Borg. As Keith points out, the issue with all the destructive crops of corn and soy being used to feed animals is not an issue with meat eating, it's an issue with factory farming! Cows eat grass! There's no reason to be cutting down rainforest to be growing corn and soy to feed them, except to line the pockets of the industrial farming operations and, of course, GMO seed producers. The problem isn't meat, it's that we've twisted the growing of all our food into an horrific STS system of greed and destruction.

Thanks for posting the interview, sitting. Although I didn't have a chance to listen to it in its entirety, you've renewed my determination to read her book. Her perspective is really beautiful, and hard won, and I think a lot of vegetarians who suffer from the affliction discussed in this thread would do well to read it. I'll just add it to the pile :rolleyes:
 
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