Angeldust wrote:

As for chickens, where I live it's not too hard to have your own. My sister and brother-in-law have chickens and I think my mom is gonna get some this year. Not sure though. Also cows aren't too hard to have here either. I even heard of someone breeding a mini milk cow (like miniature ponies), which would be awesome. (Sorry I don't have a source, my bro-in-law read it in a cow magazine.) Then again, I live in the middle of no where. lol I don't really drink milk anyway, cause I'm lactose intolerant. I love soy and rice milk. But I like milk for ice cream and cooking. And my mom reeeeeally wants a milk cow, but we don't have the room for a cow. Though I wouldn't put it past her to get a goat...

Lactose intolerance is a bummer, several of my friends have it to varying degrees. Most of them just try to avoide dairy products, use tablets or buy lactase-treated dairy products.

Mini milk cows could probably the Dexter cattle from Irleand, they are really small. But I guess up 9.5 liters of milk per day is a bit much.

It's phenomenal how little I care about what people eat.  Though I admit it annoys me a bit how whenever people start talking about food everybody starts calling everybody else a hypocrite, and not a single person uses the term correctly.

I see nothing wrong with eating meat if you are certain the animals are raised under humane conditions and killed in a way that keeps their suffering to a minimal.  If you care for a pet its whole life treating it with love and affection, then quickly kill it for its meat in old age,  that is as moral as a being can get.  There is no rational argument why eating beef or pork is okay, but eating your dog or cat is not.  It is simply cultural bias.  People eat shrimp, which are basically cockroaches of the sea.

I think the key is using as much awareness as possible in determining what is true altruistic behavior, and what are actions that affect nothing of significance (saving Cat Island?), but make emotional news stories.

Aijin wrote:

Animals are indeed killed during crop harvesting, but while there isn't extensive enough research on the topic it's pretty fair to say that it's no where near the numbers cranked out by slaughterhouses, and isn't a long, dragged out, cruel procedure as is the case in the meat industries. The U.S. alone can boast of nearly 10 billion slaughtered animals per year, and even if it were the case that that many animals were dying from crop harvesting, there's a huge difference between the types of animals being killed. Highly intelligent mammals with extrensively developed central nervous systems are not being killed by crop harvesting, as is the case with the meat industry. A field mouse dying versus a pig dying is quite the difference.

Speaking in rough numbers this article claims that more animals (strictly speaking, mammals) are killed in crop production than meat production. Regardless, it's still possible to prevent such deaths through improved farming technology, as mentioned elsewhere in the quoted post. Thus, animals killed in crop harvesting is a practical matter, and should therefore not be a reason for us to continue eating meat (at least indefinitely) since a feasible and practical solution exists.

However, there still remains the issue of why the lives of more intelligent animals are more precious than the lives of less intelligent animals. The problem with making this claim is it follows that the lives of some intelligent animals are more valuable than the lives of some humans, such as those with severe brain damage, those in vegetative states, etc. Few people will agree that the life of even an intellectually gifted chimpanzee is just as or more valuable than the lives of humans in the aforementioned circumstances. Hence, intelligence doesn't touch on the essence of what makes a life valuable. There must be something else that tells us the lives of the severely mentally handicapped are valuable.

While animal cruelty is a good case study, the philosophical issue at stake here is the value of life in general, which is central to any ethical imperative against killing, harming, or endangering forms of life. If we can understand what exactly makes one life form more valuable than another, then we'll have a general theory for which instances of killing, harming, or endangering are justified and which are not. Without this general theory, we can only point to our moral intuitions as reasons against killing, harming, or endangering certain lifeforms.

bodhisamaya wrote:

There is no rational argument why eating beef or pork is okay, but eating your dog or cat is not.  It is simply cultural bias.  People eat shrimp, which are basically cockroaches of the sea.

I don't think eating dog or cat is wrong, though I imagine it would be a bit gamey for my taste.  However, I would never eat my cat or dog (under normal circumstances), since I don't eat things that I have an emotional connection to.

And I don't like the texture of insects.  Or shrimp, for that matter.

Eikyu wrote:

vileru wrote:

Speaking in rough numbers this article claims that more animals (strictly speaking, mammals) are killed in crop production than meat production.

I really doubt that can be true, because what do we feed animals with ? Massive amounts of corn and other crops.

Are you saying that more animals are killed by meat production because we have to grow more crops to feed livestock? The problem with this objection is that it assumes that we need to grow extra crops solely for feeding livestock. This issue is complex, so I'll just outline a few key things:

1. Livestock feed isn't solely crop based. Livestock are often fed meat as well (usually parts not used by humans from slaughtered livestock).

2. Livestock frequently eat crops not fit for human consumption (e.g. grass, hay, etc. and crops humans typically eat but that don't meet inspection standards for human consumption).

3. Pasture-fed livestock directly eat crops without killing as many animals as would most likely be killed by machine harvesting.

These three points don't give the whole picture, but they're enough to show that it's possible for an entirely crop-based agriculture to kill more animals (mammals) than a crop and meat-based food industry. If the ideal is to kill the fewest number of animals, then we should only grow crops enough crops to reach a certain percent of our own consumption needs and then cover the remaining percentage with livestock that are fed with three things:

1. Crops that we grow for our own consumption but that don't pass inspection standards (but are still safe for livestock to eat).

2. Unused parts of slaughtered livestock.

3. Crops eaten directly from pastures.

Meeting our consumption needs this way would maximize the ratio between food produced and animals killed.

Anyway, I think the philosophical issue I raised strikes the very foundation of the vegetarian debate. While the debate over the lifestyle that kills the fewest animals is interesting, it already assumes that the lives of animals are valuable to the extent that humans should not kill them for food. I only mentioned the article to show that it can be debated whether a vegan lifestyle leads to fewer animal deaths. I already conceded that this problem can be fixed by improving harvesting technology, and I've said that I don't think pointing at the number of animals killed by crop harvesting is a good objection against veganism. In fact, I think the article I linked is poorly researched and argued, so I'm glad it has been taken to task. Nevertheless, the philosophical question, "What makes a life valuable?" remains. We need to be able to answer this if we want something more than mere intuitions to support our choice to not eat animals or animal products.

My argument can be summed up like this:

If everyone were to start eating only meat, we would need to grow more crops to feed the cattle, hence killing more animals in the process. Given bodhisamaya's numbers, we would need a lot more. Those animals could not be grass fed as there's already a shortage of grazing pastures. More animals would thus get killed just in the process of harvesting crops. And more animals would get killed to get the meat.

If everyone were to start eating only vegetables, we would require much less crops, because we wouldn't be feeding those hungry cows for their meat. So, we would need to grow much less crops, killing fewer animals in the harvesting process.

So, not eating meat ends up killing much less animals.

Wikipedia also mentions this guy's theory:

Wikipedia wrote:

Steven Davis, a professor of animal science at Oregon State University, argues that the least harm principle does not require giving up all meat. Davis states that a diet containing beef from grass-fed ruminants such as cattle would kill fewer animals than a vegetarian diet particularly when one takes into account animals killed by agriculture.[13] This conclusion has been criticized as flawed since it calculates the number of animals killed per acre (instead of per consumer). When his numbers are changed, Davis' argument ends up showing veganism as perpetrating the least harm.[14] Additionally, his argument has been criticized for being based on only two studies that may not represent commercial agricultural practices. Larger number of studies again show veganism to do the "least harm."[15]

Last edited by Eikyu (2011 March 20, 3:16 am)

I'm vegetarian, not because of anything to do with animal rights, but because vegetarianism (and veganism) is the only responsible dietary choice in terms of sustainability. The animal rights argument is totally subjective and doomed to fail - even if we can all agree that we don't want intelligent animals to suffer (we can't) where do we draw the line? I personally don't care one jot about whether an animal seems to be suffering in the process of food production, we have absolutely no method of determining whether anything other than ourselves truly experiences suffering, and we don't even understand exactly how we experience it.

The reason for my vegetarianism is a simple choice about resource use. As a general rule, by eating an organism which is itself a trophic consumer you are using approximately ten times the resources (land, water, emissions) that someone who eats only primary producers uses. In other words, it takes ten time the amount of land, water and emissions to produce a kilogram of meat than a kilogram of vegetables.

Of course this is a generalisation - different animals have different trophic efficiency. Cattle are one of the worst offenders, as are pigs. Chickens are relatively efficient. And some plants (tomatoes, pineapples) require more resources than others (wheat, rice, maize) for the same biomass. But there is an order of magnitude difference between the resource inputs for meat and plant foods.

If the world is to sustain our current population for much longer, and certainly if we are to support a larger population as we approach mid-century, our use of resources, particularly land and water, has to change. One way in which this change will be made is for people either to eat less meat, or for new methods of higher efficiency meat production to be developed.

A responsible choice is to make some easy decisions about your own resource use and cut down on meat consumption.

vileru wrote:

The problem with this objection is that it assumes that we need to grow extra crops solely for feeding livestock. This issue is complex, so I'll just outline a few key things:

1. Livestock feed isn't solely crop based. Livestock are often fed meat as well (usually parts not used by humans from slaughtered livestock).

2. Livestock frequently eat crops not fit for human consumption (e.g. grass, hay, etc. and crops humans typically eat but that don't meet inspection standards for human consumption).

3. Pasture-fed livestock directly eat crops without killing as many animals as would most likely be killed by machine harvesting.

These three points don't give the whole picture, but they're enough to show that it's possible for an entirely crop-based agriculture to kill more animals (mammals) than a crop and meat-based food industry. If the ideal is to kill the fewest number of animals, then we should only grow crops enough crops to reach a certain percent of our own consumption needs and then cover the remaining percentage with livestock that are fed with three things:

1. Crops that we grow for our own consumption but that don't pass inspection standards (but are still safe for livestock to eat).

2. Unused parts of slaughtered livestock.

3. Crops eaten directly from pastures.

There is no question about this - we use over 1/3 of arable land globally for fodder production for livestock. Even pastured animals outside the tropics must be housed and fed on fodder during the winter months. And most farmers' outputs would be limited by the arable land available locally if they didn't import feed.

The FAO produced a report on this in 2006 called Livestock's Long Shadow.

You are correct that there are other sources of livestock feed, including some by-products of human food, but those by-products would not otherwise simply be wasted. Inedible parts of crop plants and offal cuts of meat are used as silage in anaerobic digesters which produce high quality fertiliser, and the emissions from digesters are easily captured and turned into a fuel source.

vileru wrote:

Anyway, I think the philosophical issue I raised strikes the very foundation of the vegetarian debate. While the debate over the lifestyle that kills the fewest animals is interesting, it already assumes that the lives of animals are valuable to the extent that humans should not kill them for food.

Your argument is valid against the (in my view, pointless) animal rights debate. But it is irrelevant against the much stronger argument for vegetarianism which is sustainability.

Last edited by Blahah (2011 March 20, 4:14 am)

vileru wrote:

Then what about the countless animals killed by crop harvesting and pest control?

A vegan response:
http://unpopularveganessays.blogspot.co … ights.html

I think Blahah is surprisingly wrong when it comes to knowing whether animals/ourselves are suffering (in terms of cognition and nociception we've pretty good science on it being a difference in degree, not kind), but that's perhaps another discourse (remember the robot/animal thread? ^_^). And we can do without words like ‘idiotic’?

Tangent, forgot I'd posted this ages ago: http://www.mediafire.com/?nv10rmzz2qy

Of course, for the suffering argument, we've always got: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/opin … .html?_r=1

“Recent advances suggest it may soon be possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less.

This prospect stems from a new understanding of how mammals sense pain. The brain, it turns out, has two separate pathways for perceiving pain: a sensory pathway that registers its location, quality (sharp, dull or burning, for example) and intensity, and a so-called affective pathway that senses the pain’s unpleasantness. This second pathway appears to be associated with activation of the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, because people who have suffered damage to this part of the brain still feel pain but no longer find it unpleasant. (The same is true of people who are given morphine, because there are more receptors for opiates in the affective pain pathway than in the sensory pain pathway.)

Neuroscientists have found that by damaging a laboratory rat’s anterior cingulate cortex, or by injecting the rat with morphine, they can likewise block its affective perception of pain.

... If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether, the least we can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the animals that must live and die on them. It would be far better than doing nothing at all.”

Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality has Stalled?

Kind of a strange statement though.  Following that stream of thought, there is no proof that anyone but I experience suffering.

bodhisamaya wrote:

Kind of a strange statement though.  Following that stream of thought, there is no proof that anyone but I experience suffering.

Well solipsism when applied to humans is not defensible and certainly not practical. I can look at other humans and see that they clearly share many, many outward features of behaviour which would be very difficult to explain if they didn't all share a similar conscious experience.

But when we look at the way animals behave, it's clear that many of the outward features of humans which suggest our conscious experience are not there. And the things which animals do similarly to us have obvious evolutionary explanations, so there is no reason why we should assume a psychological underpinning.