Calling All Carnivores Tell Us Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat: A Contest, A Summary, A Winner

Do you realize how much more space is required to feed a person a vegan diet over the amount of space needed for meat? You're talking about many many acres of farming. I live on 1 acre and it wouldn't be big enough to support my family of 4. What's your solution to requiring half the earth in order to feed the population by 2030? Where do all the people and the animals live?? Have you thought any of this through?

Originally posted by RandomEsotericScreenname
reply to post by antonia

 

You first claim you had only one particular point, then you go on a rant saying how bad meat is, than you are saying that meateaters always bully vegans, then you go along with my on my on topic statements about the ethical question, seemingly taking an opposite standpoint, then you try to suggest that supplements are as natural as meat itself, and then in the end you suddenly say you never even suggested that you find eating meat unethical.

Technically you didn't, but if I read back our entire discussion you seem like a bit of a troll.

I said what I said because you proclaimed that the Vegan diet wasn't natural. My response was because you started to argue that somehow it's not natural because they would fall apart without supplementation yet you ignore that many people who do eat meat are falling apart. Your argument isn't valid. Yes, i'm going to go after an invalid argument. You made assumptions about me that were incorrect-Throughout the entire thread I have said I eat meat and don't think it's really a problem o eat meat. I have said the sheer amount of meat people eat is a problem, but that's something else.

If you think I'm a troll use the alert button and stop mini-modding.

Originally posted by gentledissident

Originally posted by libertytoall
I'm shocked at the ignorance running rampant in this thread.. Seriously vegans keep your bullcrap beliefs to yourself. I'm now convinced veganism and liberalism are mental disorders

I'm a vegetarian and a socialist I'm not trying to push off my desires on you. I would like to either have the US split into 2 different countries or move to Sweden. The 1st isn't going to happen. The 2nd isn't going to happen because my GF doesn't like the cold. Honestly, I think liberals and conservatives should stay away from each other. I've had horrible experiences with conservatives, or at least people pretending to be conservative. The disdain between the 2 groups can only lead to sorrow.

I rest my case. You just proved my point..

Originally posted by libertytoall
Do you realize how much more space is required to feed a person a vegan diet over the amount of space needed for meat? You're talking about many many acres of farming. I live on 1 acre and it wouldn't be big enough to support my family of 4. What's your solution to requiring half the earth in order to feed the population by 2030? Where do all the people and the animals live?? Have you thought any of this through?

edit on 7-5-2012 by libertytoall because: (no reason given)

What? Almost every analysis has show it takes more space to raise animals than plants. That argument isn't based in fact.

That is simply not true. Animals can live on multiple levels and do not require direct sunlight for long periods to survive. You cannot build a garden and then build a second floor garden above it because you will block the light. If you choose to bring in the argument of hydroponic gardening with artificial lights than I think you better build about 30 more nuclear power plants around the world in order to support the energy needs of such a project. Let's not even get into high costs.. The fact is you could have a 10 story chicken farm, you can't do that with vegetables..

Originally posted by libertytoall
That is simply not true. Animals can live on multiple levels and do not require direct sunlight for long periods to survive. You cannot build a garden and then build a second floor garden above it because you will block the light. If you choose to bring in the argument of hydroponic gardening with artificial lights than I think you better build about 30 more nuclear power plants around the world in order to support the energy needs of such a project. Let's not even get into high costs.. The fact is you could have a 10 story chicken farm, you can't do that with vegetables..

en.wikipedia.org...
Vertical farming would not require that kind of energy. I don't know if you've ever raised beef, but you need more than an acre to do it. And you need a lot of water too

I've lived near chicken farms, trust me, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near a 10 story chicken farm. Most of the kids who live near the Tyson plants I saw as a child were constantly sick. Animal dander and refuse is not fun to live by.

You can't use the energy argument while advocating meat as the solution. You have to account for the transport of the animals, the slaughter and refrigeration. They do require a large amount of energy.

reply to post by antonia

I said what I said because you proclaimed that the Vegan diet wasn't natural. My response was because you started to argue that somehow it's not natural because they would fall apart without supplementation yet you ignore that many people who do eat meat are falling apart.

The vegan diet isn't natural because they need produced supplements, which are a natural product, but not natural.

The fact that some meat eaters live and eat unhealthy has nothing to do with that.

You made assumptions about me that were incorrect-Throughout the entire thread I have said I eat meat and don't think it's really a problem o eat meat.

That is true, next time you don't agree with a particular point I make, stick to that point. Don't add a rant about how unhealthy meat is when I am making on topic statements about the ethics of it, cause you made it look like you were arguing against it.

If you think I'm a troll use the alert button and stop mini-modding.

I don't think you are a troll, but you sure looked like one.

Originally posted by RandomEsotericScreenname
reply to post by antonia

 

I don't think you are a troll, but you sure looked like one.

Then I suggest you stop talking to me have a nice day.

Originally posted by antonia

Originally posted by libertytoall
That is simply not true. Animals can live on multiple levels and do not require direct sunlight for long periods to survive. You cannot build a garden and then build a second floor garden above it because you will block the light. If you choose to bring in the argument of hydroponic gardening with artificial lights than I think you better build about 30 more nuclear power plants around the world in order to support the energy needs of such a project. Let's not even get into high costs.. The fact is you could have a 10 story chicken farm, you can't do that with vegetables..

en.wikipedia.org...
Vertical farming would not require that kind of energy. I don't know if you've ever raised beef, but you need more than an acre to do it. And you need a lot of water too

I've lived near chicken farms, trust me, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near a 10 story chicken farm. Most of the kids who live near the Tyson plants I saw as a child were constantly sick. Animal dander and refuse is not fun to live by.

You can't use the energy argument while advocating meat as the solution. You have to account for the transport of the animals, the slaughter and refrigeration. They do require a large amount of energy.

edit on 7-5-2012 by antonia because: added something

The link explains how vertical farming is only profitable for meat rather than vegetables.

"Despommier had originally challenged his class to feed the population of Manhattan (About 2,000,000 people) using 13 acres (5.3 ha) of usable rooftop gardens. The class calculated that, by using rooftop gardening methods, only 2 percent would be fed. Unsatisfied with the results, Despommier made an off-the-cuff suggestion of growing plants indoors, vertically."

Good luck with the energy needs of a indoor hydroponic garden.. Maybe you can give up 70% of the space to grow biofuel that could supply the electricity.. The bottom line is meat works and vegetable gardens on a large scale are unsustainable..

By the way vegetables require harvesting, transport, and refrigeration as well. Poor argument on your end.

reply to post by antonia


Well, those are your own words. goodday.

reply to post by libertytoall


www.ajcn.org...

Both the meat-based average American diet and the lactoovovegetarian diet require significant quantities of nonrenewable fossil energy to produce. Thus, both food systems are not sustainable in the long term based on heavy fossil energy requirements. However, the meat-based diet requires more energy, land, and water resources than the lactoovovegetarian diet. In this limited sense, the lactoovovegetarian diet is more sustainable than the average American meat-based diet.

Now would you like to show some science proving plants require more resources for growth than animals?

Originally posted by libertytoall
That is simply not true. Animals can live on multiple levels and do not require direct sunlight for long periods to survive. You cannot build a garden and then build a second floor garden above it because you will block the light. If you choose to bring in the argument of hydroponic gardening with artificial lights than I think you better build about 30 more nuclear power plants around the world in order to support the energy needs of such a project. Let's not even get into high costs.. The fact is you could have a 10 story chicken farm, you can't do that with vegetables..

Here's the truth about animal farming; We grow far more food to feed the animals we eat than to feed ourselves, farm animals consume 80% corn, 80% corn and 95% oats. 88% of agricultural land is used to raise farm animals we eat. you could say that's close to half the entire land mass in the States. 90% deforestation is due to our appettite of meat. Over 260 million acres destroyed due to provide cattle for grazing, another acres dissappears every 8 secs. Half the fresh water in the U.S is used to grow crops to feed the animals we eat, it takes 12 000 gallons of fresh water to produce 1 pound of fresh beef vs 60 gallons to produce 1 pound potatoes. Many water systems has gone dry to feed crops for farm animals. The average american uses 106 gallons of water for domestic needs, but if you eat a quarter pound of hamburger, your daily consumption of water jumps to 3,106 gallons of water per day. So by giving up meat you could essentially save 1 million gallon of water per year. So essentially eating meat this depletes our water supply, also add to the fact that animal extrement pollutes half of our waters, farm animals producs 130 times more waste than people do. You also have to account the fact animal feces found in our meats has gotten so bad that it's the leading cause of kidney failure for american children. Did you know packaged meat now has warning labels to keep meats away from other food cutting boards due to fecal contamination? This is the reason why you have to cook your meat for so long is so the animal excrement is cooked off the flesh. Food industry doesn't question how to get rid of excrement, instead they nuke our meats via Irradiation methods. All this is because our appettite for beef we're pretty much losing biodiversity, currently the u.s gov't kills 1.5 million wild animals for corporate interest to protect the animals we eat.

The question of "ethical" eating is largely a white, middle something, American privilege. The majority of the world needs to eat, in America we not only choose to eat or not - fat v anorexic for example, we choose to make the life sustaining condition of eating a political game in which arbitrary moral battlefields are drawn and the enemy is bombarded with judgment and anger.

The question of "eating" animals for food isn't a real question, but one created by those who seek to polarize food. If "feelings" were the motivating factor then the studies on plants "feelings" in the 70's should render all food inedible. Dr. Emoto's work on water would also render water a no no.

The actual question to be asked, the only one with actual relevance to the way humans must exist on this planet is: Should the food we eat be treated, via the entire development process, as well as we'd like to be treated? But since we, especially in America, favor prison, wars, endless political control, it seems logical that our food creation should reflect this remedial mindset. We love the actions and behavior of our "enemies" to be contained via law or, better yet, prison so it stands to reason that we also need our food to suffer the same fate via control from agencies and chemical processes.

Each of us needs a varied food experience to have a functional body. Now, we largely eat "shelf stable" products, easily created out of some edible food and mostly inorganic chemicals which make the "food" able to travel long distances. People who eat packaged foods live at a reduced quality of life - though they don't know it as their standards are low, and I have seen vegans look old and gray well before their time (living a very skittish and insecure life I might add) and I have seen meat eaters looking out of shape and lethargic.

Variety in all things is right, homogeneity is death by stasis, and food is part of the variety of life. It is one of the few things we slaves do well - the art of food. In fact, the art of food is most prevalent in the most enslaved and poorest countries - places where food is still a need and not a political choice.

reply to post by antonia


No, I don't believe you will devolve if you don't eat meat. But , you can not deny the benefits that cooked meats would have had on human development. It allowed them to consume high energy food that was easy to digest. Freeing up time and providing more energy.

Without cooking, an average person would have to eat around five kilos of raw food to get enough calories to survive.
The daily mountain of fruit and vegetables would mean a six-hour chewing marathon.
It is already accepted that the introduction of meat into our ancestors' diet caused their brains to grow and their intelligence to increase.

news.bbc.co.uk...

We've been eating meat since the dawn of time.

Vegetarians are fairly rare in the wild.

No ethical discussion needed here, it's simply natural selection.

in summary eating a animal based diet:

-consumes 1/3 raw materials & fossil fuels
-uses half the fresh water
-pollute half of fresh water
-depletes fresh water
-poisons food supply
-destroys Top Soil
-destroys Forests
-destroys Biodiversity
-destroys species

reply to post by woodwardjnr


Again it's a theory, there are other explanations for the increase in brain size that you can find.
www.livescience.com...
blogs.scientificamerican.com...
Either way, that doesn't offer an ethical argument to eat meat as it can be argued that you don't have to eat meat now to maintain that.

Originally posted by antonia
reply to post by woodwardjnr

 

Again it's a theory, there are other explanations for the increase in brain size that you can find.
www.livescience.com...
blogs.scientificamerican.com...
Either way, that doesn't offer an ethical argument to eat meat as it can be argued that you don't have to eat meat now to maintain that.

Thanks for the links. Interesting to see the other theories. I'm certainly no expert on this and am only going off that one BBC documentary that seemed to make sense to me. The coinciding factors of brain growth and gut reduction happening at a similar time in the evolutionary process.

Is it ethical to still eat meat? Probably not with the mass farming methods we practice today.

To be a vegan without artificial supplements would be impossible. To do it without factory farmed foodstuffs available would require you to basically eat nonstop all day long, every day. You know, the way things like cows, horses, gorillas and even elephants have to do.

All the problems caused by animal husbandry noted here are due to wild overpopulation, not animal husbandry. And this wild overpopulation was made possible by the advent of agriculture. The ability to produce bulk amounts of food that could be stored almost indefinitely made the population explosion possible. Almost all the problems in the world today can be directly traced to the overpopulation problem and nothing else.

All the modern health problems being cited above are due to modern factory farming practices and nothing else. Food was never produced the way it is now, not in the entire history of the world. The unnatural feed and overcrowding of the animals, GMO grains so plants can endure being sprayed with Agent Orange (now called Roundup) so that you can then eat it, the insane processing and chemical adulteration of just about everything, pink slime, the list goes on and on. All the modern health ailments like cancer, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and of course obesity were virtually unknown throughout the history of the world, up until less than a hundred years ago. The doctor who invented the EKG was initially pretty much laughed at when he showed it to his colleagues, because it was a neat device but why would you ever need something like that, since heart attacks were basically unheard of? And, before I get off track here, everyone was eating meat all that time. Just not pink slime.

And I notice, as usual, no one even mentions FISH. All this nonsense about cruelty to animals from the vegans, but somehow it's different for fish. I've even been told, "They don't feel pain the way we do". Of course they feel pain, they would immediately die if they didn't. I go spearfishing all the time, I like to stalk and then shoot large fish right in their little heads. I know for a fact they don't like it. And that's nothing compared to regular fishing, which I also do all the time. If I were to stick a hook through the face of, say, a goat, then drag it around behind a pickup truck for a while as I slowly reeled it in, and then bashed its head in with a bat, or just let it suffocate in a box till it was dead, I think people would be in an uproar. Yet it's ok to do that to fish. They don't mind it. Right.

Well, I could go on and on, but I think RandomEsotericScreen up there is TOTALLY DESTROYING all the rest of you nitwits in this debate, so I will just let him administer the coup de gras. Great job, by the way.

reply to post by CaptChaos


Well I was just about to reply to your post and say that it was the best one in this thread and then I read your compliment. Thank you.

Great post!