Vegetarianism As Law?

For millions of years our ancestors pooed and peed wherever they fancied; stop denying evolution by using a toilet you fool

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For millions of years our ancestors pooed and peed wherever they fancied; stop denying evolution by using a toilet you fool

Posted from TSR Mobile

Maybe but plenty more studies conclude that meat is an essential part of ones diet and whilst it can be swapped out, as it were, it is not the most reccomended thing to do.

to a point it might be inefficient it really depends how it is done doesnt it one example albeit on a small scale would be; take a farmer who has a field of cows the cows are more or less self sustaining with regards to food and water i.e. grass/silage and rain. on top of this they provide a free lawn cutting service, free manure, can be used for milk and then meat as well. Nothing wasted.

Indeed maybe not however it's not as such a question of ease more of desire and feasibility which lets face it it is not desirable for most after all we do love our bacon buttys. However animals are slughtered for much more than to just be turned into slabs of ham and KFC wings, for instance gelatin, animal food, leather goods, sport etc. etc. given that no body in their right mind can refute every reason that animals are killed and multi purposed it would be wasteful to just stop eating say a cow but kill it solely for leather instead.

No it means ones diet consists of both animal and vegtable matter.

Out of interest what is your view on vegans and other such restrictive denominations?

I must admit to say: That was impressive. Never before have I read two entire paragraphs so hollow and exempt of any coherent meaning. Two paragraphs, so quintessential in their demonstration, that they almost seem to attempt to display the fragility of the human mind to capitulate to obdurate dogmatism in the face of a consistent and well-sourced argument, as well as a wilful disregard and disrespect for evidence over anecdotal speculation. If those two paragraphs are not placed in a museum of natural history then, truly, a great loss has been felt to the future generations in their insight of the widespread stupidity of this generation. That really has made my day! Read the last two replies of @viddy9, they were almost flawless. I encourage you to constructively argue with them, that is if you want to start arguing effectively, it is a lesson on a number of levels.

If it can be swapped out, it's not an essential part of one's diet. The weight of the medical literature suggests that the average veg*n (vegan and vegetarian) diets probably offer some health benefits when it comes to cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes, relative to the average omnivorous diet. However, omnivorous diets which don't include too much meat in them (i.e. three to four times a week) and which are health-conscious seem to do just as well as the average veg*n.



Grass-fed beef is better in terms of efficiency, although as far as I'm aware most farms do finish their grass-fed cows on grain. My main problem with that is that it produces copious amounts of greenhouse gases, including methane, which is more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The Paris climate change deal doesn't look promising, and 2016 looks set to be the hottest year on record (beating 2015 and previously 2014). We need to act on climate change now. If governments aren't going to do it, individuals must play their part.



We ought to refrain from buying as many animal products as possible, but if the meat and eggs and dairy products aren't being sold, it will scarcely be profitable for them to continue to slaughter animals simply to make animal by-products. So, I would say that this objection is dealt with.



If we in some sense choose to be omnivores, yes. The point is that if meat were an essential part of the diet, we would be carnivores, not omnivores. And if we couldn't eat meat at all, we would be herbivores.



Well, I am a vegan. In my view, veganism logically follows from vegetarianism. Veganism is responsible for fewer greenhouse gas emissions than vegetarianism (which is responsible for fewer GHG emissions than an omnivorous diet), and it's responsible for less unnecessary suffering than vegetarianism (which is responsible for less unnecessary suffering than an omnivorous diet).

That said, I think the baseline we should advocate for is lacto-vegetarianism. As I might have said earlier, dairy is generally harder to cut out than meat and eggs, but should be cut out wherever possible. But, if people don't stop eating meat and eggs simply because they don't want to give up dairy, that's a worse outcome than giving up meat and eggs but keeping dairy. For people who have an irrational aversion to supplements, there aren't any supplements that you need to take on a lacto-vegetarian diet either. You'll find Vitamin B12 and iodine in dairy products.

shhhhhh you being too logical for him.

Should taxes be placed on meat with the long term gradual goal of a society that does not eat meat from animals?

I'm not going to argue this from pathos or ethos, but from logos. Substitutes for meat are now readily available which do not precipitate the destruction of the environment on a scale as unprecedented as cars do. Eating meat on the scale we currently do is simply unnecessary and destructive, and in times when societal change is too slow, should the government step in?

Fundamental changes to society are sometimes labelled as impractical or contrary to human nature, as if there were only one human nature, but fundamental changes can clearly be made, we're surrounded by them. In the last two centuries, abject slavery which was with us for thousands of years has almost entirely been eliminated in a stirring world-wide revolution. Women systematically mistreated for millennia are gradually gaining the political and economic power traditionally denied to them. And some wars of aggression have recently been stopped or curtailed because of a revulsion felt by the people in the aggressor nations. The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinisms, and to rabid nationalist fervour are beginning not to work, a new consciousness is developing that sees the Earth as a single organism, and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet, and on this planet at this moment we find ourselves at a critical branch-point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and will powerfully effect the destiny of our descendants.

The scale at which we consume meat today is as unprecedented as its destruction to the environment, it demonstrates the worst excesses of human behaviour and our Jungian archetypes. Through personal experience, the proportion of vegetarians and vegans at top universities is much higher than the general population, but this is still a tiny minority of the entire demographics. In times when societal change is too slow, governments must step in as a catalyst, particularly when the issue at hand is as damaging to the world as this. This has been well demonstrated with the abolishment of abject slavery, racial segregation and the full introduction of LGBT rights in the US, when the government stepped in to settle the matter decisively. Despite the inevitable outcry from much of society and its damage to many industries, such action is essential to stop its more devastating and pernicious effects to the world at large. You do not have to be a master prognosticator to see that this will happen eventually, if history has taught us anything it is that the moral high-ground always wins eventually, even if initially support for it is minimal. Take slavery, sexism, homophobia and racism: all accepted as the norm 300 years ago, now deeply frowned upon by the bulk of society, you'd have to be obdurate to not see eating meat from animals going the same way. So my question is: Why wait?

Only if we increase tax on tabaco products

Can someone please explain to me why it is 'wrong' for humans to eat other animals?

Note: I am a meat-lover, protein junkie and I don't really like the taste of anything that isn't from animals in some way - I genuinely want to understand why some people view this as wrong. Thanks (:




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Can someone please explain to me why it is 'wrong' for humans to eat other animals?

Note: I am a meat-lover, protein junkie and I don't really like the taste of anything that isn't from animals in some way - I genuinely want to understand why some people view this as wrong. Thanks

Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.

Can someone please explain to me why it is 'wrong' for humans to eat other animals?

Note: I am a meat-lover, protein junkie and I don't really like the taste of anything that isn't from animals in some way - I genuinely want to understand why some people view this as wrong. Thanks (:




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The physical act of eating other animals or indeed humans isn't wrong in itself, of course. Buying meat, however, almost always is.

Factory farming inflicts brutal and unnecessary suffering on hundreds of millions of sentient beings each year, and accounts for the majority of the meat sold in the UK and around the world. In the meat industry, non-human animals reared for meat have their natural instincts suppressed, so much so that they show signs of depression according to some animal experts. Behaviours that are not seen in the wild are regularly seen in the meat industry: pigs bite the tails of other pigs, inflicting severe pain on them; chickens peck at the feathers of other chickens; and pigs kept in farrowing crates bite the bars of their cages.

The vast majority of chickens are kept in huge, overcrowded sheds, with no natural light whatsoever. Each chicken can have floor space that’s just the size of an A4 sheet of paper. They essentially live in their faeces, which often isn’t cleared out until slaughter time, and the air can become highly polluted with ammonia from the droppings, causing painful burns to develop on the legs and the breast, as well as ulcerated feet, respiratory and eye problems.

Chickens are also grown so fast that their legs can collapse under the weight of their bodies, or they become lame, and they also develop heart and lung problems as a result. Hundreds of thousands of chickens, if not millions, die every year from heart problems as a result. Chickens under the age of 10 days can still be de-beaked with a hot blade without anaesthetic and 1 in 10 turkeys, who are raised in the same horrible conditions, are still de-beaked. The beak is an incredibly sensitive area with many nerves: it is difficult to imagine the pain that occurs as a result of this.

Turkeys have also been bred to have breasts that are too fat to mate naturally, which is itself terrible. In order to get around this, male turkeys are forcibly manipulated to eject the regular fluid, and the female turkeys are caught, held upside down and forcibly impregnated. This process has to be done quickly, so the workers who have this appalling job (for both parties) often take their frustration out on the turkeys.

Pigs, meanwhile, can be kept in farrowing crates for weeks at a time; these crates are so narrow that they can’t even move their bodies. In such confinement, pigs show signs of severe depression: they are highly intelligent, complex animals who can outperform three-year-olds on tests of cognition and video games – they require stimulation. As with chickens, many pigs die due to neglect in these horrible conditions. Here are some examples of typical UK pig farms, including some owned by people who have received honours from the Queen for work on “animal welfare”, including some which were labelled 'freedom food' farms by the RSPCA.

Piglets also regularly have their tails docked and their teeth clipped without anaesthetic, inflicting extreme pain on them. The justification for this, as alluded to earlier, is that they would bite the tails of other pigs because of their sheer boredom and empty existence. Yet, choosing between the two is a false dichotomy: we should instead not breed them into such conditions in the first place.

In the egg industry, unwanted male chicks are placed, fully conscious, into giant shredders. Half of the eggs sold in the UK still come from caged hens (how many of these caged eggs are used in all of the products we eat and in restaurants?), in which hens can’t effectively practice their natural behaviours, and in which feather pecking still regularly occurs. If a hen is severely injured, as some were in this video, there's no possibility of helping them, despite their clear vocalizations. Because they’ve been bred to produce large amounts of eggs, laying hens can suffer from osteoporosis and fractures, which is exacerbated by their restricted movement in cages.

Free-range hens often fare no better. Contrary to popular belief, the term free-range simply entails that there needs to be a small hole in a large crowded shed through which the hens can escape outside for a few hours a day. As numerous investigations have shown, so-called free-range farms are often no better for the hens than cages. As for fish, when they are taken out of the water, often die from asphyxiation. The depressurization can also cause their insides to burst. It’s extremely difficult to even attempt to humanely slaughter fish.

In the dairy industry, nearly all calves are taken away from their mother within hours of birth. This causes severe distress to both the cow and the calf, and has long-term effects on the calf’s physical and social development. Naturally, calves suckle their mothers for up to a year, and maintain a strong bond with her for several years.

Mastitis, inflammation of the udder, is the painful result of bacterial infection that is prevalent among dairy cows. On average, 70% of cows in a herd in the UK develop this infection. Due to the massive demand for dairy, ‘zero-grazing’ systems are becoming more prevalent in the UK, whereby cows are confined indoors all year round, without ever being allowed outside to graze. To prevent this, we need to reduce demand for dairy products, by abstaining from them.

All of this occurs before the transportation and slaughter process, which results in even more stress for the animals. Chickens, for instance, have to be rounded up and are essentially thrown into crammed crates before being taken to the slaughterhouse. Long journeys to the slaughterhouse cause animals a significant amount of stress. Due to neglect and disease in farms, as well as fires and other accidents, tens of millions of animals in the UK die before they even reach the slaughterhouse. This occurs on country farms and in factory farms.

In slaughterhouses – even secular ones – the slaughter process very often isn’t humane, because stunning can go wrong in a significant proportion of cases. Various studies have found that the slaughter process goes wrong in between 10-40% of cases. This equates to millions upon millions of animals – chickens, pigs and cows - dying in intense pain every single year. Random investigations of secular slaughterhouses in the UK have corroborated this.

Chickens are shackled upside down by their feet, which can exacerbate leg problems they’ve already developed in the slaughterhouse, and being hung also causes them extreme stress. Their heads are dipped into an electric water bath, but many chickens (and turkeys) may raise their heads, therefore they miss the water bath and are slaughtered whilst fully conscious. Other chickens and turkeys may have their wings painfully electrocuted instead of their heads, before being slaughtered alive.

Gassing has become an increasingly popular method of killing pigs and chickens, but it’s not at all humane. Pigs, for example, can be seen gasping for breath for up to 30 seconds, and trying desperately to get out of the gas chambers.

Overall, due to the insatiable demand for meat, we treat non-human animals are economic units who need to be bred and slaughtered as fast as possible and as cheaply as possible. They're not treated as sentient beings whose interests we should equally consider. Even if people think that intelligence somehow determines how much your suffering matters, we wouldn’t dream of treating severely intellectually disabled humans, or human infants, in the ways in which we treat animals reared for meat or used for eggs and dairy. We may also underestimate how much suffering actually occurs, because unlike us, animals cannot rationalize their suffering (they cannot convince themselves that it will all be over soon, for instance). A lot of what they experience can only be akin to blind terror. And, investigations of farms and slaughterhouses are incredibly difficult to do, because it's incredibly difficult to get inside to film in the first place. Who knows what happens elsewhere.

If people only buy meat from small, local farms whose conditions they can personally assess, then that’s more acceptable, but whenever they can’t verify the conditions in which the animals were kept – when eating out – for instance, they should eat vegan. In addition, there’s not nearly enough land for humane, pasture-based farms to satisfy the current demand for meat: we need to drastically reduce our consumption of meat and other animal products in any case. So, for every meat-eater who doesn’t reduce consumption to one or two portions a week, a vegan is, in essence, carrying some of the extra burden.

And, this doesn't even take into account the fact that, as the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has found, the meat industry is responsible for almost 15% of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transportation sector, with higher welfare meat, such as grass-fed beef, being responsible for copious amounts of methane emissions (methane being a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide). The Environmental Working Group has found that virtually all plant-based products are responsible for fewer emissions than animal products, which is why it’s unsurprising that a 2014 study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Climatic Change, found that vegans, followed by vegetarians, had the lowest greenhouse gas emissions associated with their diets. It’s also why the UN’s Environment Program has called on everyone to move towards a vegan diet:



Given that climate change is already causing humans to suffer - and will continue to do so but at an accelerating rate - we should all take individual action to ensure that the warming of the planet is slowed and halted. Governments seem set to fail in the duty: the Paris climate change agreement doesn't even limit warming to 2C, and that's even assuming that every country will keep to its pledge.

If you're looking for an answer based on a moral/ethical front, unlike my last post which was more objective, then you won't have to look far on YouTube to find a video demonstrating the worst excesses of the meat industry and the conditions and method of death of these animals. I tend to be a very emotionless person as you might've worked out, but even I find it utterly vile to watch the personification of the worst excesses of human behaviour. But moreover I think it comes down to the question: "Why is slavery wrong?", if you can answer that, then it's abundantly clear why eating meat is "wrong" in terms of morals.

But as I said in my previously post, there are more reasons than morals as to why people don't eat meat.

Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me in such detail. No really, thanks!

This makes it harder to make the argument that it is justifiable to consume animal products in the current state that all of those industries you mentioned are in.

But could I ask, what do I eat now? I know it seems like the obvious thing to do now is stop consumption of such products, but it feels much more complicated than that. My parents do the food shopping and I have a small source of income that is not enough to support food on a weekly basis - all they buy is eggs, chicken, beef, steak, fish, pork and then of course, cereal. My parents can afford fruits and vegetables and other healthy food items that are from the market rather than the big stores, but they can't afford to keep this up. We have tried to keep it up because my dad is diabetic, but it just didn't work out because were eating too little and there ended up not being enough food at home for a while. So, the real question I am asking is: should we try and get used to expensive but low calorie vegan diets (on average 1200 a day) or just carry on with our destructive meat-eating lives?

I hope this doesn't sound stupid or anything

Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me in such detail. No really, thanks!

This makes it harder to make the argument that it is justifiable to consume animal products in the current state that all of those industries you mentioned are in.

But could I ask, what do I eat now? I know it seems like the obvious thing to do now is stop consumption of such products, but it feels much more complicated than that. My parents do the food shopping and I have a small source of income that is not enough to support food on a weekly basis - all they buy is eggs, chicken, beef, steak, fish, pork and then of course, cereal. My parents can afford fruits and vegetables and other healthy food items that are from the market rather than the big stores, but they can't afford to keep this up. We have tried to keep it up because my dad is diabetic, but it just didn't work out because were eating too little and there ended up not being enough food at home for a while. So, the real question I am asking is: should we try and get used to expensive but low calorie vegan diets (on average 1200 a day) or just carry on with our destructive meat-eating lives?

I hope this doesn't sound stupid or anything

Animal suffering, although would obviously be nice to completely irradiate, has and always will be part of life, and as long as it's not done maliciously and unnecessarily then I have little issue with it.

Whenever we don't need to inflict suffering on other animals, it is unnecessary, and that's the case with the meat and egg industries in almost all cases. As I said earlier, though, I have little problem with local meat where the conditions can be assessed, but this would still require a drastic reduction in meat consumption, because there's not enough land to feed everyone with this kind of meat. For other reasons, though (the risk of riots, for instance), I wouldn't support the government forcing people to drastically reduce their meat consumption.

I also don't think that the "has and always will be part of life" objection to eliminating animal suffering throughout the biosphere holds - many things used to be part of life, but humanity stepped up and eliminated them. We should aim to reduce as much suffering as possible, ultimately, both of farm animals and animals in the wild. (See this article on reducing wild-animal suffering, for instance. Speculative, but I see no objection to it in principle. See also the response to the objections from people who didn't read the article properly.)