Vegetarians
I have nothing against people who don't want to eat meat. I have the same revulsion against certain vegetables on account of their texture, taste etc. But what does my fucking head in is where they start the bullshit eating meat is morally wrong bit.

Working in conservation and being associated with animal welfare I encounter a lot of nutters who take things just a tad to far, which includes the wankers who literally think, "meat is murder."

Posting some horrific image of animal farming gone wrong, to the point where I would probably instantly attack the farmer responsible with a hammer; with some caption about all meat eaters being responsible of it, is the stuff of a demented fucking spastic. If you genuinely think that don't bother reading on; you will never understand reality, the natural world, or our place in it as human beings.

I don't actually like factory farming, or the mistreatment of animals in general as some of you might have sussed out by now, but for fucks sake, I have not removed myself from the natural world. I am a human being, an omnivore, and thus my diet consists partly of meat. This isn't a moral issue, it's reality. Most of the natural world spends all day eating other life, so how on earth can there be any moral problem unless you are some kind of overtly sentimental idealist? Life by definition lives and dies, it's not rocket science. Amazingly, some of us give a shit about where the meat we consume comes from, and why I pay above the odds to eat animals that have had a few moments not to be squashed in some pen to wander about fields staring at the fucking ground all day.

The rest of the natural world couldn't give a fuck for animal welfare, it simply attacks it and eats it, right down to microscopic level, and even bacteria in our own bodies. People who cannot comprehend that have lost their way with the natural world and need to come out of their precious shells and stop being arseholes. The reality of the natural world is it's a 24/7 holocaust of consumption and destruction; where people fail is failing to respect that.

And with that i'm off to feed some leopards some road kill, a Muntjac deer, freshly killed in rural Hertfordshire.
( Jahled Three shades of black, Sun 7 Oct 2012, 11:26, 5 replies)

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
( The Awful Puppy Bakery is still bored, Sun 7 Oct 2012, 13:52, closed)

As omvivores, we have a lot of choice in what we eat, and our diet does not have to include any meat
It isn't so much killing that vegetarians object to, it is animal farming as slavery, and the wastage of land and resources in creating food products that are entirely optional. People are choosing to replace exploitative animal products with kinder, more sustainable alternatives.

Animals are bred for the sole purpose of being killed at a very young age, by having their throats slit. They are units of meat production, owned by people and corporations. This is slavery.

However, many vegetarians are more concerned about the sustainability issue, and avoid funding the animal farming industry because it takes good quality food that could be fed directly to people. Approximately half the world's surface area and over 70% of crops are fed to livestock. Even the United Nations is now speaking out against this. We could feed the world's population far more efficiently on a fraction of the land if we abandoned animal farming. It is basic physics; the more you process energy from the sun by converting it into heat, movement, shit etc. in animals' bodies, the more of it gets wasted.

You may not like having an accusing finger pointed at your choice to eat farmed (as opposed to scavenged roadkill) meat, but you can't really argue with the logic of the veggies, or the laws of physics.
(IHateSprouts is baking a huge pie shaped like an enormous pie, Sun 7 Oct 2012, 15:03, closed)

It doesn't quite work that way.
Much of the "crops" grown to feed livestock grow on land that cannot usefully be used for growing things that humans can eat. If you can work out a way to eat tough heathery plants and grasses then great, I'd love to hear it. For now, I'll stick to putting sheep there and then eating the sheep.

We just do not have the ecological resources for everyone to be vegetarian. The oil consumption alone in arable farming is terrifying. Once the oil runs out, there will be no vegans and very, very few vegetarians.
(gordonjcp, Sun 7 Oct 2012, 16:45, closed)

You can argue with their grasp of farming reality, though.
The areas which are suitable for growing grass and silage for cattle are not necessarily suitable for growing delicious and oh-so-trendy mung beans.
(ubergeekian, Sun 7 Oct 2012, 19:30, closed)

Ok, let's stop animal farming tomorrow, and all become vegetarians/vegans.
What will happen to all the pigs, sheep, cattle, goats, ducks, geese, chickens etc.?

They can't just wander around - they'll need to eat, and generally speaking will rather like eating the same cereals, fruits and vegetables that we now live on.

And what do we call animals which we can't extract any value from that like to eat our food crops? Pests. And what do we do to pests? Why, we kill them. (Aside from a few very devout Buddhists, all agrarian farmers kill pests.)

And we don't generally have much sympathy for the way we kill our pests* so I doubt we'd go to all the time and trouble of stunning them.

And, if we kill all these suddenly feral cattle to stop them eating our wheat, maize and soya, their bodies are going to just go to waste, rotting where they dropped, spreading disease etc. unless we do something with them.

Incineration isn't very green. So, we might as well just eat them, eh?

And all that manure that we spread on fields through the winter to replace some of the organic matter that's been used by last year's crop - where's that going to sustainably come from? Us? You do know we already do that with solid waste left over from sewage treatment once it's usefully free of pathogens? So unless we suddenly all start shitting more, we'll have to dig out more mineral fertilisers to use them instead - even more than we already do, bringing forward the time when 'peak phosphate' will pass, pushing up the price of phosphate fertilisers and therefore of the "sustainable" food you think we're all going to be able to live on.

The problem of eating meat is not that it is inherently more or less sustainable than a plant diet, but that trying to feed meat at every meal to upwards of seven billion people is inherently unsustainable. We could comfortably feed everyone meat with a far smaller meat industry and more humane farming methods if we in the West went back to a diet where we maybe ate meat or fish once or twice per week, raising those in the less developed world to that same level.

But ultimately it's human numbers that are the core problem, not what they eat, and my guess is were pretty close to the stationary phase of our population curve. Even if we can think ourselves to a point where we can sustain 10bn or so people, we're unlikely to be able to do that indefinitely without getting knocked back by a disease that kills us or one of our food species, by pollution or some other limiting factor. Just because we can see the strings doesn't make us any less the puppets.

So have a burger, and think a bit harder about how we can get back into some kind of balance without invoking some kind of hippy-dippy pastoral idyll that never existed and never will, even if you can humanely reduce the human population to a faction of its current level.

*Probably because it's hard to anthropomorphise a locust or a slug. Which is a problem - all farming, even organic farming, does what it can to 'control' (a euphemism for kill, usually) insect and other invertebrate or fungal pests. Nematode-infected slugs die just as dead as metaldehyde-baited ones do. Why is this ok, but killing a chicken isn't? Slugs are alive. Potato blight fungus is alive. Caterpillars and locusts are alive. Why draw a line between what forms of life are alive and which ones are dead? There's no moral justification for the distinction, so why make it?
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Mon 8 Oct 2012, 16:58, closed)

meat is murder
Quick, eat the evidence.
(unclestinky, Sun 7 Oct 2012, 15:14, closed)