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Happy Holidays, Sarah Palin: Animal Rights Are In The News
New York, 2:48 AM
Wed Nov 11
68 posts in the last 24 hours
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Happy Holidays, Sarah Palin: Animal Rights Are In The News |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
11/23/08
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11/21/08
Not only can you eat them but you can use them as green alternatives for example:
Cows are natural lawnmowers and automatic fertilizers.
Pigs are natural garbage disposals.
Chickens are natural pest controls while the rooster provides home security.
I don't think I could be a vegetarian even though I have petted and fed my ribeye dinner. Oddly we did name him "Dinner" just as a reminder where he was gonna end up.
11/21/08
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11/21/08
I take the Michael Pollan approach: Eat (non processed) food. Not too much. Mostly plants. I go to great lengths to buy free-range meat (when I buy it). And almost everything on my grocery receipts these days is organic. You'll also find me at the farmer's market on weekends, buying as much local produce as I can finish in a week.
Eating meat is a personal, moral call. I understand that some don't want to eat another animal. I, personally, don't find meat immoral in and of itself.
11/21/08
One of my vegetarian friends told me that she ended up going to Burger King with coworkers because they were working late, and needed to grab some food. She said she ate BK maybe once or twice a year. She got the veggie burger, but her coworkers gave her such a hard time for eating unhealthily, as they were chomping down on their double whoppers. She is a vegetarian mainly for environmental reasons.
I try to eat a healthy vegetarian diet, but I am uncertain as to why vegetarians always get called out when they have a slice of pizza compared to carnivores. We're not saintly eaters, we just don't eat meat.
11/21/08
But, turkeys? Really? That guy who thought he was "teaching the other turkeys a lesson" is obviously a sadist and an idiot. Turkey's aren't smart enough to recognize that cause & effect. Wild turkeys aren't smart enough not to wander right in front of my boss's shotgun when he's standing in the middle of an open field. I can't see the problem with eating something so low on the food chain, especially if I get it from a local, free range farm.
11/21/08
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11/21/08
The processes in which we do it now, for mass consumption, has not. We are not people with spears trying to kill a buffalo and use it for food, clothing, and other materials. Meat is an industry now, not something you need to survive.
If someone wants to eat meat, fine. But don't say that some animals, like turkey, are okay to eat because they aren't as smart as pigs.
11/21/08
Ethics aren't necessarily static, I think the fact that I can go to the store and just as easily pick up some tofu or beans as I can some frozen chicken drastically changes the way I look at my "food" and how I decide to eat what. Tofu is convenient, cheaper, was never sentient, and I have no fears of it having been mistreated. People in subsistence societies may not get this luxury. But everyone in America, today, does. We have the luxury to evaluate the ethics of how we eat, and I'm glad I can take advantage of that.
11/21/08
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Eat all the meat you want -- everyone makes that decision for herself -- but stop hiding behind this specious trope that vegetarian and vegan diets are defacto "elitist".
11/21/08
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11/21/08
This is not the discussion I wanted to have. I don't actually feel that strongly either way, I just don't like being called an idiot.
11/21/08
that's weird. macaroni is pretty cheap, rice is cheap. eggs are cheap and cheese is cheap. that's a vegetarian (not vegan) group of foods. and tofu is sold in every single market in my state. not the organic markets, i'm talking about the markets that service the new england area.
11/21/08
11/21/08
I've gone back and forth with being a vegetarian and it just isn't a good choice for me. We were bred by evolution to be omnivores, it's what gave us the edge to remain competitive on the food chain. We do eat a LOT more meat in this country than we could possibly need and we abuse the privilege in ways that makes me sick to my stomach. BUT we still do need a little bit of animal protein to truly be healthy. We have a choice, yes, but to choose to continue to eat meat isn't an unethical choice, it's a perfectly natural one. If any other animal on the food chain decided to switch to nuts and berries the entire balance in the animal kingdom would be thrown off. Even now, there are animals that would breed out of control if nobody hunted them and it's just not practical or even ethical for us to let that happen. There's a happy medium that we are far from finding and no extreme is close to being the right way.
11/21/08
11/21/08
Also, I haven't found flaxseed oil too expensive. A bottle of flaxseed oil is cheaper than a bottle of wine, and I have the shiniest hair and the nicest nails ever, seriously. I do buy vitamin B12 in bulk. Protein =/= vitamins B12 and fatty acids, btw.
I am sorry that you could not get the sort of nutrition you needed from a vegetarian diet, but it is absolutely false to claim that we need animal protein, or that other people will not be able to handle the diet.
11/21/08
11/21/08
But the article also linked soy products to ADD, learning disabilities, and other ailments that manifest in childhood, so there's that to use in weighing the credibility of the conclusions.
11/21/08
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11/21/08
what i'd like to say is that there's an extreme disconnect between people who are cool with "humanely raised livestock then slaughtered for food" and on the other hand would never allow their beloved pet to be taken from them as a food item, even with the promise of "humanely slaughtered".
why? because whenever we can objectify something and remove its individual rights~~ distance ourselves because we don't feel love for these anonymous food animals the way we do our pets~~ we're really not following logic.
the only difference between food animals and our pets is that our pets are lucky to have us to love them, interact with them and see their individual personalities. farm animals don't have that luxury, so it's perceived that they have no individual personalities. this makes no sense to me.
11/21/08
I know it seems callous to talk about animals as having a specific purpose; makes them sound like inanimate objects or tools purely for human consumption. But raising cows specifically for slaughter is no different than growing plants specifically for your salads. To do so in a humane manner, to treat the animals as kindly as possible until they are taken away, that's what most small-time farmers do. And that's why it's unfair to assert that farmers purposely objectify their crop animals and deny them any rights.
11/21/08
The difference I see is that cows are have central nervous systems (just like us!), are sentient, and feel pain when you slaughter them "humanely."
11/21/08
With respect to the aspect of animals as pets; dogs, cats and horses are typically kept around because they have great social and utilitarian functions on a farm. Cows and other livestock are product and essential for the survival of the farmer.
Most children who grow up on livestock farms will at one point in their childhood be given a cow or sheep to raise entirely from birth. They will show this animal in the local grange and be graded on various aspects. Typically, they will develop a strong emotional connection with the first one they raise. However, time comes when the cow or sheep needs to become meat product, at which point they will be sad for a short time. The money the animal is sold for also becomes the childs, usually invested in a college fund. Very quickly after that, the child is given a new animal to do the same with. From then on, the child will not have such an emotional connection to the animal.
This is to demostrate to the child the responsibily involved, but also the concept that the animal is neccessary for livelyhood and is meant for the betterment of its master.
11/21/08
11/21/08
actually you're wrong, i grew up in the country and worked on a few farms. that's probably what contributed to my becoming an herbivore.
and you miss my point (or maybe prove it!) your whole argument is human-centered and completely devoted to human "needs" with no thought to what the animal experiences. as though the animals experience nothing, like a blank machine. your use of the word "master" pretty much sums up your compartmentalization of the place that animals should hold in your world. that whole mentality is so speciest.
and the child rightly feels sad when the pet calf or lamb or pig is taken away. it is the legacy of the brainwashed parent to pass on "don't be a baby, you can't get attached to this animal. it's meant for feed."
guess what. they have this same mentality with greyhounds. that's why so many of them wind up dead after their usefulness as a racer is over. also with racehorses. they're not viewed as living beings."they're not pets." you'll hear this over and over in horse and dog racing farms. they're viewed as commodities. which is very ignorant of contemporary animal behavior.
read a few books by today's animal ethologists, who study animals in the wild and record their behavior, and see how off the mark this mentality is.
humans are no better than animals. just because we can cage and eat them, does that mean we should? . those are two different and to my mind deeply ignorant of the lives of all animals. pigs, cows and chickens, if kept as pets, will show you they have the same individuality as your cat. dog. horse. etc.
11/21/08
that's my whole point. that we as humans view animals as lessers who have to fulfill some kind of human need in order to have rights. i disagree with that logic.
11/21/08
Those ideas are a combination of Hinduism and Buddism.
And equating humans to animals is beyond idiotic. Are animals capable of committing evil? Were the Nazi Concentration Camps of Auschwitz and Krakaw just a way of thinning what some crazed Austrian decided to call a 'weaker breed of human' and seek the 'Ubermanche' (super-man). I bring an extreme example, because that is how you test a world-view, by using extremes. If it doesn't hold up in the extremes, then it doesn't work. By equating humans to animals you devalue every human life ever lost and elevate the status of every murderer the world has ever seen.
11/21/08
11/21/08
And as for horses - sure, we may keep them as pets in North America - but we export their meat to Europe, where the culture has deemed them the equivalent of cattle (which they are!). We just attach human attributes to them here. (As long as they're winning blue ribbons with Little Jenny. Because there are a whole bunch of young, healthy horses that go to slaughter for meat when they stop being of interest to our teenage daughters, or are too old to race, etc.)
It's a values thing. Just like cows are sacred in India and people eat dogs in some countries, it all just depends on the characteristics we attach to these animals. They are not, however, any different just because we choose to (or not to) eat them.
11/21/08
11/21/08
"I bring an extreme example, because that is how you test a world-view, by using extremes. If it doesn't hold up in the extremes, then it doesn't work."
Thats what the hell Nazis have to do with this. As soon as you equate humans and animals in terms of worth, then it brings up those kind of moral issues. If humans and animals are equal, can animals be evil like humans? Are lions evil because they prey on other animals? Or are humans absolved of committing evil to each other like animals are? Is it evil when the lone wolf forces himself on the female wolf? If not, why would it be evil when a strong man forces himself on a woman? Remember humans=animals. How can you call one evil, but not the other? Or excuse one of behaviors that aren't excused by the other?
She wants animals to be seen as human equals? Those are the questions that need to be answered before that can be done.
11/21/08
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11/21/08
Quite the contrary. I'm arguing for the humane treatment of the animals we eat, and for SUSTAINABLE farming practices. Because while you said there's no way to predict how not eating meat would effect our ecosystems, there IS a damn good way to predict how fucked we'll be if industrial farming practices continue polluting our environment.
And as for cultures where meat eating is a necessity, good on 'em. They aren't pumping their herds of goats full or hormones or funneling their goat-waste into our rivers and lakes or groundwater.
I am not elevating animals to the same moral level as humans. I am saying that, as humans, we should make ethical decisions about the food we consume and the effects it has on the earth's population. I don't eat bananas, either, and it's sure as hell not because they have feelings. It's because the debt-bonded slaves who farm them deserve to be considered over my morning smoothie.
All I'm saying is this: think about what you put in your overfed North American mouth, and how it effects other people, other creatures, and our own damn planet. If you want to eat cows, eat cows. If you want to eat dog, eat dog. Just use your damn critical thinking skills for once, and consider the implications of your actions.
11/21/08
11/21/08
I did actually read your prior posts, and I can tell that you're obviously well informed (hell, you even cite your sources on a blog thread). I 'friended' you before I even responded, because you're obviously well-read.
I just get extremely worked up when anyone a) assumes that, as a vegetarian, I'm preaching it as a be-all-end-all solution for everyone or b) tries to pull the good ol' "we need to eat meat for the sake of the environment!" because that's obviously only a tiny tidbit of the whole picture.
Of course you're right that, as wealthy Westerners, we're privileged to even consider such things. I would like to mention, however, in your previous pastoral example - even that's not as simple as we make it out to be. Who, exactly, is eating the meat? How is it divided? By class? By gender? That's a whole other can of worms, but when it comes down to it, eating meat still conveys inherent moral decisions in every culture.
11/21/08
I don't think anybody here is advocating the torture, abuse, or mistreatment of animals. But, I am curious as to why the people making the argument that eating babies and turkeys are moral equivalents do not think that it is equally equivalent for a bear and a human to eat a deer.
11/21/08
Just guessing though.
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Oh. Ew. Thanks.
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11/21/08
Stomping turkeys heads is a totally valid point, for the most part... unless one raises their own turkeys, hunts one, or gets it from an independent, free-range farm.
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