Veganism

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Are you vegan if you eat vegetables grown in manure?

Haha. This debate reminds me of this bit in "The restaurant at the end of the universe" by Douglas Adams:

Imagine a guy cut off his own hand for you, with you there watching. Now, let's get past the fact that this is a disturbing way for him to behave to begin with, and let's pretend that you didn't think to call 911 or run screaming.

Now, imagine that he were to drain all of blood out of his hand, wash it thoroughly, put it in a marinade, and store it in the fridge. The following night, suppose he pulls the now marinated hand out of the fridge and cooks it on the grill, and then he serves it to you with a slice of lemon.

You wouldn't eat it, would you? If anything, you would probably turn your head and puke. The thing is, I think that some vegans are like this about animal protein in general. It's nothing in the world except animal squeamishness in those kinds of cases. I've found that those kinds of vegans won't preach about veganism to you, and they probably wouldn't even tell you they're vegans until after your fifth year living with them after you finally break down and ask, "why don't you ever eat your pork chop?"

On the other hand, the ethical arguments annoy me. Hello, but a chicken doesn't have any sense of self at all. It doesn't have the parts of the mammalian brain that would give it the ability to have a sense of self. A cow has only slightly more of a concept of its own existence than Terri Schiavo. Pigs only care about one thing in the world, which is eating, which makes even the worst factory farm in the world a relative paradise for a porker. Therefore, you have to be a bit of an r-tard for the "ethical" arguments to fly.

Finally, I have a special hatred for the kinds of vegans who make stuff up about human nutrition to fit in with their bigotry. I have encountered those kinds of people, and I think it's perfectly justifiable to deal with them by smashing them in the head with cinderblocks. I call them "evangelical vegans."

So really, vegans are about as wide-ranging in character as any other demographic. Like evangelical Christians, an evangelical vegan is a bigoted as*hole who will knowingly lie to you to support his/her ideology. Some of them are relatively tolerant, and a few of them don't even discuss their dietary choice with family because they see it as a personal preference and nobody else's business. Vegans make this choice in their diets for a wide range of reasons, and they all pursue it in a somewhat different spirit. You can't paint vegans with a broad brush and still be honest.

i have read none of this except for the first few lines of the first thread, so i am not sure if i am in context, and i can not be bothered to find out, so i will post a thought i had a few minutes ago after i read it.

it is interesting that carnivorous and omnivorous animals usually prefer herbivorous animals.
lions do not hunt hyenas or other smaller cats or african hunting dogs or any other carnivorous small animal.

i know that it maybe is because carnivorous animals have weapons and short burst stamina as well as stereoscopic vision (that has a side effect of providing improved prefight postural positioning) , and so they propose a challenge that would require more energy than hunting herbivores.

but i also note that lions (using lions as an example of general carnivores) will not scavenge on a carnivore carcass either. it seems to me that because they are both at the same level in the food chain, that they may find each others flesh unpalatable, and their systems my not be able to extract the same amount of "nutrition" from other carnivore flesh.

i have seen footage of a lion in an altercation with a hyena on a few occasions. on some occasions the lion could easily have finished the hyenas life, but desisted and let it go. if the lion had killed it, then if the flesh was acceptable, then the lion would attain both a meal and a reduction in competition. but they lion chose the path of "you have learned your lesson! now get out of here!!".

on some occasions (one i think) the lion killed the hyena, but did not start to eat it.
instead, it resumed it's hunt for impalas etc.

humans, (going comma crazy tonight) as they voyaged through prehistory and acquired their omnivorous digestive natures, have rarely chosen carnivorous animal as food choices.

hmmmmm now i come to think of it, i can see so many exceptions to my line of reasoning that i think i will abandon it.


vultures would not pass up a dead lion as a meal.

sharks eat whatever they can catch.

asians do eat dogs and cats.

aborigines eat goanna's.

i was going to say that carnivores would have been easier to catch than omnivores to stone age people, and it is surprising that they chose not to go that route.
i was going to consider that all one has to do to catch a carnivore, is set a trap.

omnivores would be much harder to trap because whatever bait you use is usually available outside the trap as well (put grass inside a trap in a grassy savannah, and it is unlikely to catch anything).

but if meat (which is in much shorter supply) is put in the trap, it is very likely that an animal that weighs much more than the bait (providing much more energy than was invested with the bait) will be rapidly caught. i thought that it would be a compound return (almost exponential if one wants to excur to the ridiculous).

obviously as i was thinking this (which was after i started writing this post), i realized that there were vastly fewer carnivores to catch than there were herbivores, and if they employed the method that i thought of, then they would be out of food after a few years (in their vicinity (which they are somewhat confined to)).

then i thought that this would be excellent for them because the population of herbivores would explode (given climatic clemency), and the danger of being predated upon themselves would be reduced to a significant degree. for the few remaining uncaught carnivores, it would also be a boon, as they would have a smorgasbord available to them (weather permitting)

and now i am bored with thinking about the matter because i have something else in mind that i want to attend to presently.

but to close this post, i will say that it was going to be a joke that if you do not eat meat, you will be more appetizing to a lion, and he may have the last laugh.

whatever.

@WilliamWDelaney Animal cognition is relatively new area of science and foundings are rather suprising comparing to what speciesists push relentlessly. What is ethical or not is a matter of long and tough debate.

In 2008 Americans consumed 18 billion chickens. Wow!

ruveyn