Veganism/Vegetarianism

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My body does not tolerate animal fats well at all and milk makes me bloated. Growing up I was always told that eating meat and dairy (especially dairy) was obligatory in order to be healthy and so I never felt like I could be vegan even though I kind of wanted to for health as well as ethical reasons. I also never felt like I could assert my own interest in not contributing to needless harm since most people I've known express a great deal of hostility toward the idea of having concern for animal suffering. As I see it we have to eat something, which necessarily means that some organisms will die but we can at least avoid harm to some creatures by not raising them to be eaten. It kind of reminds me of the latter part of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene wherein he says something to the effect that as humans we have evolved to have the ability to not be as cruel as nature. Just because we evolved as omnivorous creatures does not mean that that is the only way we can get our nutrition. Anytime you remove a major source of nutrients from your diet you need to be careful to compensate and get the nutrition elsewhere. Having access to a variety of legumes and vitamins (B12 is very important for vegans) I feel that I am in a position to do this.

Since I personally do not tolerate animal products very well I feel a lot better when they are not in my diet. I also donate blood regularly and my iron levels are good, even despite being a vegan and a menstruating female. Since I also avoid things like white flour and white rice, my diet is naturally very high in fiber which can be a bit much for my already sensitive stomach (animal fat makes me nauseated, milk makes me bloated, refined starch gives me headaches and the fact that my brother has Crohn's leads me to believe that there is probably something genetic about it) but I find that I do well on small meals with plenty of plant-based protein and fat.

That's how I feel about it.

Go ahead and criticize me if you want, but..

Cows emit greenhouse gases, and a lot. If everyone stopped eating cows, cows will over-populated.

Over-poppulation of cows = over-the-counter greenhouse gases = making global warming worse..

I have no clue why nature would ever make cows emit that stuff! But if we were intent to be herbivores, mother nature would have done so in the first place! Therefore, humans were intent on eating both meat & plants!

I think the main problem is how cattle is treated, NOT whenever to become vegan or not. That's the reason of the sqeeze chute and stuff, to make cattle as calm as possible.

Like Temple Grandin said: "We own them respect!"

this is incorrect. If humans stopped eating cows, their population would not be artificially inflated by humans breeding them en masse (which we do so that there are plenty to eat) and devoting hundreds of thousands of acres of cornfields to growing corn for bovine consumption.


It's a by-product of the process by which they digest (via bacteria) the cellulose in their food. If they couldn't digest cellulose (and thus produce methane, a greenhouse gas), they'd starve.


There is ample evidence that we evolved as omnivores, and there is just as much evidence that they type of herbivore that we evolved as was much more vegetable-intensive than meat-intensive.


I agree with you there. I'm a Grandin fan, too. Have you read any of her books?

[quote="LKL"I agree with you there. I'm a Grandin fan, too. Have you read any of her books?[/quote]Read "Thinking in Pictures" countless times...

At the peak of the last ice age, the diet of Eurasian human populations consisted almost entirely of meat. During the summer, our ice age ancestors had a chance to supplement their essentially carnivore diet with berries and roots, but in the winter, game was the only food source. Scurvy must have been rampant back then, which explains why human life expectancy went down from 33 years in the upper paleolithic to 20 years in the neolithic era (link).

Tens of thousands of years on a high protein diet have likely caused adaptive changes, which explains why some Europeans have severe health problems on a high carb diet which almost vanish on a low carb, high protein diet (such as my Crohn's disease).

And if we ate the cow's food instead of the cows, we would emit as much greenhouse gas as they currently do I've never suffered from flatulence after a steak or grilled chicken. But after a vegetarian meal, I fart like there's no tomorrow

Your "consciousness" requires more thorough definition.

Also, you are hung-up too much on "pain." Slacken your grip on it.

I resent the argument that robots are not conscious. I mean, exactly what is consciousness again? I do not really have much reason to think animals lack it. Humans do have a lot more intelligence and are masters at a very complicated thing: language. But beyond our level of intelligence, we have not found anything magical inside our brains yet that makes us much different from worms with primitive capabilities. It is still a bunch of neurons with physical reactions.

Then we have the free will argument. We are not actually sure we have free will either. We may be preprogrammed. If you confuse free will with nondeterminism then there are a lot of robots and software that is not deterministic either. I don't know where to find the video, but a genetic algorithm was used on structures over the task to get a blue block before the other. The idea of the programmers was to find the structure and behaviour that gets the block faster, but in fact, a branch of the algorithms decided it is better to hit the other guy before getting the blue block.

On that, many robots are not preprogrammed to a fixed behaviour but to kind of learn it. As such, I find it hard not to call it consciousness.



Is the argument about pain then? So, is the faux vegan morality not about {I don't want to kill living beings} but really about { I do not want to feel guilty when killing beings}. So in fact, the problem is not that they kill, but that they kill things that die loudly.

In that regard, what if we disabled a cow's nervous connection to its brain before sending to the slaughter house. Would it then become fine to eat the cow?

And that's exactly the point I was trying to make. A vegan going vegan to "protect life". Is all about protecting life he anthropomorphices because of pain, or eyes or features like that. They do not mind killing things that do not make them feel hypocritically guilty, like plants or insects. Plants likely are not sentient, but their death is still death. You are doomed to consume other lives in order to live. As such, if I have to kill to live I'd rather get the ones that taste better.

I read a fascinating book by Lierre Keith called The Vegetarian Myth; Food, Justice and Sustainability where she makes exactly that point, among others.

Her website:
http://lierrekeith.com/vegmyth.htm

She was a vegan for 20 years and is now an omnivore who eats non-factory farmed meat. Her path to eating this meat came about by wrestling with the dilemma you have brought up. Is it about pain or is it about life? She was forced to confront that she drew the line in a very anthropomorphic way when she decided to grow her own vegetable garden and had to wrestle with how to keep bugs from eating all her crops, which ultimately involved killing them. It's a fascinating book and I learned a lot from it. Many of my pro-(non factory farmed!) meat eating arguments are taken from her book because she makes such a compelling case.

Given that certain parts of this planet are not adequate for growing anything besides brush and grass, it makes sense to keep a certain number of animals for food production as they can turn the energy in that grass into protein which we can digest, both through milk and meat. Furthermore, 71% of this planet is water, so it makes sense to fish at a sustainable level as additional food production.

Some populations in the far north *still* subsist mostly on meat, but the majority of human history has been tropical and semi-tropical. While there have, no doubt, been a few adaptations in a few populations to that kind of niche (the retention of brown fat into adulthood of the inuit, for example), a few dozen millenia can't counter millions of years of evolution.

But you don't fart like a cow would, since you don't have a fermentation chamber in your digestive system purposfully evolved to break down cellulose. You poop most of the fiber out.

Humans might get, tops, a few hundred kcal/day from a diet of nothing but grass: as the Irish (and many other populations in famine) learned, that's not enough to keep a human from starving to death.

You're arguing against a straw vegan.
I've never heard a vegan claim that they 'don't want to kill living things.' I don't think that vegans are that stupid; the vast majority know that plants are, in fact, alive. The question is whether or not they are sentient or sapient, As I'm pretty f*****g sure I've said, and others have said, over and over and over and over.

As an omnivore, sure: I want my cow flesh to come from cows rendered unconscious by a bolt to the head before its throat is cut. I also want my cow flesh to come from cows which didn't get "finished" on a feedlot, chowing on corn that they didn't evolve to digest, up to their hocks in feces, and pumped full of antibiotics to keep them from keeling over dead in that environment.

edit for clarity: even if the cow does not suffer, however, the vegan would still point out that a conscious being has been killed, which (if given the choice) would have preferred to stay alive. A vegan would, for example, consider it perfectly logical to compare cows killed painlessly to humans harvested and killed painlessly by some species of carnivorous alien. Even if the humans didn't 'suffer,' we'd still consider it a bad thing to kill sentient, sapient beings for food.

Or extend the metaphor: just how sapient does a being have to be, before you personally would feel uncomfortable eating it? I personally would never eat dolphin, for example, even if it wasn't full of mercury and other heavy metals.

Last edited by LKL on 02 Mar 2012, 12:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

I agree; I have argued exactly this point on animal rights forums in the past.

Actually, I think that humans could possibly be adapted for relatively humane methods of slaughter, and this comes from knowing someone who grew up and worked on a farm that raised livestock...in the 1950s, when they still remembered not having the advanced equipment we do now. The thing is, excessive blood in the meat is not good for humans. We don't like the taste of it, and we don't like the look of it. Our food goes down better if the blood is drained relatively thoroughly from our meat. It's simply much easier for our digestive systems to handle. This includes red meat: that red juice you see is NOT blood, but the color is determined by myoglobin levels in the meat. Now, my understanding is that, when you are slaughtering any animal, you are supposed to get it as calm as possible. Otherwise, the muscles will tense up more when you slaughter it, and this prevents the blood from draining out properly. This supposedly has a negative effect on the taste of the meat.

Therefore, I would consider painting a different picture of our ancestors from either a violent, club-bearing savage or a sessile, fruit-eating herbivore. Our ancestors are built for long distance treks at low speed, not the high-speed, short distance pounce of a predator. Our ancestors did not like having to fight their food. Instead, they preferred to tire it out. This is a direct result of how we are built: our two-legged, "bipedal" means of locomotion is ultra-efficient at low speeds, downright crappy at a sprint. Try getting into your head an image, then, of a tired group of hunters standing quietly near a large, isolated land mammal they have tracked through the wilderness for a much as possibly a week. They had first separated the animal from its herd (the animal was probably old or a social outcast anyway), and then they had crept behind it at a slow pace, perhaps picking up occasionally into a light jog as necessary. Once their prey had been run to the point of exhaustion, they would send the youngest, swiftest hunter up to the panting creature, a sharp rock in hand, to go up and sever its main artery, moving swiftly enough that the confused and depleted animal barely registers the act before the hunter has vanished again into the bushes. The animal lays down where it stands, and the hunters wait while it quietly bleeds out its life on the ground.

We are meant for moving like ghosts. We are not violent creatures. We are plotters. We are schemers. We are thinkers. Our brains are meant for dreaming peaceful dreams while on long walks. That's what I envision.