- Many animals kill out of pleasure/instinct, not to eat. Ask any shepherd, wolves will often come, kill a sheep, and leave it. Humans cook meat to increase their caloric intake, which reduces the amount of meat needed to eat. I don't see any problem with this.
- Your link regarding "high performance athletes" isn't really relevant. F1 Racers are not athletes - they have to be as slim as possible to fit in the car body. Also, nothing is told about performance, just random facts about cardiovascular health, something that doesn't affect athletes, as they're already doing a lot of exercise. Last, there is a lot of difference between red meat full of fat and the lean, white meat that most athletes consume. Same with antioxidants, eating meat doesn't prevent you to eat berries on the side.
Ah, and plant-based diets are usually full of carbs, which are metabolized into fat, so their last point is another example of vegan pseudoscience.
- The "happy farm" method could exist by reducing our meat consumption. You can also greatly improve industrial farms if you accept price increases, which is I think a reasonable solution.
- It's virtue signaling. I met so many vegans earning top 5% income lecturing me about global warming and taking planes few times a year for their holidays, I now know the drill quite well. You know what? The best predictor for your CO2 production is your income, which is associated to your consumption level. You want to reduce global warming? Withdraw 80% of your salary in cash and burn it. Stop using a fridge, as well.
>> Many animals kill out of pleasure/instinct, not to eat. Ask any shepherd, wolves will often come, kill a sheep, and leave it. Humans cook meat to increase their caloric intake, which reduces the amount of meat needed to eat. I don't see any problem with this.
What you describe is surplus killing. It's not because they get a kick out of torturing or seeing another animal suffer. Here is the definition: "researchers say animals surplus-kill whenever they can, in order to procure food for offspring and others, to gain valuable killing experience, and to create the opportunity to eat the carcass later when they are hungry again". Also see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229928398_Surplus_k...
I think what the former special forces guy explained in the video I shared previously applies to you. You use a flexible morality. When it suits you, you compare yourself to wolves or other carnivores to justify your actions of supporting cruelty. When it doesn't suit you, you say we shouldn't compare ourselves to animals. So what is it? If you want to be like a wolf then kill and eat the animals raw - no cooking or making it taste nice.
Most people would feel sick watching an animal being butchered. That's why the realities of butchering are hidden from society. In the US they have AG gag laws - it's not allowed to film what's going on in factory farms or slaughter houses. I wonder why.
There were many reports of small children not wanting to eat animals once they realized they eat Peppa the pig. Or the recent cases of kids crying because the farm animals they made friends with are being taken away and being slaughtered. We are not carnivores. We are not hunter gatherers anymore, most of us don't need animal flesh to survive anymore. What differentiates us from other non-human animals is that we can choose. We have the ability to progress. Future humans will look back at this time the same way we look back at when we enslaved other humans and 'othered' them.
The core question really is not whether animals are the same as us, but it's whether they can suffer like us. And the answer to that is a resounding YES. But you might be OK for animals to suffer so you can have temporary mouth pleasure and convenience.
>> Your link regarding "high performance athletes" isn't really relevant. F1 Racers are not athletes - they have to be as slim as possible to fit in the car body. Also, nothing is told about performance, just random facts about cardiovascular health, something that doesn't affect athletes, as they're already doing a lot of exercise. Last, there is a lot of difference between red meat full of fat and the lean, white meat that most athletes consume. Same with antioxidants, eating meat doesn't prevent you to eat berries on the side.
What do you think an athlete is? So anyone who is slim is not an athlete? Marathon runners are not athletes according to your definition.
How come you left out the other types of athletes from the article, like NFL players. Do you think NFL players are not athletes?
If you want to see other athletes and how they thrive and perform on a plant based diet then watch this https://gamechangersmovie.com/
I bet your argument against this will be that the most performant athletes in a certain category of sport are not on a plant based diet. But are you trying to be the best athlete in the world and you need to carefully fine tune your diet to maximize performance?
>> Ah, and plant-based diets are usually full of carbs, which are metabolized into fat, so their last point is another example of vegan pseudoscience.
>> The "happy farm" method could exist by reducing our meat consumption. You can also greatly improve industrial farms if you accept price increases, which is I think a reasonable solution.
We kill Billions of animals each year. How do you reduce the demand for animal flesh?
>> It's virtue signaling. I met so many vegans earning top 5% income lecturing me about global warming and taking planes few times a year for their holidays, I now know the drill quite well. You know what? The best predictor for your CO2 production is your income, which is associated to your consumption level. You want to reduce global warming? Withdraw 80% of your salary in cash and burn it. Stop using a fridge, as well.
So yours is anecdotal evidence and you make the same mistake many others make (I make the same black&white thinking mistake and try hard to avoid it) - assuming that all people advocating for animal rights and for a more plant-based diet... that they are all virtue signalling.
I don't own a car. I haven't flown for over 5 years. According to the WWF carbon footprint calculator my score is below the world average. So please don't assume that all people who don't eat animals are all the same.
In conclusion, I think we agree on one thing - that animal factory farming is bad and that we should reduce our animal flesh consumption. How do you propose we do that? How would you abolish factory farms?
What we don't agree on are ethics. You don't seem to believe that animals don't have the right to live and it's fully justified to kill them against their will even if our survival doesn't depend on it.
I'm curious, if we could grow animal flesh in the lab without having to grow a full animal and making it suffer, would you eat it?
Anyway, thank you for trying to keep this discussion civil ;)
> I think what the former special forces guy explained in the video I shared previously applies to you. You use a flexible morality. When it suits you, you compare yourself to wolves or other carnivores to justify your actions of supporting cruelty. When it doesn't suit you, you say we shouldn't compare ourselves to animals. So what is it? If you want to be like a wolf then kill and eat the animals raw - no cooking or making it taste nice.
I'm not a wolf. I'm explaining that animals kill in nature. Omnivore animals do kill, too, even if they could live by being vegetarians. Also, as I told you, I have stated my point already, it's not flexible. It's ok to breed and kill animals for their meat. Useless suffering should be avoided, as it's unnecessary and spoils the produce. This way of thinking would actually improve much better the situation than your overall ban.
Don't believe me? Well, veganism hasn't stopped industrial farming, however organic farming and diverse labels to nudge the consumer gave birth to better practices and an awareness about more sustainable farming. You're putting virtuous farmers out of business, I'm helping them improve their work.
> What do you think an athlete is? So anyone who is slim is not an athlete? Marathon runners are not athletes according to your definition.
F1 drivers' hedge is mainly in the nervous system and their experience. It's stupid to compare them to marathon runners or gymnasts working the olympic rings. Those last one need proteins to build up muscle/heal it, which is hard to get using plants, because plant protein profile has a lower quality than animal produce.
Yes, sorry, but I don't respect the authority argument, especially after COVID-19 where all the “experts” told us that by jailing everyone we'd be safer, while hard data from Sweden was showing that it was clearly false.
The fact that they say that plant-based diet has less fat, which is better, is clearly a misunderstanding of carbs->fat metabolisms. Otherwise, drinking coke wouldn't make you fat. Anyway, we had before the "fat is bad" dogma, now it's "carbs is bad", what comes next?
If you want to know, I ate an almost plant-based diet for a while, full of proteins (lentils + rice, nuts, etc etc), while exercising for endurance and strength 5 days a week. I was logging my data on the ergometer every day. At some point, I started eating meat twice a day, after workout. I suddenly made big gains over the next three weeks, while I was plateauing before. Same workout.
I lost weight, stopped having carbs cravings, got better focus at work and my mood improved. This evidence is worth 100x all the "experts" that you'll find on the internet. It happens that it also meets the experience of millions of athletes across the world - not those cherry-picked by your lobbying group.
> We kill Billions of animals each year. How do you reduce the demand for animal flesh?
Meat isn't an inelastic good. Stringent regulations = lower supply = higher price. I know, I know we aren't yet in a communist economy, so maybe the market will work it out?
> In conclusion, I think we agree on one thing - that animal factory farming is bad and that we should reduce our animal flesh consumption. How do you propose we do that? How would you abolish factory farms?
*animal meat. You can improve factory farms. The Americans are, as always, extreme to suck profit out of everything. You can give more space to animals. You can give access to sunlight and outdoors. You can improve the food. You can have smaller slaughterhouses near the breeding grounds to reduce stress. You can forbid halal/kasher-type of slaughtering. etc etc.
You can also stop subsidizing the exports of low-quality meat the US produces.
Love your comments on F1 drivers! Do you know any? Do you know the G forces they encounter during hiur long races? I've always heard they were extreme examples of human fitness compared to the average human.
Ok good that you confirmed you're not the same as a wolf. But then also please stop using their behavior as a reason to justify that it is OK to continue killing billions of animals and making them suffer and creating huge environmental damage at the same time.
Here from the UN [0]:
"... meat and dairy provide just 18 per cent of calories consumed but use 83 per cent of global farmland and are responsible for 60 per cent of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. As that report’s lead researcher, Oxford University’s Joseph Poore said: “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car.”
This was echoed by an IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land last year which stated that if we don’t rapidly change the course for our food systems, we won’t be able to prevent the climate crisis."
So scientific studies clearly show we can't continue like this or our kids and their kids will inherit a harsh world. So what's more important- that we can have some burgers & french cheese and the illusion of getting 'complete protein' because otherwise we can't be a top performing athlete or keeping our world inhabitable for future generations? If top athletes can thrive on a plant-based diet, so can we.
Also you mentioned the words ban, communist and some other highly charged words that have nothing to do with this discussion.
Nobody is talking about banning animal flesh. That's not possible. The world is too addicted to it and people like yourself will keep up the demand rather than advocating for more sustainable and ethical alternatives and continue to perpetuate the myth that factory farms can be better or we could feed the entire world with 'happy animal' farms.
The way to change behavior is to show the realities of large scale animal farming and its impact. Show it in schools. This would help to reduce the demand for animal flesh & dairy.
Kids instinctively want to cuddle and play with animals. They don't want to shred them to pieces. What do you think would happen if we showed children how pigs and other animals are treated and slaughtered? How do you think they would react to all the blood and screaming? Even most adults can't look at this as it makes their stomach turn. In comparison, how do you think children would react to vegetables & fruits being chopped up? Would they react with the same horror?
We are not hunter gatherers anymore. We have the brains and technology to come up with better food systems that require fewer resources and are more gentle and that can scale without destroying our biosphere.
>> Yes, sorry, but I don't respect the authority argument, especially after COVID-19 where all the “experts” told us that by jailing everyone we'd be safer
Not to go off topic, the only country I know of that quasi jailed their citizens was China.
Sweden's strategy in hindsight was not much better than other western countries.
- It now has up to 10 times as many COVID-19 deaths per capita as its Nordic neighbors.
- Sweden also didn't fare much better economically, suggesting its gamble didn't pay off.
*meat. Stop using "flesh" for food : the right term is meat.
You're not better than the guy who work in slaughterhouses that you despise if you want to push your ideology on kids, while they're still vulnerable. Quite a carnivorous behavior, truly.
Or please, we'll show to your kids Iraqi children dying from malnutrition and from depleted-uranium induced cancer each time you use your credit card.
Also, your UN report is quite laughable. Why would such a solution should be imposed everywhere on the globe? There are places where you can't do traditional farming (e.g pastures). Again, you're thinking like if we were all overweight Americans.
Regarding Covid-19, my country prevented me to go outside for more than 1h a day and used helicopters to find hikers camping in forests. Many other countries did the same: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-stay-home-restrictions
>> *meat. Stop using "flesh" for food : the right term is meat.
You are eating animal flesh - that's a fact. Yes I deliberately didn't use the term meat to illustrate a point and you helped me prove it. We invent these new words to distract from the reality of where meat comes from. For example saying 'I had chopped up baby sheep for dinner' doesn't sound as nice as 'I had lamb chops for dinner'.
>> You're not better than the guy who work in slaughterhouses that you despise if you want to push your ideology on kids, while they're still vulnerable. Quite a carnivorous behavior, truly.
Again - you're making the mistake of limited binary thinking. Where did I say I'm better than a slaughterhouse worker? Tell me what is ideological about raising awareness about the horrors of animal factory farming or how it majorly contributes to the climate crisis.
Here's another fact for you. Slaughterhouse workers experience PTSD [0]. What do you think having to kill hundreds of animals a day does to the human psyche? Demand for animal flesh creates this situation.
If you had no job options but these two: a) day in day out kill animals, see and smell blood and feces. b) pick, pack and chop up vegetables all day. Which option would you go for?
Another example - this person [1], which most people would describe as tough - former MMA fighter Michael Bisping - could not work in a slaughterhouse because it's too horrible and drives you mad.
Are you really so attached to your cheese and eating animal flesh that you don't care about any of this or your child's future life on this planet? Are all the climate scientist pseudo scientists?
We are humans and we should strive to be humane, which definition is 'Characterized by kindness, mercy, or compassion.' Tell me what's kind about animal factory farms? Tell me what's compassionate about killing sentient beings against their will so you can have a burger?
Why not look for better and more humane food system solutions that will ensure we don't destroy our biosphere?
>> Or please, we'll show to your kids Iraqi children dying from malnutrition and from depleted-uranium induced cancer each time you use your credit card.
Yes agree - we should teach about the realities of war. Good point. So why not teach both?
>> Also, your UN report is quite laughable. Why would such a solution should be imposed everywhere on the globe? There are places where you can't do traditional farming (e.g pastures). Again, you're thinking like if we were all overweight Americans.
Most of the animal flesh produced is from large scale animal farming. This is not talking about your small & happy slaughtered animal farm.
The point is it's not sustainable to meet the current demand of animal flesh. It needs to be drastically reduced and replaced with more sustainable alternatives - if we want to have a chance at limiting global heating or at least avoiding the worst outcome.
So FEE.org is an economic think tank. What do you think they care more about, the economy or public health? Of course they will write from the perspective of the economy. Please see this rigorous study instead [2].
>> How's your 5th booster going by the way?
I don't need it and I'm grateful that Science gave us vaccines.
"Stuck in such a life, Butler described how it would make them ‘more prone to violence’, and ‘much more likely to physically attack whatever or whoever you are mad at’ – and described in detail some of the ‘games’ workers would play with the carcasses of dead animals. In one such game, slaughterers would apparently rip the heads off live chickens, place the heads on their fingers and use them as puppets. In another, they would start so-called ‘shit fights’, where they would squeeze a live chicken so violently that its feces would squirt out onto another person."
- Your link regarding "high performance athletes" isn't really relevant. F1 Racers are not athletes - they have to be as slim as possible to fit in the car body. Also, nothing is told about performance, just random facts about cardiovascular health, something that doesn't affect athletes, as they're already doing a lot of exercise. Last, there is a lot of difference between red meat full of fat and the lean, white meat that most athletes consume. Same with antioxidants, eating meat doesn't prevent you to eat berries on the side.
Ah, and plant-based diets are usually full of carbs, which are metabolized into fat, so their last point is another example of vegan pseudoscience.
- The "happy farm" method could exist by reducing our meat consumption. You can also greatly improve industrial farms if you accept price increases, which is I think a reasonable solution.
- It's virtue signaling. I met so many vegans earning top 5% income lecturing me about global warming and taking planes few times a year for their holidays, I now know the drill quite well. You know what? The best predictor for your CO2 production is your income, which is associated to your consumption level. You want to reduce global warming? Withdraw 80% of your salary in cash and burn it. Stop using a fridge, as well.