Ostriig on 24/6/2011 at 16:26
And in related news I got a surprisingly decent sirloin steak at lunch today. It was really something 'cause that place usually just barely manages to scrape mediocre with their cooking.
Hewer on 24/6/2011 at 17:16
Quote Posted by MrDuck
So....chicken isn't vegan?
Nope- neither is duck :cool:
Gingerbread Man on 24/6/2011 at 18:14
I bet that if I went around psychologically distressing animals by showing them awful pictures and making them watch other creatures get slaughtered in inhumane ways, Peta would be quite upset with me.
But I'm someone's baby, too.
Also fuck these guys until they stop eating anything with yeast or honey in it. And what about product that is the result of human animal exploitation? You think all those polyester knickerbockers are stitched together by robots?
PeeperStorm on 24/6/2011 at 19:31
Quote Posted by SD
I heard she was making a curry. She didn't realise that these days, nobody puts baby in a korma.
Ohh, the pain...the pain...
Aerothorn on 24/6/2011 at 20:14
Quote Posted by Starrfall
The sad part is that no one thinks they're cool regardless
I do, actually, though I'm well aware that I'm in the small minority in this.
Let's be clear: PETA is a multi-faceted organization. Their marketing arm is both their most well-known organ and, sadly, their least effective. The organization does a lot of good work ending animal cruelty (see their recent work with Lipton as a random example) through serious means, sometimes even (gasp!) compromises that advance their agenda a bit.
The problem is that the relative pragmatists that make up a lot of PETA seem to be completely missing in the marketing arm, who - their relatively effective fight against fur notwithstanding - are completely fucking useless. Convincing people to end support for factory farming is an uphill battle on many levels: if nothing else, it's a very difficult lifestyle change, and so an individual has a vested interest (all merits of either side notwithstanding) in keeping the status quo, which for most folks involves eating factory-farmed meat. This means that they will look for any excuse (and I realize this isn't true for all meat-eaters, but I'm generalizing based on my personal experiences and observations) to ignore the animal rights people. PETA gives them that excuse: by pushing consistently sensationalistic and extreme (even if sometimes true) stuff, they are dismissed out of hand; and when people dismiss them they often end up dismissing all those who share their beliefs. It's a sad state of affairs, and as someone deeply concerned with animal rights I find it extremely frustrating, and have to cut through a LOT of misconceptions about vegetarianism/veganism any time I have this conversation with folks.
Sometimes I think they're not really trying to change people, and are just interested in feeling smug about their moral superiority. Because I honestly don't understand the tactics behind their marketing.
Xorak on 24/6/2011 at 22:37
I believe completely in treating animals with respect and all that, but I've never understood what purpose it serves to begin the process of evolving back into Australopithecines. Our brains grew to the size they are now because we switched to eating meat. Some vegetarians even try and claim it's better and healthier to be a vegetarian. Homo habilis might've had stronger bones than me, but I'll take my 1100cc sized brain over his 600cc brain any day of the week. That PETA is just pushing us down that road is mindblowing to me.
It's ironic too how in a world in which we have very little empathy for each other, we care more about the welfare of animals and less about each other.
Harvester on 24/6/2011 at 22:46
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
Also fuck these guys until they stop eating anything with yeast or honey in it.
Vegans don't eat honey AFAIK.
Aerothorn, I see your point, but I still think PETA is a corrupt, hypocritical organization. I have heard multiple times that they kill most of the animals they "liberate" from abusive household and such, because keeping them alive costs too much money and they are against pet ownership. And I'll never forget that time when a woman high up in the PETA organization said it was fine
for her to use pig insulin to treat her diabetes, because she devotes her life to helping animals (such as "liberating" and then euthanizing them), but everyone else with diabetes type 1 can just waste away and die as far as PETA's concerned.
I'm all for a humane treatment of animals, but screw you PETA, I need my medications, I don't care how many animals it's tested on.
I have a vegan colleague and while I like her as a person, she's really weird about that stuff (she hates PETA though). When I recommend a movie she always asks if it has cruelty against animals or dying animals in it. It can be the most vicious horror movie in which lots of people die in gruesome ways, and that's fine with her, but one dead animal and she won't watch it. I once borrowed a Johnny the Homicidal Maniac comic book from her, which is about a demented serial killer who kills lots of people "but it's okay because he never hurts animals". :rolleyes:
demagogue on 25/6/2011 at 00:04
Quote Posted by Xorak
but I've never understood what purpose it serves to begin the process of evolving back into
Australopithecines. Our brains grew to the size they are now because we switched to eating meat.
If the only moral defense you can muster in favor of eating meat is Vitamin D, I have a shocking revelation for you: you can take vitamins, or even get it from eating mushrooms or standing in the sun. The human brain can function very well without meat. And we've come quite far from needing to scavenge for bone marrow in the dry savannas of the Pleistocene-era East African Great Rift Valley in order to even survive. (And is that really the moral starting point you want to insist on? Scavenging for bone marrow?).
This is aside from the point that evolution & natural selection are terrible arguments in favor of any human practice. Most of civilization is the methodical process of dispensing with our unjustified natural instincts. Do you have an argument that appeals to an actual moral reason, like animals aren't conscious or their consciousness or way of life doesn't matter as much as ours because... whatever? Something in that neighborhood.
Xorak on 25/6/2011 at 02:59
I'm well aware this is probably tl;dr
I'm not saying that the brain can't function without meat (I don't even think the brain can differentiate between energy-sources as long as it gets the energy), but that the physical body itself will change depending on how we use it. Reduction in teeth, mandible and cranium bonemass only significantly reduced once humans became meat eaters, which was the key factor in letting the brain grow in size and humans becoming more intelligent. I don't even know why you bring up vitamin D, I don't even think it comes from meat sources.
The point I'm making (somewhat facetiously) is it's possible that removing meat removes the need for canines and encourages the growth of larger molars again and larger cheekbones, thus evolving us back to where we were, as the skull again inhibits the brain from growing so large. And as archaeologists observe, evolution does not happen slowly, but happens in a (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium) punctuated equilibrium: there is a long period of sameness and then sudden evolutionary change. Changes can and do occur over generations rather than eons: if there is a purpose for that change. It's just rare to see major physical changes because we've lived and used our body the same way for the last 200,000 years.
Your statement that "most of civilization is the methodical process of dispensing with our unjustified natural instincts," I would argue is wrong because if you take a person from before the start of civilization--if you plucked a person from the caves of the Ice Age--he would instinctly act just like us and if dressed in modern clothes and with modern language, he would appear the same as anyone else around him. Civilization has done nothing to fundamentally change humanity. Personally, I think in one generation we can slip down again, which makes it imperative that we always try our hardest and remain active against destruction.
I have no moral reason or defense for eating meat, other than that I don't believe that the world can support a completely vegetarian diet. Think of how quickly populations of these animals will grow if just left to themselves. If we never kill another animal they will become invasive everywhere. We'll have to start culling them anyways, or deal with the predators that will feed on them and then
they will become invasive species. Maybe early farmers realized this and that is the reason they attempted to control those animal populations.
I mean, just think of the numbers of cats and dogs there'd be if they weren't silently put down. The streets would be crowded with animals and pets. I think it's presumptuous to say that God created us to direct and maintain all this, but we are the only animal who knows what's going on around the world--though I don't know what that says about humanity's reason or purpose.
But at a most basic level: populations rise over time and some must win and some must lose. We just want to direct who wins and loses according to our sympathies--but there has to be a loser somewhere (in a way, I think people want humans themselves to lose). We might as well direct as best we can the equilibrium of life. And what happens if it's found out that plants are intelligent too? Suddenly, there's nothing left to eat, except rocks.
demagogue on 25/6/2011 at 04:36
Quote Posted by Xorak
I'm well aware this is probably tl;dr
No that's good food for thought (couldn't resist a pun either). & I can return the tl;dr favor, with absolutely no pressure to actually read it.
Quote:
I don’t even know why you bring up vitamin D, I don't even think it comes from meat sources.
It does, concentrated in bone marrow (so they say). The only big non-meat sources are mushrooms and the skin makes it from sun exposure. The reason why I mentioned it is because it's (apparently) *the* key reason why the change in human diet to meat eating led to a larger brain.
Well, since you mentioned punctuated equilibrium (which is what happened here), I'll tell the whole story since it was interesting as hell to me. According to the book I read on human evolution ... the story is ~1.5 myo or whenever, the Red Sea plate tectonic boundaries pushed up the East African mountain ranges enough to create the Great Rift Valley, with the most important consequence (for human evolution) being that the uplifting scattered the forest ecosystem (and our predecessor's niche with it) leaving wide, dry, sparse savannas with roaming big fauna, an environment that our hominid predecessors were rather unequipped to deal with.
The theory of P.E. is that ecosystem changes drive species to find new niches to survive, and that's what drives evolutionary change to fit themselves into that niche (then as long as the niche stays in equilibrium, so does the species.) Anyway, the niche our predecessors were driven into was away from swinging in trees eating fruits and shit to walking long distances scavenging, eating the left-over marrow of animals killed by other predators by cracking the bones open with tools after the real hunters left. There were a lot of consequences of all this change (bipedalism, enhanced hand-skills, we lost our fur for temp control), but the two consequences relevant to the brain were a huge boost in vitamin D since marrow was so enriched with it, which fed a large increase in brain size (so the book argued; there was some biological reason why that was important, plus probably the things you mentioned too), and an absolute reliance on tool use to eat (no tools, no live), which programed abstract & analytical thinking into all that new brain real estate.
Quote:
The point I'm making (somewhat facetiously) is it's possible that removing meat removes the need for canines and encourages the growth of larger molars again and larger cheekbones, thus evolving us back to where we were, as the skull again inhibits the brain from growing so large.
I see your logic now. I think as far as the theory goes, the idea is you really have to destabilize the niche to get genetic change to fit the new niche, I mean have a real Malthusian moment where it's a small community on the verge of extinction and it's sink or swim. Since I think food will be provided whether we have canines & larger molars or not, there's not really the fitness pressure to drive genetic change, so our current features would stay in the equilibrium as kind of outdated hangers-on (like a thousand other things in our body right now, fit for past versions of us but doing nothing now). So as long as civilization lasts, I think were ok without meat-eating. But if it collapsed and we couldn't be certain of a secure food supply, I think first we'd have much bigger problems than diet, your argument might be more of an issue, and the moral case for meat eating would be better.
Quote:
Your statement that "most of civilization is the methodical process of dispensing with our unjustified natural instincts," I would argue is wrong because if you take a person from before the start of civilization--if you plucked a person from the caves of the Ice Age--he would instinctly act just like us and if dressed in modern clothes and with modern language, he would appear the same as anyone else around him. Civilization has done nothing to fundamentally change humanity. Personally, I think in one generation we can slip down again, which makes it imperative that we always try our hardest and remain active against destruction.
I think we're talking about apples & oranges, but it'd take a lot of writing to explain what I'm thinking. Yes the brain is the same. But I think language, intention, & culture have a life of their own and have special control over our behavior, including vetoing instinctive behavior (that you find in infants & "wild humans" that never learn language). And these things change over time by their own rules. If civilization does collapse, though, like I said above, that's a good case for changing all sorts of norms including our diets. The case against meat-eating is part of the normative package of living in a civilized world, I think.
Quote:
I have no moral reason or defense for eating meat, other than that I don't believe that the world can support a completely vegetarian diet.
This would be a respectable argument if it were empirically supported.
Quote:
Think of how quickly populations of these animals will grow if just left to themselves. If we never kill another animal they will become invasive everywhere. We'll have to start culling them anyways, or deal with the predators that will feed on them and then
they will become invasive species. Maybe early farmers realized this and that is the reason they attempted to control those animal populations.
Oh you took this in a different way than I was thinking. Well one problem with this idea is that factory farming is right now waaaay over-raising animals. The world population of cattle in the 1800s was in the mid 10s of millions. Now the population is just over 1 billion! (The feral bovine population has to be very low, in the 10K-100Ks?) Worse, that 1 billion is concentrated in a small genetic space (little genetic diversity), and shut into sardine like pens, which means they concentrate disease and mountains of just sheer biological waste. Also keep in mind cows have unnatural diets in factory farms (putting aside the hormones); they're eating corn not grass fed, which also concentrates disease, makes waste worse, & all sorts of problems. I mean picture the cow shit & disease of 500,000 feral grass fed cows on ranges in Mongolia and Wyoming far away from people vs 1.3 billion corn fed cows in sardine conditions everywhere that most of us eat, and try to tell me the 1 billion is better. (Then this applies to every farmed animal, chickens, pigs...) I just can't help but see your argument cutting exactly in the other direction.
Quote:
I mean, just think of the numbers of cats and dogs there'd be if they weren't silently put down. The streets would be crowded with animals and pets.
If cats and dogs were farmed for food the crowding & problems would be much worse I think. Also population control is part of dealing with all wild fauna so that wouldn't change. I doubt we'd have that large wild bovine population without farms (as many as India), but if population health became an issue we'd deal with it including by putting many of them down. I think the moral grounds for that is pretty strong.
Quote:
I think it's presumptuous to say that God created us to direct and maintain all this, but we are the only animal who knows what's going on around the world--though I don't know what that says about humanity's reason or purpose.
But at a most basic level: populations rise over time and some must win and some must lose. We just want to direct who wins and loses according to our sympathies--but there has to be a loser somewhere (in a way, I think people want humans themselves to lose). We might as well direct as best we can the equilibrium of life. And what happens if it's found out that plants are intelligent too? Suddenly, there's nothing left to eat, except rocks.
Well, since I'm an environmental lawyer my response is we just have sensible environmental laws. We do have the ability to reason, so we know a lot about how the environment works, and we can pass laws that can manage its dynamics. They won't be perfect, but they're better than doing nothing or the wrong thing. We're not trying to create a utopia, just maximize the overall welfare of society & the natural world.
As for plants, they don't have brains. No worries there. And lower level animals, fish & lizards, have less developed brains so eating them is of course better than eating higher level animals like mammals. To do it properly one really has to look animal by animal on their own terms, what's the best way to manage their situation.
