- Joined
- Mar 29, 2008
- Messages
- 225
I am a pescetarian, meaning a vegetarian that eats fish. I choose to label myself as such to make it abundantly clear that I'm not as staunch a vegetarian as I once was. However, prior to living in Hawaii I followed a strict octo-vegetarian diet, meaning that I ate eggs and cheese but not other animal products.
The thought process behind being a vegetarian of one form or another is two-fold: it is far healthier for the vast majority of people to eat a vegetarian diet...not all people but most; and switching to such a diet requires very little effort on one's part. Secondly, the way that modern meat is raised in most circumstances is horribly disgusting, extremely wasteful and is very cost intensive. That is not an opinion, that is simply a fact. Factory farms produce the vast majority of meat, feeding these animals "foods" that they were NEVER intended to eat, such as feeding cows corn when they have evolved as grass eaters, eating this corn causes incredible amounts of disease and unrest in these animals so much so that they can literally die (an inward implosion) from the gases that are built up from their bodies attempting to process corn instead of what their stomachs have evolved to eat: grass. This is not to mention the other diseases that they are susceptible to by being in a "factory" farm setting that include but are not limited to kidney, fecal, and mouth diseases. And that is only covering cows: pigs and chickens are also factory farmed and the settings in which they have to live in are also shockingly horrible. And when it comes down to it it really is a matter of rights for those animals. Those animals are extremely similar to ourselves, they can feel and they too have a quality of life that we ought to consider. Animals have feelings? Yes they do, in fact not only do they have feelings but they can be extremely intelligent as well. Did you know that researchers have taught pigs how to play video games? That's right, pigs have been taught how to play video games. And they also exhibit "pain" when put in various situations.
Furthermore, the drain on the economy that operating factory farms causes is highly significant. It takes an extraordinary amount of water, oil and grain to feed these animals to the point at which we can use them for meat but this in turn hurts us in other ways, such as the price of oil increasing--people's consumption of meat has not declined, therefore the oil is a constant input that is NOT renewable and that is already in "short" supply and thus causes the price to rise further at the pumps.
My point is that vegetarianism has been around just as long as meat eaters. In fact if we're taking an anthropological stance on the human diet, then humans are naturally prone to eating meat maybe twice a month because we used to have to hunt it and then once we found animals to kill, we could only take what we could carry back to our tribes, think nomadic hunter and gatherers. This means that the majority of our diet, in which our digestive system evolved to and for, as reliant upon roughage (greens such as leaves, grass and edible flowers) and that of fruits and nuts. Humans have not evolved to eat the incredible amounts of meat that most modern humans eat and you are seeing the various diseases and complications of living with such a diet arise everyday in the news, higher risk of heart attacks and strokes, increased amounts of clogged arteries, higher instances of diabetes both in children and adults, etc. Therefore the modern human diet is averse to the evolutionary diet from which our bodies have evolved from. That is not to say that early humans did not eat meat, but they didn't eat meat/fish/game nearly as much as they do today. Even comparing the last 2000 years, it's the last 100 or so in which consumption shot up simply because we could (meat consumption is correlated with wealth of nations, wealthier nations typically have higher consumptions of meat, which is why since the 20th century the US has been one of the leaders in meat consumption as that's been our wealthiest time, now you're seeing it happen in China as their GDP and total wealth increases), but that doesn't mean we should.
Finally, the point is that animals have feelings, they hurt too and in many cases it's to our benefit to use them as symbiotic creatures. Cows are sacred for certain religions because they are more than meat, they are milk and cheese too and they will continually reproduce these products for us if we treat them well, the same for chickens producing eggs and also therefore other chickens, some surely will be killed for their meat, but the point is that they often provide more for us than just the flesh on their bones. And it's not my concern with all meat, free range, no cages, grazing areas, room to move around larger than the animals body, situations like those make raising meat for human consumption far more responsible on our end and then it typically doesn't destroy our environment nearly as quickly or even remotely as badly as the factory farms. But the fact is that most meat and even fish (since there's often a distinction) is raised in a factory type setting and when we start relying upon a factory setting for what is naturally producing but in smaller quantities, we are only asking for problems. Veganism which is avoid of ALL animal products including some who even avoid animal products in their clothing and other products that they live with, is something new and recent, springing up around the beginning of the 20th century, while vegetarianism has been practiced for the last 2000 years or so. If for nothing else everyone that eats meat should at least understand and know how their meat is raised and where it comes from because you owe it to yourselves that if you're going to continue eating meat, try and do it in a responsible manner because we're all in this together and you owe it to me as much as I owe it to you to be a responsible citizen and consumer in this world.
And I don't want to hear anymore about how vegetarians are weird/bad because if anything that's a plain ignorant view and there is no excuse for that in this day and age. Educate yourself, don't just say it's bad, tell me why it's bad and I'll consider your view point. Until that point, don't make a judgment call on it because it doesn't show intelligence it only shows ignorance.
The thought process behind being a vegetarian of one form or another is two-fold: it is far healthier for the vast majority of people to eat a vegetarian diet...not all people but most; and switching to such a diet requires very little effort on one's part. Secondly, the way that modern meat is raised in most circumstances is horribly disgusting, extremely wasteful and is very cost intensive. That is not an opinion, that is simply a fact. Factory farms produce the vast majority of meat, feeding these animals "foods" that they were NEVER intended to eat, such as feeding cows corn when they have evolved as grass eaters, eating this corn causes incredible amounts of disease and unrest in these animals so much so that they can literally die (an inward implosion) from the gases that are built up from their bodies attempting to process corn instead of what their stomachs have evolved to eat: grass. This is not to mention the other diseases that they are susceptible to by being in a "factory" farm setting that include but are not limited to kidney, fecal, and mouth diseases. And that is only covering cows: pigs and chickens are also factory farmed and the settings in which they have to live in are also shockingly horrible. And when it comes down to it it really is a matter of rights for those animals. Those animals are extremely similar to ourselves, they can feel and they too have a quality of life that we ought to consider. Animals have feelings? Yes they do, in fact not only do they have feelings but they can be extremely intelligent as well. Did you know that researchers have taught pigs how to play video games? That's right, pigs have been taught how to play video games. And they also exhibit "pain" when put in various situations.
Furthermore, the drain on the economy that operating factory farms causes is highly significant. It takes an extraordinary amount of water, oil and grain to feed these animals to the point at which we can use them for meat but this in turn hurts us in other ways, such as the price of oil increasing--people's consumption of meat has not declined, therefore the oil is a constant input that is NOT renewable and that is already in "short" supply and thus causes the price to rise further at the pumps.
My point is that vegetarianism has been around just as long as meat eaters. In fact if we're taking an anthropological stance on the human diet, then humans are naturally prone to eating meat maybe twice a month because we used to have to hunt it and then once we found animals to kill, we could only take what we could carry back to our tribes, think nomadic hunter and gatherers. This means that the majority of our diet, in which our digestive system evolved to and for, as reliant upon roughage (greens such as leaves, grass and edible flowers) and that of fruits and nuts. Humans have not evolved to eat the incredible amounts of meat that most modern humans eat and you are seeing the various diseases and complications of living with such a diet arise everyday in the news, higher risk of heart attacks and strokes, increased amounts of clogged arteries, higher instances of diabetes both in children and adults, etc. Therefore the modern human diet is averse to the evolutionary diet from which our bodies have evolved from. That is not to say that early humans did not eat meat, but they didn't eat meat/fish/game nearly as much as they do today. Even comparing the last 2000 years, it's the last 100 or so in which consumption shot up simply because we could (meat consumption is correlated with wealth of nations, wealthier nations typically have higher consumptions of meat, which is why since the 20th century the US has been one of the leaders in meat consumption as that's been our wealthiest time, now you're seeing it happen in China as their GDP and total wealth increases), but that doesn't mean we should.
Finally, the point is that animals have feelings, they hurt too and in many cases it's to our benefit to use them as symbiotic creatures. Cows are sacred for certain religions because they are more than meat, they are milk and cheese too and they will continually reproduce these products for us if we treat them well, the same for chickens producing eggs and also therefore other chickens, some surely will be killed for their meat, but the point is that they often provide more for us than just the flesh on their bones. And it's not my concern with all meat, free range, no cages, grazing areas, room to move around larger than the animals body, situations like those make raising meat for human consumption far more responsible on our end and then it typically doesn't destroy our environment nearly as quickly or even remotely as badly as the factory farms. But the fact is that most meat and even fish (since there's often a distinction) is raised in a factory type setting and when we start relying upon a factory setting for what is naturally producing but in smaller quantities, we are only asking for problems. Veganism which is avoid of ALL animal products including some who even avoid animal products in their clothing and other products that they live with, is something new and recent, springing up around the beginning of the 20th century, while vegetarianism has been practiced for the last 2000 years or so. If for nothing else everyone that eats meat should at least understand and know how their meat is raised and where it comes from because you owe it to yourselves that if you're going to continue eating meat, try and do it in a responsible manner because we're all in this together and you owe it to me as much as I owe it to you to be a responsible citizen and consumer in this world.
And I don't want to hear anymore about how vegetarians are weird/bad because if anything that's a plain ignorant view and there is no excuse for that in this day and age. Educate yourself, don't just say it's bad, tell me why it's bad and I'll consider your view point. Until that point, don't make a judgment call on it because it doesn't show intelligence it only shows ignorance.
