SUPPORT A MEAT FREE WORLDF

Also they started posting duplicate identical threads like this, so I'm deleting duplicates.

http://a725.g.akamai.net/7/725/1095/000026/www.omahasteaks.com/gifs/large/160x145_fm069.jpg

Mmmmmmmm.....

admittedly the spamming of the boards is unwelcome & obnoxious, but no more so that these tired "I loves me meat" jokes over & over & over again

how good of you, kind sir

Remember, many of these animal brethren will willingly chow down on humans if the opportunity presents itself.

Which ones? Cows? Chickens? Pigs? I don't think so. (Pigs will bite you, though, that's true.)

And taking "animal brethren" to mean those animals who aren't part of the mainstream Western diet, every so often you hear about a shut-in who died and was eaten by the cat or dog.

this is only because wild pigs feel a genetic responsibility to provide the world with comic relief from time to time. and for this we eat them. my race is a race of INGRATES

I just wanted to actually say that.

I don't play well with vegans.

I made that my AIM profile I liked it so much.

-- Chris Barrus

Now you did it... I've got an incredible urge to each a bag or two of fried pork skins!

MEAT!!!

If I were to go onto some random message board and post a thread about how American football is barbaric, and how badminton is much more civilized, I severely doubt that it would be met with posts like the following:

"You know what I just got back doing? Playing eight non-stop hours of dirty tackle football -- and without pads!"

*Insert picture of random massive defensive lineman*, with a caption that says something like "I'm gonna piledrive you into the ground YEAH ARGH!!!"

"Football is instinctive. It is in our blood. If I saw a football on the ground, under any circumstance, I would have the instinct to pounce on it and recover it for my team." (This, of course, is the equivalent of the 'we are born to eat meat' argument; that, if we were out in the wild, it'd be our instinct to hop on an animal and gnaw on the back of its neck in order to subdue it and transform it into nourishment. And it's also kind of a joke.)

"Eat a shuttlecock dude."

This is strictly conjecture here, but I'd be willing to bet that those who play American football or at least enjoy watching it would not pay any mind to the thread or the first post. They love their American football, and no argument could possibly sway them into thinking it's too barbaric. Just the same, it's been demonstrated over and over how the average meat-eater finds the concept of vegetarianism to be just as silly as the thought of being morally against American football.

So why do meat-eaters pay this silly argument any time? Why do they do it over and over? Why even waste the time making jokes? I crack sarcastic jokes about my anti-social tendencies and social butterflies all the time, quite possibly because it's a shortcoming I feel I have. Is it possible that a certain percentage of meat-eaters make their own set of jokes 'cause they're dealing with the same dynamic? Because they are being defensive in some sense? Because they can entertain the possibility that something positive could result from giving up meat?

Do I mean that no thinking person could possibly conclude that it's all right to eat meat? No, I don't, though I find it puzzling: I can't believe it took me as long as it did to come over to the dark side of the Preachy Annoying Vegetarians. (I will say, though, that any thinking person who eats meat from a factory farm is kidding themselves if they think there's any possible justification for doing so: factory farming is a rotten shame from any standpoint at all.)

I eat chicken and fish. Does this make me a kind of hypocrit as I cry tears at footage of bush meat and 'science' labs? I don't think so. I'm against factory farming for a start, but I have come across vegans who live in some sort of weird world where wild animals don't tear their prey to shreds. Not that this is comparable with your average pig farm (ever see the programme 'Bringing Home the Bacon?' now that would stop any prok eater from eating chops ever again) but the fact is that if you're going to make an arguement for humans as simply another animal (as most vegans do) then you have to consider that we too are predators. I have, for instance, spoken to vegans who believe that domestic dogs and cats can be made vegetarian - I mean, have these people ever seen what a cat does to a mouse???

I have tried to give up white meat, but I couldn't do it. I hate vegetables for a start and ended up being very pale and ill. One day I might try again, but as I said I honestly don't have a problem with someone eating something that has been reared properly. I have a much larger problem with blood sport, lab experimentation, factory farms and circus animals.

Also, Andy K makes no sense at all at any point.

(As an aside, this may be a character flaw on my part, but I cannot take anyone seriously who says, "I don't eat meat for ethical reasons but I don't look down on meat-eaters." Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the way the word "ethical" is being used there.)

My preferences are actually irrelevant to the joke. I just hate spam.

(Keep in mind that I fell into becoming a vegetarian after giving up red meat. I never intended to become one. Still have yet to miss any meats. Now if only population = me.. sigh. i love these stream of consciousness narcissistic fantasies.)

really? even bacon?

Ah, but believe it or not, there is such a thing as free-range bacon. It's expensive. And it's so. fucking. good.

One of my favorite arguments about meat is... well, complicated. Lemme try to explain.

People aren't going to stop eating meat -- probably not ever. Disabuse yourself of that little fantasy right now. But there are better ways to eat meat than the ways we're used to. The way meat is produced and distributed nowadays is a crying shame, and probably a violation of several laws of the universe. It's horrible and cruel, and when you eat horrible and cruel... well, it's just bad ju-ju, man. Bad, bad ju-ju. I don't mean to get all mystical, but if you are what you eat, and you eat things that have been horribly unhappy all their lives, you have played into the hands of an huge imbalance in the natural world. Meat, as it's currently made, might just be pure evil.

But that doesn't mean the problem is with the meat itself. That's a problem with the meat industry, and with the popular perception of meat. That's where the cruelty happens, and that's where the toxins come into play, and that's what's bad about meat. The mistreatment of animals is unforgivable, but the killing of animals for food is perfectly fine. I used to watch my grampa lop the heads off of chickens he raised himself, and watched gramma cook the chickens, and damn, that was some good chicken. Good-tasting, and good-feeling. When you raise an animal yourself, and kill it yourself, you have a relationship with it. It's fair and balanced. It's kill and eat -- a perfectly natural arrangement since life began on this planet. To raise something in horrible conditions, torture it, kill it inhumanely, freeze it, ship it out to grocery stores to be bought by people who never even want to think about the animal that the meat came from -- all that's a relatively recent phenomenon, and it's sick. A lot of vegetarians understand this, and most other people do not.

But what a lot of vegetarians don't understand is that if you just stop eating meat, you have taken yourself out of the loop entirely, and elimated your own ability to make effective change in the way meat is made. Your agressive shouting doesn't mean shit, and, as we've covered already, runs the risk of polarizing people against you. Your dollar is your vote. And if you only buy meat and eggs that are free-range, that are verifiably not cruel or tainted, that's the ultimate message. It says to meat producers, "I don't want your shit. I want something better." But if you don't buy meat at all, you don't get counted. Vegetarians will never hurt the meat industry. Meat consumers can.

if this is so, then why is the beef industry in america doing things like their cool-2b-real.com website? (site aimed at teenage girls to convince them that eating meat is 'cool')

"When you raise an animal yourself, and kill it yourself, you have a relationship with it. It's fair and balanced. It's kill and eat..."

this is 'fair and balanced'?? i let you graze on my property, so i now have the right to kill you anytime i want? why? do you justify it with 'might makes right', or because god gave man dominion over the animals, or because it's 'natural' and has been going on since the dawn of humankind? i'm sure you're well aware of it, but there are folks who think it's 'bad ju-ju' to interrupt an animal's life cycle by killing it just to satisfy one's eating habits. 'meat is murder', 'i don't eat my friends', and so forth...no matter how well-treated the animals are, some still object to the killing part.

people make fairly arbitrary distinctions...for instance, westerners become outraged when they hear of other cultures eating dogs or cats...

This thread is so much better than that reactionary thing I started when I was all emo an' shit.

John D. is secretly the Punmaster from Planet Tharg.

I think meat is good. I'm no religious man, and I'm not about to say "God's gift" or anything so silly as that. But the argument here seems to be mainly that eating meat is wrong because it kills animals. Now, I don't want to be cruel to animals, but I see little reason not to raise them for food.

"When you raise a cat yourself, and kill it yourself, you have a relationship with it. It's fair and balanced."

Always going for the emotional appeal. If I ate cats, which I don't because they're carnivores and make for stringy meat, then yes, I would support the above statement. What I'm driving at here is that it's important to know where your food comes from, and to respect the animal in question.

People aren't ever going to stop mistreating each other, either, but that doesn't mean you teach your kid "Aw, the hell with it, just do what you want."

I didn't say that. And unless we're talking about cannibalism, I don't see what people have to do with anything. What next? "When you raise a person yourself, and kill it yourself..."

It a fundamental difference of opinion, but I think people have more rights than animals, and that it's okay to kill animals for food. I believe that. Now, again, that doesn't make me right. But it's about as supportable a position as saying that it's not okay to kill animals, ever, for any reason. We all have our magical little beliefs. I think Ted Nugent is a nut for supporting Bush and thus being anti-environmentalist and lots of other things, and he's not the brightest bulb, but I don't mind his philosophy of taking down a big gorgeous buck, skinning it yourself, and feeding your family for a month. I see a certain grace in that primal, simple act of feeding yourself. A certain back-to-basics, Native American vibe that's easy for me to romanticize. You gotta admit, it beats the hell out of the tortuous and gruesome machinations by which we get meat into grocery stores. And if that turns your stomach, well... so be it. Reactionary emo phases turn mine.

Sorry for any offense John, in this post or in previous ones.

cool, but why do you think people have more rights than animals? given humans' track record on this planet, don't you think they should have some 'rights' taken away from them?

& yes, of course, animals kill other animals...

And free-range, grain-fed lamb... oh, don't get me started. Pricey as hell, but maybe all meat should be such a luxury.

Obviously I'm not speaking for everyone here, but this is not the issue to me - I don't think killing animals to eat them is inherently wrong. What I think is wrong is the way animals are treated in huge meat processing plants before they are killed, and on some occasions, the way that they are killed. I know that this means that I could ethically eat free range meat or animals that I raised and killed myself, but for me, it's just easier to be completely vegetarian. So, to reiterate, I don't think that "eating meat is wrong because it kills animals."

I wonder if the change to meat-eating in prehistoric times contributed to the impressive evolution or hominids?

(seriously - can anyone answer that?)

We abhor simplicity.

1. For the meat-eaters, do you think you would be able to eat meat if you had to kill everything that you eat yourself?

2. Now I know you're all going to say "yes, I'm a big macho man," but for those who say no, don't you think this implies some kind of ethical confusion?

yeah, probably so. vegans represent a devolutionary force.

"(seriously - can anyone answer that?)"

i like the theory that eating tryptamine-containing mushrooms contributed to the impressive evolution of hominids. & mushrooms are even more karmically correct than a level 15 vegan...they don't kill anything to survive, but instead obtain nutrition from already dead organisms.

It's hard to know anything for certain about things that happened so long ago, but there is a paleoanthropological theory to the effect that humans diverged from the apes by developing certain adaptations that made us able to add more meat to our diet. See the work of this Berkeley anthropologist, for example:

Meat-eating was essential for human evolution

Yes! That would be far preferable!

I worry that vegetarianism evolved not out of a sense of connection with food, but the opposite. A disconnection from the animals we eat led to people beginning to think they're cute or whatever. (Newsflash: cows are not cute.) If you're going to eat dead animal, or even if you're not going to eat dead animal, it's extremely important to know and understand dead animal.

I like it when the alien machine-elves jump in and out of my chest.

Even so, I don't think there's any kind of ethical confusion, no. The other side of the coin of being part of the same society that means we can get hold of killed animal meat, means we aren't accustomed to being exposed to the killing. I imagine if we had a *need* to kill, or had forever been used to it, we'd find it not hard at all in most cases.

(Dallas, my question on meat-eating = evolutionary fast-tracking was a genuine question, the answer of which I was entirely ignorant. I'm avoiding being snarky in this thread)

The irony as I see it is that the ability to go 'against nature' - e.g. choose whether to kill and/or eat other animals - is part of what makes humans 'superior' to other animals.

I think cows are cute Kenan! Sheep are even more cute! But obviously 'cuteness' is an attribute of my imaginative human consciousness not an innate attribute of an animal.

Well shit... we're a sophistocated enough society that you don't have to think about much of anything. That don't make it right.

i know, i was just kidding around. i have to plead ignorance in this matter, as well.

And I still don't understand how this logic explains why people are horrified at eating their pets?

Also, we have to consider this : is "disconnection" necessarily a bad thing? Should we all just "buck up", reject sissy urbanity and get back to the "farm", wherever that is? It is at this point that I can see why the "sexual politics of meat" theory has so much appeal for certain people. I'll go so far as to ask what is exactly wrong with not wanting to eat animals because they're "cute", anyway?

Also, what does "disconnection" mean, exactly? Where do slaughterhouses fit into this? My grandma worked in the stockyards and, although she never talked about it, I never saw her touch red meat (there could be any number of reasons for this).

FWIW one of the most ardent vegans I know grew up in a family of hunters. At the same time, he does have more respect for hunters than he does for factory farming (so do I).

I think the Nuge enjoys killing just a little too much, though.

I don't see why I should have to kill my own meat any more than I mine my own coal or make my own furniture.