Have you ever stopped and wondered where your food comes from?
Like so many people, until recently, I am ashamed to say that I was completely oblivious to the harm I have been causing other sentient beings on this planet. Those who may not of been confronted by this yet I think it is obligatory that you be shown the truth. Please watch the links below. Comments or question welcome
"Meet your Meat"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykTH_b-cXyE
"Best Speech You Will Ever Hear"
Subscription Note:
Choosing to subscribe to this topic will automatically register you for email notifications for comments and updates on this thread.
Email notifications will be sent out daily by default unless specified otherwise on your account which you can edit by going to your userpage here and clicking on the subscriptions tab.
I spent various portions of my life farming, so I don't find these revelations surprising. To be honest, I didn't watch the first video, and only watched about 5 minutes of the second. If I gather the gist of your intent correctly, it is to encourage more ethical treatment of animals. I'll make a couple quick observations for your consideration.
We're omnivores. There's no current pressure sufficient to produce a cultural tipping point to exclude animals as a source of food or to come up with satisfactory protein alternatives. We are still hunter-gatherers instinctually. Our sophistication only extends to the methods used to expedite the processes used to meet our current lifestyle. I think when the need does arise, it will be driven by survival, not humanistic husbandry or situational ethics. I'm not entirely sure current civilization will not have collapsed before then due to upcoming possible extinction events. We live in a very fragile balance.
Yes, I usually tend to avoid those types of videos also. Not because I fear that they will change my opinion about meat, but because they are usually so biased and doctored that you can't put any faith in them at all.
I really believe in the ethical treatment of animals. It makes for healthier meat, if nothing else.
Pigs are omnivores too, and will eat humans if presented with the right combination of need and opportunity. No hard feelings, bacon.
Wait, pigs will eat us? I need to eat more bacon just because of that fact! I will start right away and save everyone from a life of being eaten by little four legged hams running around with pineapple rings and Coca Cola glaze dripping off of them! I'm hungry now. :(
Yes, pigs will eat humans. Forget Planet of the Apes, think more along the lines of Planet of the Pigs. :)
LOL, nice imagery you have created there.
I am not a vegan by any chances but I still believe that animal cruelty should be stopped. I don't see any point in making an animal suffer before you eat it.
I agree, if we are going to end anythings life for sustenance we owe it at least as much as to make a process which will reder this as painless as possible.
render* this, as painless as possible.
Temple Grandin has done some interesting work in this area.
Yes she has, and she is an interesting case herself well worth looking into for people unfamiliar with her.
Someone please answer my question with full objectivity.
I read somewhere, that the nutrition becomes lesser and lesser(almost by 90%) as it gets transferred from an animal at the bottom of the food chain to someone at a higher position (pardon me for the vagueness).
Let's say that we produce a crop on a certain area of land and feed it to the animals to ultimately eat them. This would give us only 10% of the nutrition as we could have had by growing something eatable by humans on that land. Why don't we use the fertile land efficiently, then? (It is not like I do not eat them, but this is something I had been thinking about lately).
People who say that animals eat animals, so do we. The difference is that animals don't know how to cultivate land and grow food. We are more intelligent than animals; then why don't we grow and eat efficiently? That would save a lot of money and resources.
Now, go back to the top of this question and read the first line. (Please, don't let your atheist/theist ego come into this answer).
Hmm... the first question can be objectively answered, the second not so much.
It is true that we could certainly use our agricultural land much more efficiently, but that does not mean that animals do not have a place in proper land use and human consumption. Meat generally has a less diverse nutritional composition than many vegetables, but to say it's less useful isn't necessarily correct.
However, the virtue of animals in agriculture is that they can eat things we can't, and then we can eat them :) For example, chickens and fowl scour orchards for bugs (unless they're the disgusting commercial kind where poison is sprayed all over them to keep off the bugs, and the chickens won't go near it) and feast on all the things that would ruin the fruit and the trees. They take up nearly no additional space, however those garden pests they're eating are now edible by humans in the form of meat and eggs.
Goats and grazing animals have the ability to metabolize beta glucose, which is useless to the human system. They can eat parts of the plant that we can't, such as bean and corn stalks, and various woody stem weeds and plants. They also mobilize the nitrogen in these plants an poo it out to be better absorbed by newly developing plant life, faster than a simply compost pile (no matter how fertile land is, constant farming will render it useless in years). Bonus, we can eat their meat and drink their milk!
So, if you're looking at growing veggies *or* animals, you would get more bang for your buck going vegetarian. However, there should not be a choice if you're good with plans, as we humans are designed to be. Animals are a useful piece of the agricultural system. These inefficiently specialized farms are entirely against human nature, and are just wrecking the system we have here.
I'm not going to touch animal intelligence. However, studies have been shown where sheep will conserve populations of herbs that they have found helpful in curing minor issues like indigestion and UTI. A lot of people couldn't go out into the field and know what to eat when they're feeling sick! Plus, if you put bins of different supplemental salts in cow and horse bars (they are common), animals inherently know when they need a boost of which mineral. I will say that humans are clearly intelligent, but we don't always make the most intelligent choices...
Nutrition becomes lesser? Or is it that the same amount of nutrition comes from far more resources being spent. I dont have the numbers but it goes like a hundred or thousand times more is spent to produce meat with value equivalent to crops.
I imagine a hundred or so years from now the only meat (legally at least) would be lab meat, 500 years from now we can eat human meat and in a 1000 years we would have forgotten how to grow crops on soil.
Yes, you have put it right. The same amount of nutrition comes from spending far more resources. Why are we not taking any step to make it right. Why don't we grow crops and eat them directly instead of feeding a pig/chicken/cow and eating it? This is ridiculous when you think of it.
As you rightly said, it is a possibility that we will eat human meat in future. Maybe the poor will be able to "sell their bodies" as a foundation to grow new flesh which will be harvested; that would be a delicacy(?). There are a lot of things to worry about, among which this is one.
What sounds more ridiculous is, people talking about increasing the ecological efficiency from 0.01 to 0.05. Why can't we see that there is a far better option, i.e. not raising animals for food and growing human-eatable crops, instead!