I don't think it's a terribly insensitive question to ask, particularly if you don't celebrate Lent. I actually had to look it up before I answered to be sure that it starts next week.
If the sight of animal suffering is supposed to prompt one to a moral epiphany or merely a crystallization of her resolve to give up meat, why would the ceremonial date of lent even be relevant. If it truly were a moral matter, I think that the sooner the better, and waiting for the sake of Catholic etiquette is hypocritical. Then again, we're all only speculating this is a lent thing. Wednesday could just be an arbitrary date.
This video really hammers home the point that this humanely raised meat which is all the rage is popular for the simple reason that every cow dies, but not every cow truly lives.
...softened to the consistency of velvet through intense beating.
At any rate, I thought I recently read something about an free-range farm being able to command premium prices for free-range pork because, supposedly, the free-range lifestyle produces more and better marblization of the fat, and thus a superior-tasting product.
we're all only speculating this is a lent thing. Wednesday could just be an arbitrary date.
Maybe you are, but "we" aren't. Our gracious hostess discussed her intention to celebrate Lent a while back in the context of possibly going vegan for it.
And there's nothing wrong with setting a date; anyone who decides to go vegan suddenly will have some cheese and eggs lying around, and it would be stupid just to throw them in the trash.
Careful Megan, you may be excommunicated by the Supreme Church of Veganism for assigning a date to the time where you reach salvation--you don't see Christians walking around saying, "On the second Thursday in October I'm going to accept Christ as my savior."
i can't speak in the general case, anony-mouse, but the best bacon i've ever had was from a free-range pig. it still had the rind on it and everything. so good.
I was willing to listen up to the point when the speaker claimed that chicken are being "genetically manipulated". Why can't they just tell the truth? Why should I believe that the rest of what they are saying is true if they lie in such an obvious, manipulative way?
The anti-Kyoto folks, using the China analogy, would say that your reduced consumption of meat will merely make meat cheaper, leading me to consume more meat, with no net reduction in meat production.
The pro-Kyoto folks would say that by setting an example, you are shifting the social balance and moving the political center towards the "no-meat" pole, and that moral suasion and increased guilt-tripping will ultimately lead people like me to consume less meat.
I'm pro-Kyoto, so I follow the latter model. And empirical observation shows that I am thinking about eating less meat as a result of this discussion, and that China is talking about reducing CO2 emissions.
Then again I used to be a vegetarian so what do I know.
Chickens are genetically manipulated, through selective breeding, to grow five times faster than they used to before industrialized farming. Why would you call this an obvious lie? The breeds used today grow so fast that the birds can hardly walk, many are crippled, and some cannot even reach their food and starve. Such breeds can't survive long, which is why they're killed at just 6 weeks of age. But it's a miserable six weeks suffering chronic pain.
Progressives should support not just the rights of children, but the rights of animals! Regardless of where one stands on abortion (yes, there ARE progressive pro-lifers), we can all agree that cruelty to children is wrong--and the same applies to animals.
A rational case exists for the rights of preborn humans. The case for animal rights is stronger and more readily apparent. Animals are highly complex creatures, possessing a brain, a central nervous system and a sophisticated mental life. Animals actually suffer at the hands of their human tormentors and exhibit such "human" behaviors and feelings as fear and physical pain, defense of their children, pair bonding, group/tribal loyalty, grief at the loss of loved ones, joy, jealousy, competition, territoriality, and cooperation.
Dr. Tom Regan, the foremost intellectual leader of the animal rights movement and author of The Case for Animal Rights, notes that animals "have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; and emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference and welfare interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independent of their utility for others and logically independent of their being the object of anyone else's interests."
John Stuart Mill observed, "The reason for legal intervention in favor of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves— the animals."
In his book, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, Reverend Andrew Linzey, an Anglican priest, notes that "In some ways, Christian thinking is already oriented in this direction. What is it that so appalls us about cruelty to children or oppression of the vulnerable, but that these things are betrayals of relationships of special care and special trust? Likewise, and even more so, in the case of animals who are mostly defenseless before us."
In his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes:
"Killing an animal is in itself a troubling act. It has been said that if we had to kill our own meat we would all be vegetarians. There may be exceptions to that general rule, but it is true that most people prefer not to inquire into the killing of the animals they eat.
"Very few people ever visit a slaughterhouse; and films of slaughterhouse operations are rarely shown on television...Yet those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed have no right to be shielded from this or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy.
"If it is distasteful for humans to think about, what can it be like for the animals to experience it?"
Peter Singer concludes in Animal Liberation that "by ceasing to rear and kill animals for food, we can make extra food available for humans that, properly distributed, it would eliminate starvation and malnutrition from this planet. Animal Liberation is Human Liberation, too."
The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number of animals killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.
"If anyone wants to save the planet," says Paul McCartney in a PETA interview, "all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let's do it! Linda was right. Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century."
The animal rights movement should be supported by all caring Americans.
According to Us Magazine, even after they split in February 2007, Chicken demanded that Megan be drug tested before her visitations with family in their kitchens.
But publicist Mara Buxbaum, who represented Megan and family, refuted Us's claims.
Chicken's body was found on Jan. 28 in Megan's mother's guest room in Washington DC, with bottles of prescription drugs nearby. The 1-year-old "New Chicken platter" star's cause of death remains open, pending toxicology tests.
Megan denies meeting Chicken while on visit with family. "I am with Vegan now and very happy", she told reporters.
"It has been said that if we had to kill our own meat we would all be vegetarians."
I hate to burst his bubble but this is nonsense.
Most people in most parts of the world (outside a few wealthy western countries) know exactly what is involved both in slaughtering animals and in processing the carcass (which is a lot of hard work; turning one freshly killed pig into storeable portions of food is many hours of work for more than one person) and this knowledge does nothing to prevent them from consuming meat. At most, it makes people want decent living conditions for the animals while alive and humane methods of slaughter.
Yes, consumers in wealthy western countries have at best a dim understanding of the relation between the process of slaughter and the sanitized plastic-wrapped meat available at the supermarket. I'll even agree that this is dysfunctional.
But, historically, humans are in a kind of institutionalized predator-prey relationships with domesticated food animals. The abuses of factory farming is a horrible corruption of this, but the basic relationship is valid; humans feed and protect the animals for a time and eventually kill them (in a far more humane manner than is ever liable to happen to their wild cousins).
The frugivores (gorillas, chimpanzees and other primates) have intestinal tracts twelve times the length of the body, clawless hands and alkaline urine and saliva. Their diet is mostly vegetarian, occasionally supplemented with carrion, insects, etc.
Flesh-eating animals lap water with their tongue, whereas vegetarian animals imbibe liquids by a suction process. Humans are classified as primates and are thus frugivores possessing a set of completely herbivorous teeth. Proponents of the theory that humans should be classified as omnivores note that human beings do, in fact, possess a modified form of canine teeth. However, these so-called "canine teeth" are much more prominent in animals that traditionally never eat flesh, such as apes, camels, and the male musk deer.
It must also be noted that the shape, length and hardness of these so-called "canine teeth" can hardly be compared to those of true carnivorous animals. A principle factor in determining the hardness of teeth is the phosphate of magnesia content. Human teeth usually contain 1.5 percent phosphate of magnesia, whereas the teeth of carnivores are composed of nearly 5 percent phosphate of magnesia. It is for this reason they are able to break through the bones of their prey, and reach the nutritious marrow.
Zoologist Desmond Morris makes a case for vegetarianism in his 1967 book, The Naked Ape:
"It could be argued that, since our primate ancestors had to make do without a major meat component in their diets we should be able to do the same. We were driven to become flesh eaters only by environmental circumstances, and now that we have the environment under control, with elaborately cultivated crops at our disposal, we might be expected to return to our ancient feeding patterns."
In The Human Story, edited by Marie-Louise Makris (1985), we read:
"...recent studies of their teeth reveal that the Australopithecines did not eat meat as a regular part of their diet, and were mainly peaceful vegetarians, rather like chimps or gorillas. The popular image of the murderous ape is now as extinct as the Australopithecines themselves."
Dr. Gordon Latto notes that carnivorous and omnivorous animals can only move their jaws up and down, and that omnivores "have a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth, a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth--showing that they were destined to deal both with flesh foods from the animal kingdom and foods from the vegetable kingdom...
"Carnivorous mammals and omnivorous mammals cannot perspire except at the extremity of the limbs and the tip of the nose; man perspires all over the body. Finally, our instincts; the carnivorous mammal (which first of all has claws and canine teeth) is capable of tearing flesh asunder, whereas man only partakes of flesh foods after they have been camouflaged by cooking and by condiments.
"Man instinctively is not carnivorous," explains Dr. Latto. "...he takes the flesh food after somebody else has killed it, and after it has been cooked and camouflaged with certain condiments. Whereas to pick an apple off a tree or eat some grain or a carrot is a natural thing to do; people enjoy doing it; they don't feel disturbed by it. But to see these animals being slaughtered does affect people; it offends them. Even the toughest of people are affected by the sights in the slaughterhouse.
"I remember taking some medical students into a slaughterhouse. They were about as hardened people as you could meet. After seeing the animals slaughtered that day in the slaughterhouse, not one of them could eat the meat that evening."
Author R.H. Weldon writes in No Animal Food:
"The gorge of a cat, for instance, will rise at the smell of a mouse or a piece of raw flesh, but not at the aroma of fruit. If a man can take delight in pouncing upon a bird, tear its still living body apart with his teeth, sucking the warm blood, one might infer that Nature had provided him with a carnivorous instinct, but the very thought of doing such a thing makes him shudder. On the other hand, a bunch of luscious grapes makes his mouth water, and even in the absence of hunger, he will eat fruit to gratify taste."
As far back as 1961, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported: "A vegetarian diet can prevent 97% of our coronary occlusions."
More recently, William S. Collens and Gerald B. Dobkens concluded:
"Examination of the dental structure of modern man reveals that he possesses all the features of a strictly herbivorous animal. While designed to subsist on vegetarian foods, he has perverted his dietary habits to accept food of the carnivore. It is postulated that man cannot handle carnivorous foods like the carnivore. Herein may lie the basis for the high incidence of arteriosclerotic disease."
Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), responds to the argument that killing animals for food is natural:
"The main problem with this argument is that it does not justify the practice of meat-eating or animal husbandry as we know it today; it justifies hunting. The distinction between hunting and animal husbandry probably seems rather fine to the man in the street, or even to your typical rule-utilitarian moral philosopher. The distinction, however, is obvious to an ecologist. If one defends killing on the grounds that it occurs in nature, then one is defending the practice as it occurs in nature.
"When one species of animal preys on another in nature, it only preys on a very small proportion of the total species population. Obviously, the predator species relies on its prey for its continued survival. Therefore, to wipe the prey species out through overhunting would be fatal. In practice, members of such predator species rely on such strategies as territoriality to restrict overhunting and to insure the continued existence of its food supply.
"Moreover, only the weakest members of the prey species are the predator's victims: the feeble, the sick, the lame, or the young accidentally separated from the fold. The life of the typical zebra is usually placid, even in lion country; this kind of violence is the exception in nature, not the rule.
"As it exists in the wild, hunting is the preying upon isolated members of an animal herd. Animal husbandry is the nearly complete annihilation of an animal herd. In nature, this kind of slaughter does not exist. The philosopher is free to argue that there is no moral difference between hunting and slaughter, but he cannot invoke nature as a defense of this idea.
"Why are hunters, not butchers, most frequently taken to task by the larger community for their killing of animals? Hunters usually react to such criticism by replying that if hunting is wrong, then meat-hunting must be wrong as well. The hunter is certainly right on one point--the larger community is hypocritical to object to hunting when it consumes the flesh of domesticated animals. If any form of meat-eating is justified, it would be meat from a hunted animal."
Finally, even if humans really are omnivores as some claim (and this claim is subject to dispute: I would refer these people to the website of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, www.pcrm.org , which advocates a vegan diet, an end to vivisection, etc., for the latest on whether humans are frugivorous or omnivorous), my friend Mareechi Duvvuuri (another Hindu-American!) who once studied sports medicine, pointed out that the diet of natural omnivores is mostly (up to 85 percent) plant food.
I am stunned by the boorishness of many of the comments here. How can any of you joke about this? How can cavilling over small problems in the video help you avoid the bleak suffering depicted here? Stupidity is not a trait I customarily associate with Atlantic readers.
I am stunned by the boorishness of many of the comments here. How can any of you joke about this? How can cavilling over small problems in the video help you avoid the bleak suffering depicted here? Stupidity is not a trait I customarily associate with Atlantic readers.
I've been vegetarian since 1982. I attended my first anti-vivisection protest in the spring of 1985. It was outside the biology building at UC San Diego, when anti-apartheid demonstrations were taking place. I first got interested in promoting vegetarianism in mainstream society after reading John Robbins' Diet for a New America (1987). Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it makes veganism seem as reasonable and mainstream as recycling.
For example, half the water consumed in the U.S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water are also used to wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as does the entire human population; creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause ten times more water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes three times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined. Meat producers are the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contributing to half the water pollution in the United States.
Joanna Macy, author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, depicts the advantages of America moving towards a vegan diet in her foreword to Diet for a New America:
"The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis...
"The social, ecological, and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale...
"The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes, begin to grow again. Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.
"The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and farm factories had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants..."
Joanna Macy admits, "This scenario is wildly, absurdly utopian. It is also clearly the way we are meant to live, built to live." What could possibly make it a reality? "It is this very book!"
Paul McCartney also says, "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let's do it! Linda was right. Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century."
Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights similarly says:
"Merely by ceasing to eat meat
Merely by practicing restraint
We have the power to end a painful industry
"We do not have to bear arms to end this evil
We do not have to contribute money
We do not have to sit in jail or go to
meetings or demonstrations or
engage in acts of civil disobedience
"Most often, the act of repairing the world,
of healing mortal wounds,
is left to heroes and tzaddikim (holy people)
Saints and people of unusual discipline
"But here is an action every mortal can
perform--surely it is not too difficult!"
When I first read Diet for a New America, I thought it could have the same kind of impact on mainstream American society that Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet had in the '70s.
The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in pounds. A fellow animal activist in San Diego, Tricia Fernatt, felt as I did: since the vast majority of animals are being killed for food, why are we wasting our time on peripheral issues? Shouldn't veganism be the main focus of our movement? And Diet for a New America tied it all together. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by just 10 percent, it would release enough grain and soybeans to feed over 60 million people.
In writing his expose on the meat industry, John Robbins has been compared to Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader and other whistleblowers. In Diet for a New America, he demonstrates how all the various causes that concern the left: healthcare, a sustainable energy policy, hunger, malnutrition, etc. are all taken care of in one fell swoop by a vegan diet. I had the opportunity to meet John Robbins in September 1988. It was one of the most inspirational moments of my life!
He was heir to the Baskin-Robbins fortune. He renounced it at a young age. He traveled to India, opened a yoga ashram in Canada, etc. He spoke of Gandhi and nonviolence. His son Ocean Robbins founded Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!) and is also dedicated to promoting veganism. I asked John if he would try and get the American Left to support animal rights. He told me that he had sent a copy of his book to Mother Jones, a left-liberal periodical published in San Francisco.
Many on the Left are beginning to take a stand in favor of animal rights. Joanna Macy spoke at the San Francisco Green Festival, in November 2005. In his 1990 updated and revised edition of Animal Liberation, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes that many of the political parties leaning towards the "Green" end of the political spectrum in Europe were beginning to oppose animal experimentation.
John Robbins elaborated further on the economic waste of raising animals for food in May All Be Fed, which my brother gave me for Christmas in 1992. Oxfam, the international charity, reports that in Mexico, 80 percent of the children in rural areas are undernourished, yet the livestock are fed more grain than the human population eats! Meat consumption in Taiwan increased 600 percent between 1950 and 1990. In 1950, Taiwan was a grain exporter; in 1990 the nation imported, mostly for feed, 74 percent of the grain it used. Twenty-five years ago, Syria was a barley exporter. But in the intervening years, livestock have consumed increasing amounts of the country's grain. Now, despite a phenomenal 1000 percent increase in the land area devoted to producing barley, Syria must import the cereal.
John Robbins spoke before the United Nations in 1994, where he received a standing ovation.
I had the opportunity to hear John Robbins speak at a Unitarian church here in Oakland several years ago. The church was PACKED! John writes in The Food Revolution (2001):
"The revolution sweeping our relationship to our food and our world, I believe, is part of an historical imperative. This is what happens when the human spirit is activated. One hundred and fifty years ago, slavery was legal in the United States. One hundred years ago, women could not vote in most states. Eighty years ago, there were no laws in the United States against any form of child abuse. Fifty years ago, we had no Civil Rights Act, no Clean Air or Clean Water legislation, no Endangered Species Act. Today, millions of people are refusing to buy clothes and shoes made in sweatshops and are seeking to live healthier and more Earth-friendly lifestyles. In the last fifteen years alone, as people in the United States have realized how cruelly veal calves are treated, veal consumption has dropped 62 percent."
Out of curiosity, why did you set a specific date to go vegan? It would seem like the sort of decision people just do, without schedules or deadlines.
Ash Wednesday, most likely? Is this for good or just for Lent? Or are you using Lent as a trial run?
Peter, you aren't religious are you? Or you are an insensitive moron.
Mmmmmmmmm........bacon.
I don't think it's a terribly insensitive question to ask, particularly if you don't celebrate Lent. I actually had to look it up before I answered to be sure that it starts next week.
No, the truly insensitive question would be: is Tuesday going to be an all-meat-and-dairy orgy to prepare?
Well I think that goes without saying. She'll probably dress head to toe in leather as well.
Not leather. Baby seal fur.
Lent really starts next Wednesday? That means Easter Sunday is March 23? Earliest Easter I can ever remember.
If the sight of animal suffering is supposed to prompt one to a moral epiphany or merely a crystallization of her resolve to give up meat, why would the ceremonial date of lent even be relevant. If it truly were a moral matter, I think that the sooner the better, and waiting for the sake of Catholic etiquette is hypocritical. Then again, we're all only speculating this is a lent thing. Wednesday could just be an arbitrary date.
This video really hammers home the point that this humanely raised meat which is all the rage is popular for the simple reason that every cow dies, but not every cow truly lives.
Baby seal fur.
...softened to the consistency of velvet through intense beating.
At any rate, I thought I recently read something about an free-range farm being able to command premium prices for free-range pork because, supposedly, the free-range lifestyle produces more and better marblization of the fat, and thus a superior-tasting product.
Anyone know more about this?
we're all only speculating this is a lent thing. Wednesday could just be an arbitrary date.
Maybe you are, but "we" aren't. Our gracious hostess discussed her intention to celebrate Lent a while back in the context of possibly going vegan for it.
And there's nothing wrong with setting a date; anyone who decides to go vegan suddenly will have some cheese and eggs lying around, and it would be stupid just to throw them in the trash.
Careful Megan, you may be excommunicated by the Supreme Church of Veganism for assigning a date to the time where you reach salvation--you don't see Christians walking around saying, "On the second Thursday in October I'm going to accept Christ as my savior."
Luckily, the meat you consume between now and next Wednesday was from animals who all deserved to die.
"Meet your Meat" reminded me of St. Douglas Adams (peace be upon him), and his "dish of the day" scene in "Restaurant At the End of the Universe."
Yesterday I bought a 12-pound brisket to grill up this coming weekend. Yummy.
i can't speak in the general case, anony-mouse, but the best bacon i've ever had was from a free-range pig. it still had the rind on it and everything. so good.
you may be excommunicated by the Supreme Church of Veganism for assigning a date to the time where you reach salvation
Oh, I don't know. They might make her a saint: "Give me chastity and continency -- but not yet!"
you don't see Christians walking around saying, "On the second Thursday in October I'm going to accept Christ as my savior."
That's because such people are not Christians. Can't be excommunicated if you aren't a member.
Giving up meat would be horrible. Good luck!
Homer: Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute. Lisa honey, are you saying you're "never" going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad! Those all come from the same animal!
Homer: Yeah, right Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal
I was willing to listen up to the point when the speaker claimed that chicken are being "genetically manipulated". Why can't they just tell the truth? Why should I believe that the rest of what they are saying is true if they lie in such an obvious, manipulative way?
I also really liked the way they referred to chickens being "still" conscious several times. As if chickens are ever conscious
Meat is murder!
Tasty, tasty, murder...
Sancho-
Chickens are conscious--its pretty much a biological fact.
Megan is going vegan so she can lord her superior virtue over others.
Fact.
I am suffering from cross-post syndrome. Tonight I will probably be dreaming of free-range Sharapovas.
Someone needs to go to Bovine University!
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/b/z/bzm116/work/MeatandYou.wmv
I still think Megan should give up guilt for lent, rather than meat.
Congrats on making the thoughtful, compassionate choice, rather than the cynical, self-centered snarky choice.
The anti-Kyoto folks, using the China analogy, would say that your reduced consumption of meat will merely make meat cheaper, leading me to consume more meat, with no net reduction in meat production.
The pro-Kyoto folks would say that by setting an example, you are shifting the social balance and moving the political center towards the "no-meat" pole, and that moral suasion and increased guilt-tripping will ultimately lead people like me to consume less meat.
I'm pro-Kyoto, so I follow the latter model. And empirical observation shows that I am thinking about eating less meat as a result of this discussion, and that China is talking about reducing CO2 emissions.
Then again I used to be a vegetarian so what do I know.
Chickens are genetically manipulated, through selective breeding, to grow five times faster than they used to before industrialized farming. Why would you call this an obvious lie? The breeds used today grow so fast that the birds can hardly walk, many are crippled, and some cannot even reach their food and starve. Such breeds can't survive long, which is why they're killed at just 6 weeks of age. But it's a miserable six weeks suffering chronic pain.
Progressives should support not just the rights of children, but the rights of animals! Regardless of where one stands on abortion (yes, there ARE progressive pro-lifers), we can all agree that cruelty to children is wrong--and the same applies to animals.
A rational case exists for the rights of preborn humans. The case for animal rights is stronger and more readily apparent. Animals are highly complex creatures, possessing a brain, a central nervous system and a sophisticated mental life. Animals actually suffer at the hands of their human tormentors and exhibit such "human" behaviors and feelings as fear and physical pain, defense of their children, pair bonding, group/tribal loyalty, grief at the loss of loved ones, joy, jealousy, competition, territoriality, and cooperation.
Dr. Tom Regan, the foremost intellectual leader of the animal rights movement and author of The Case for Animal Rights, notes that animals "have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; and emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference and welfare interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independent of their utility for others and logically independent of their being the object of anyone else's interests."
John Stuart Mill observed, "The reason for legal intervention in favor of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves— the animals."
In his book, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, Reverend Andrew Linzey, an Anglican priest, notes that "In some ways, Christian thinking is already oriented in this direction. What is it that so appalls us about cruelty to children or oppression of the vulnerable, but that these things are betrayals of relationships of special care and special trust? Likewise, and even more so, in the case of animals who are mostly defenseless before us."
"some cannot even reach their food and starve"
That's why they are force-fed, Silly. And that way we not only get meat, but smooth, succulent, rich fois gras!
In his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes:
"Killing an animal is in itself a troubling act. It has been said that if we had to kill our own meat we would all be vegetarians. There may be exceptions to that general rule, but it is true that most people prefer not to inquire into the killing of the animals they eat.
"Very few people ever visit a slaughterhouse; and films of slaughterhouse operations are rarely shown on television...Yet those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed have no right to be shielded from this or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy.
"If it is distasteful for humans to think about, what can it be like for the animals to experience it?"
Peter Singer concludes in Animal Liberation that "by ceasing to rear and kill animals for food, we can make extra food available for humans that, properly distributed, it would eliminate starvation and malnutrition from this planet. Animal Liberation is Human Liberation, too."
The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number of animals killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.
"If anyone wants to save the planet," says Paul McCartney in a PETA interview, "all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let's do it! Linda was right. Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century."
The animal rights movement should be supported by all caring Americans.
According to Us Magazine, even after they split in February 2007, Chicken demanded that Megan be drug tested before her visitations with family in their kitchens.
But publicist Mara Buxbaum, who represented Megan and family, refuted Us's claims.
Chicken's body was found on Jan. 28 in Megan's mother's guest room in Washington DC, with bottles of prescription drugs nearby. The 1-year-old "New Chicken platter" star's cause of death remains open, pending toxicology tests.
Megan denies meeting Chicken while on visit with family. "I am with Vegan now and very happy", she told reporters.
"It has been said that if we had to kill our own meat we would all be vegetarians."
I hate to burst his bubble but this is nonsense.
Most people in most parts of the world (outside a few wealthy western countries) know exactly what is involved both in slaughtering animals and in processing the carcass (which is a lot of hard work; turning one freshly killed pig into storeable portions of food is many hours of work for more than one person) and this knowledge does nothing to prevent them from consuming meat. At most, it makes people want decent living conditions for the animals while alive and humane methods of slaughter.
Yes, consumers in wealthy western countries have at best a dim understanding of the relation between the process of slaughter and the sanitized plastic-wrapped meat available at the supermarket. I'll even agree that this is dysfunctional.
But, historically, humans are in a kind of institutionalized predator-prey relationships with domesticated food animals. The abuses of factory farming is a horrible corruption of this, but the basic relationship is valid; humans feed and protect the animals for a time and eventually kill them (in a far more humane manner than is ever liable to happen to their wild cousins).
The frugivores (gorillas, chimpanzees and other primates) have intestinal tracts twelve times the length of the body, clawless hands and alkaline urine and saliva. Their diet is mostly vegetarian, occasionally supplemented with carrion, insects, etc.
Flesh-eating animals lap water with their tongue, whereas vegetarian animals imbibe liquids by a suction process. Humans are classified as primates and are thus frugivores possessing a set of completely herbivorous teeth. Proponents of the theory that humans should be classified as omnivores note that human beings do, in fact, possess a modified form of canine teeth. However, these so-called "canine teeth" are much more prominent in animals that traditionally never eat flesh, such as apes, camels, and the male musk deer.
It must also be noted that the shape, length and hardness of these so-called "canine teeth" can hardly be compared to those of true carnivorous animals. A principle factor in determining the hardness of teeth is the phosphate of magnesia content. Human teeth usually contain 1.5 percent phosphate of magnesia, whereas the teeth of carnivores are composed of nearly 5 percent phosphate of magnesia. It is for this reason they are able to break through the bones of their prey, and reach the nutritious marrow.
Zoologist Desmond Morris makes a case for vegetarianism in his 1967 book, The Naked Ape:
"It could be argued that, since our primate ancestors had to make do without a major meat component in their diets we should be able to do the same. We were driven to become flesh eaters only by environmental circumstances, and now that we have the environment under control, with elaborately cultivated crops at our disposal, we might be expected to return to our ancient feeding patterns."
In The Human Story, edited by Marie-Louise Makris (1985), we read:
"...recent studies of their teeth reveal that the Australopithecines did not eat meat as a regular part of their diet, and were mainly peaceful vegetarians, rather like chimps or gorillas. The popular image of the murderous ape is now as extinct as the Australopithecines themselves."
Dr. Gordon Latto notes that carnivorous and omnivorous animals can only move their jaws up and down, and that omnivores "have a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth, a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth--showing that they were destined to deal both with flesh foods from the animal kingdom and foods from the vegetable kingdom...
"Carnivorous mammals and omnivorous mammals cannot perspire except at the extremity of the limbs and the tip of the nose; man perspires all over the body. Finally, our instincts; the carnivorous mammal (which first of all has claws and canine teeth) is capable of tearing flesh asunder, whereas man only partakes of flesh foods after they have been camouflaged by cooking and by condiments.
"Man instinctively is not carnivorous," explains Dr. Latto. "...he takes the flesh food after somebody else has killed it, and after it has been cooked and camouflaged with certain condiments. Whereas to pick an apple off a tree or eat some grain or a carrot is a natural thing to do; people enjoy doing it; they don't feel disturbed by it. But to see these animals being slaughtered does affect people; it offends them. Even the toughest of people are affected by the sights in the slaughterhouse.
"I remember taking some medical students into a slaughterhouse. They were about as hardened people as you could meet. After seeing the animals slaughtered that day in the slaughterhouse, not one of them could eat the meat that evening."
Author R.H. Weldon writes in No Animal Food:
"The gorge of a cat, for instance, will rise at the smell of a mouse or a piece of raw flesh, but not at the aroma of fruit. If a man can take delight in pouncing upon a bird, tear its still living body apart with his teeth, sucking the warm blood, one might infer that Nature had provided him with a carnivorous instinct, but the very thought of doing such a thing makes him shudder. On the other hand, a bunch of luscious grapes makes his mouth water, and even in the absence of hunger, he will eat fruit to gratify taste."
As far back as 1961, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported: "A vegetarian diet can prevent 97% of our coronary occlusions."
More recently, William S. Collens and Gerald B. Dobkens concluded:
"Examination of the dental structure of modern man reveals that he possesses all the features of a strictly herbivorous animal. While designed to subsist on vegetarian foods, he has perverted his dietary habits to accept food of the carnivore. It is postulated that man cannot handle carnivorous foods like the carnivore. Herein may lie the basis for the high incidence of arteriosclerotic disease."
Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), responds to the argument that killing animals for food is natural:
"The main problem with this argument is that it does not justify the practice of meat-eating or animal husbandry as we know it today; it justifies hunting. The distinction between hunting and animal husbandry probably seems rather fine to the man in the street, or even to your typical rule-utilitarian moral philosopher. The distinction, however, is obvious to an ecologist. If one defends killing on the grounds that it occurs in nature, then one is defending the practice as it occurs in nature.
"When one species of animal preys on another in nature, it only preys on a very small proportion of the total species population. Obviously, the predator species relies on its prey for its continued survival. Therefore, to wipe the prey species out through overhunting would be fatal. In practice, members of such predator species rely on such strategies as territoriality to restrict overhunting and to insure the continued existence of its food supply.
"Moreover, only the weakest members of the prey species are the predator's victims: the feeble, the sick, the lame, or the young accidentally separated from the fold. The life of the typical zebra is usually placid, even in lion country; this kind of violence is the exception in nature, not the rule.
"As it exists in the wild, hunting is the preying upon isolated members of an animal herd. Animal husbandry is the nearly complete annihilation of an animal herd. In nature, this kind of slaughter does not exist. The philosopher is free to argue that there is no moral difference between hunting and slaughter, but he cannot invoke nature as a defense of this idea.
"Why are hunters, not butchers, most frequently taken to task by the larger community for their killing of animals? Hunters usually react to such criticism by replying that if hunting is wrong, then meat-hunting must be wrong as well. The hunter is certainly right on one point--the larger community is hypocritical to object to hunting when it consumes the flesh of domesticated animals. If any form of meat-eating is justified, it would be meat from a hunted animal."
Finally, even if humans really are omnivores as some claim (and this claim is subject to dispute: I would refer these people to the website of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, www.pcrm.org , which advocates a vegan diet, an end to vivisection, etc., for the latest on whether humans are frugivorous or omnivorous), my friend Mareechi Duvvuuri (another Hindu-American!) who once studied sports medicine, pointed out that the diet of natural omnivores is mostly (up to 85 percent) plant food.
I am stunned by the boorishness of many of the comments here. How can any of you joke about this? How can cavilling over small problems in the video help you avoid the bleak suffering depicted here? Stupidity is not a trait I customarily associate with Atlantic readers.
I am stunned by the boorishness of many of the comments here. How can any of you joke about this? How can cavilling over small problems in the video help you avoid the bleak suffering depicted here? Stupidity is not a trait I customarily associate with Atlantic readers.
I've been vegetarian since 1982. I attended my first anti-vivisection protest in the spring of 1985. It was outside the biology building at UC San Diego, when anti-apartheid demonstrations were taking place. I first got interested in promoting vegetarianism in mainstream society after reading John Robbins' Diet for a New America (1987). Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it makes veganism seem as reasonable and mainstream as recycling.
For example, half the water consumed in the U.S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water are also used to wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as does the entire human population; creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause ten times more water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes three times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined. Meat producers are the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contributing to half the water pollution in the United States.
Joanna Macy, author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, depicts the advantages of America moving towards a vegan diet in her foreword to Diet for a New America:
"The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis...
"The social, ecological, and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale...
"The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes, begin to grow again. Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.
"The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and farm factories had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants..."
Joanna Macy admits, "This scenario is wildly, absurdly utopian. It is also clearly the way we are meant to live, built to live." What could possibly make it a reality? "It is this very book!"
Paul McCartney also says, "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let's do it! Linda was right. Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century."
Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights similarly says:
"Merely by ceasing to eat meat
Merely by practicing restraint
We have the power to end a painful industry
"We do not have to bear arms to end this evil
We do not have to contribute money
We do not have to sit in jail or go to
meetings or demonstrations or
engage in acts of civil disobedience
"Most often, the act of repairing the world,
of healing mortal wounds,
is left to heroes and tzaddikim (holy people)
Saints and people of unusual discipline
"But here is an action every mortal can
perform--surely it is not too difficult!"
When I first read Diet for a New America, I thought it could have the same kind of impact on mainstream American society that Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet had in the '70s.
The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in pounds. A fellow animal activist in San Diego, Tricia Fernatt, felt as I did: since the vast majority of animals are being killed for food, why are we wasting our time on peripheral issues? Shouldn't veganism be the main focus of our movement? And Diet for a New America tied it all together. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by just 10 percent, it would release enough grain and soybeans to feed over 60 million people.
In writing his expose on the meat industry, John Robbins has been compared to Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader and other whistleblowers. In Diet for a New America, he demonstrates how all the various causes that concern the left: healthcare, a sustainable energy policy, hunger, malnutrition, etc. are all taken care of in one fell swoop by a vegan diet. I had the opportunity to meet John Robbins in September 1988. It was one of the most inspirational moments of my life!
He was heir to the Baskin-Robbins fortune. He renounced it at a young age. He traveled to India, opened a yoga ashram in Canada, etc. He spoke of Gandhi and nonviolence. His son Ocean Robbins founded Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!) and is also dedicated to promoting veganism. I asked John if he would try and get the American Left to support animal rights. He told me that he had sent a copy of his book to Mother Jones, a left-liberal periodical published in San Francisco.
Many on the Left are beginning to take a stand in favor of animal rights. Joanna Macy spoke at the San Francisco Green Festival, in November 2005. In his 1990 updated and revised edition of Animal Liberation, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes that many of the political parties leaning towards the "Green" end of the political spectrum in Europe were beginning to oppose animal experimentation.
John Robbins elaborated further on the economic waste of raising animals for food in May All Be Fed, which my brother gave me for Christmas in 1992. Oxfam, the international charity, reports that in Mexico, 80 percent of the children in rural areas are undernourished, yet the livestock are fed more grain than the human population eats! Meat consumption in Taiwan increased 600 percent between 1950 and 1990. In 1950, Taiwan was a grain exporter; in 1990 the nation imported, mostly for feed, 74 percent of the grain it used. Twenty-five years ago, Syria was a barley exporter. But in the intervening years, livestock have consumed increasing amounts of the country's grain. Now, despite a phenomenal 1000 percent increase in the land area devoted to producing barley, Syria must import the cereal.
John Robbins spoke before the United Nations in 1994, where he received a standing ovation.
I had the opportunity to hear John Robbins speak at a Unitarian church here in Oakland several years ago. The church was PACKED! John writes in The Food Revolution (2001):
"The revolution sweeping our relationship to our food and our world, I believe, is part of an historical imperative. This is what happens when the human spirit is activated. One hundred and fifty years ago, slavery was legal in the United States. One hundred years ago, women could not vote in most states. Eighty years ago, there were no laws in the United States against any form of child abuse. Fifty years ago, we had no Civil Rights Act, no Clean Air or Clean Water legislation, no Endangered Species Act. Today, millions of people are refusing to buy clothes and shoes made in sweatshops and are seeking to live healthier and more Earth-friendly lifestyles. In the last fifteen years alone, as people in the United States have realized how cruelly veal calves are treated, veal consumption has dropped 62 percent."