As a vegan, I have thought a lot about how society exploits other animals, specifically in the parts of the world were its unnecessary and personally I cannot see how in the the developed world it could be justified to kill billions of animals each year (for each killed, they went through the horrible process before death) in order to have a tastier dinner, although a small fraction of people may need meat to survive for some reason, for most people it's not a necessity.

It's not only that billions of animals suffer in exchange for taste-pleasure that appears unjustifiable but also the water & grain spent on these billions of animals could have been spent saving the lives of starving people in Africa and other extremely poor parts of the world. If it wasn't for factory farming, these animals wouldn't exist therefore the grain & water could go to the people and before one argues that these animals wouldn't exist without factory farming therefore its a good thing for them that factory farming exists, I doubt the life they go through is a good thing, it would be better for them not to have lived in the first place and a lot less animals to have lived, whom had a good life, free from factory farming. That appears as a better option.

Thanks for reading and I wish to see, why this goes on and why people think its morally justifiable?

One of our regular forum contributors, John Bevin, wrote an article in December which you can find on this topic which you might enjoy reading http://www.ethics.org.au/ethics-article ... -putanesca

The following link provides a good summary of the arguments for and against in ethics discussions on the morality of eating meat

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/g/gaskilld/So ... 4/Meat.htm

Dean,

As a vegan do you use any animal products that are not part of the process of, or result from, the farming animals in one form or another?

I eat little bought meat but hunt, kill and butcher my own, this has been a traditional lifestyle in my family for over two thousand years.

An interesting perspective on the issue - information that caused well-known vegan George Monbiot to switch to being an omnivore

http://theconversation.edu.au/ordering- ... hands-4659

Interesting indeed and then there are the animals directly killed in the harvesting of grain. The Harvester reaps all that is in its way, fox cubs, rats and mice, small natives, snakes, lizards, frogs and a myriad of insects along with the young of birds, their nests (and attached bird droppings) as well as any carcasses of whatever might be hanging dead in the wheat.

All is grist to the mill and that's where the broken bits go, into the hammer or grinding mills to be pulverized into flour. Not being metal these bits of formerly living creatures are not detected and removed by the magnetic detectors and being light pass over the drop separators whence go stones and other non-metallic bits as well as non-ferrous metal that have a bit of weight and would damage the mills.

The upshot is that lots of this animal matter, blood, bones, fur and feathers, contents of stomachs and bowels, excreta etc., goes into the final product; flour on the shop shelves.

Therefore vegans who do not buy specially ground flour are eating meat, along with the rest of us, in their bread and whatever else they cook using store bought flour.

Enjoy your morning toast.

Did some grape picking years ago. The job requires you to work quickly so whatever is on the bunch of grapes when it's picked, snails, spiders, grasshoppers etc, goes into the bucket and on into the crusher. So your favourite drop has a small meat content. But don't worry, it's been properly aged...

Dean,

Perhaps you might have a look at this on Snopes
http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=69920
and let us have a comment?

I wonder if you have a cat or dog. If so, what do you do about the fleas? Surely, you do not interfere with their right to life on their host animal! And what about those pesky little bacteria that make you sick? Do you interfere with their right to life? The fact is that animals convert vegetation that is inedible for humans into nutrious and tastey foodstuffs without which millions more people would die of starvation.

Well, yes. But, on the other hand, no.

It’s true that cows convert grass, which is inedible to humans, into beef, which is edible. But of course the grass is only cultivated so that the cows can eat it; if we weren’t eating cattle then the land would be used for something else. And it would be more productive. In general, using land for a food crop is much more efficient than using the same land for animal fodder, and then eating the animals that graze it.

It’s already the case that a vegetarian or low-meat diet is fairly well correlated with population density. Densely-populated areas tend to favour a low-meat diet since that’s the only way they can get all the food they need from the land they have available. And, if the global population continues to grow, it’s likely that we’ll all eat less meat. The earth can support a larger population than it currently does, but not if they all expect American levels of meat consumption.

Or Australian levels for that matter.
Nor can I envisage millions of people starving because they can't get meat.

Most of the people that I mix with socially when I'm in India use meat, but to my way of thinking, only as a flavouring.

Correct. People who can’t get meat, even if they want it, don’t starve; they eat a vegetarian diet. They only starve when they can’t get a vegetarian diet.


Yup. The typical Indian diet is near-vegetarian; they eat a little meat, but not very much, because it’s inefficient to produce, and a densely-populated country like India needs to produce food efficiently. This has been the case for centuries, so the Indian cuisine, and the Indian taste, is adapted to it. Even Indians who can afford plenty of meat mostly still eat relatively little meat.

I can imagine the hundreds of millions of domesticated animals starving to a long lingering death until the species are extinct as there is no reason to feed them as they aren't a source of food anymore.

Yes. It would never occur to anybody to slaughter them to avoid this. As we all know, meat producers all want to maximse animal suffering, so naturally in this eventuality they will choose to starve them to death.

peregrinus,

Since peple aren't going to eat them, wouldn't it be inhumane to just kill them now that they no longer served a useful purpose.

More inhumane than to starve them? No, it wouldn't.

But, actually, the debate is unreal. The entire world isn't going to give up meat overnight. If the world does become more vegetarian it will be through a gradual process. As demand for meat falls and the profits to be made from producing meat decline, fewer and fewer animals will be bred for consumption, and animals slaughtered for consumption will simply not be replaced. And, of course, if an animal isn't bred, the question of whether to slaughter it or let it starve will never arise.

We used to breed pigeons for consumption. (No, really, we did. This happened in dedicated structures called dovecotes, and there are still plenty of redundant dovecotes in Europe.) We no longer do. Do you remember reading of the great scandal about all the starving pigeons? No, me neither.

I don't think the world will give up on meat, mainly because it tastes great and is quite nutritious - which are the two important qualities that most people care about the most regarding food. If there was a big social engineering push towards a 'meat-free' society it would see the typical failures that such social engineering projects face - widespread dissatisfaction, black markets, corruption etc.

Perhaps a more realistic vision is that of artificial meat. Although science has been trying (and largely failing) to produce a meat that doesn't require the rest of the animal, it is likely that a decent product will end up being developed. This would have the opposite effect of vegetarianism or veganism. Without the enormous costs of grazing animals for slaughter, it would bring meat into even the poorest societies as a staple food, helping to stamp out the concept of widespread, enforced vegetarianism/veganism once and for all.

peregrinus

Don't they serve squab in the restaurants anymore? How many of those pigeons were slaughtered when the dovecoot was abandoned and how many were turned loose to fend for themselves. Do people ever complain about the free range pigeons population today? Now translate that to feral pigs, sheep, and cattle.

It seems that killing the animals outright rather allowing them to fend for themselves and possibly starve or get hit by a lorry, would violate these animal rights. Or is there right the right not to be eaten as opposed to a right to life?

But artificial meat would be seen as hypocritical, just as 'Vegetarian Sausages' are today.

I don't see "vegetarian sausages" as hypocritical, and I don't know anyone who does. What's hypocritical about them?

Yes. Have you never had a McSquab with fries?


None were slaughtered, but nor were they “turned loose”. They were already loose; the dovecote worked because of the pigeon’s homing instincts. I imagine that when people lost interest in raising pigeons they simply stopped scattering grain in the dovecote to attract and feed the pigeons, and the dovecotes were gradually abandoned by the pigeons.


Feral sheep? The mind boggles.

But, again, I think this is unrealistic. A decline in demand for farmed meat will result in a decline in stock breeding, not in the mass release of excess stock. Even if the world becomes vegetarian overnight (which, so far as I know, no-one foresees) and farmers are left with stock that they cannot sell on any terms, I do not see them releasing the stock to starve. They will destroy the stock because

(a) they are not cruel

(b) they will fear adverse social consequences if they turn loose stock which trespasses on their neighbour’s land, eats their crops, damages their fences, etc

(b) they will fear legal consequences if they turn loose stock which trespasses on their neighbour’s land, eats their crops, damages their fences, etc


It doesn’t seem like that to me. And, more to the point, I doubt that it will seem like that to the farmers concerned. You seem to suppose that farmers who currently kill animals in order to sell the carcass for profit will find themselves ethically unable to kill the same animals to avoid the animal dying of starvation or neglect. That doesn’t sound very plausible to me.



Farmers won’t stop producing meat because the animals have a “right to life”; they’ll stop producing meat because people will stop buying it. And they’ll stop buying it because, as the world population grows, the relative cost of using productive land inefficiently to raise meat rather than efficiently to raise food crops will make meat more and more expensive.

Meat-eating won’t disappear altogether. There will be the idle rich, for whom meat-eating will be a form of conspicuous consumption. And there will be meat that is hunted in the wild, which doesn’t involve an opportunity cost in terms of food plant production foregone.