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I don't think most vegans/vegetarians delude themselves that they're not doing any harm through their consumption, but rather are content to be doing less harm.

I don't think most vegans/vegetarians delude themselves that they're not doing any harm through their consumption, but rather are content to be doing less harm. Anyway, still a fascinating article if for nothing else than the sophistication of plant behavior it highlights.

potatolicious 17y ago
What sort of harm, though? Instead of the (arguably renewable) leather windbreaker, now you're pumping oil out of the ground to do it with synthetics.
- dschobel 17y ago
  Harm as defined by the intersection of your values and your understanding of economics.
- pyre 17y ago
  Harm to the animals. The practices in the livestock industry are pretty horrible. There are some places where a percentage of the animals survive the 'kill' stage and are still alive as all of their parts are harvested. There are places where the animals that are too lame to make it through the slaughterhouse are just tossed onto a pile of dead bodies to freeze/starve to death (rather than at least killing the animal first). The livestock 'industry' has turned animals from living beings into 'moving lumps of commodity resources.' Is this necessarily a good thing? Don't we lose our humanity at some point? I haven't look too far into it, but for things like livestock raised for meat, we grow a lot of food just to feed it to livestock. I've seen some numbers that put a large portion of the farmland in the US as growing livestock feed exclusively. How much of our resources are being diverted into raising and feeding the livestock which could be used for other purposes? These are all questions that no one asks because it would mean that possibility of limiting the amount of meat/dairy/eggs that they eat (or eliminating it altogether). People would rather live in ignorance of these issues that face the possibility of having to undergo a lifestyle change.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    > Don't we lose our humanity at some point? I'd argue that the mere act of killing the animal would strip us of our humanity, industrialized slaughterhouses or not. In any case, there is also the implication that industrial agriculture kills millions of animals per year by robbing them of their habitats, or where they get caught and ripped to shreds by industrial machinery during harvesting. Simply put, I do not buy the idea that by being vegetarian I'm doing significantly less harm - I may be one slight degree more removed from the animal that has to die to put food on my plate, but morally it makes little difference, and technically it makes even less difference. > These are all questions that no one asks because it would mean that possibility of limiting the amount of meat/dairy/eggs that they eat I object against this presumptuous attitude. Plenty of us meat-eaters ask these questions - and we decide to continue being omnivores while being entire conscious of its consequences (as well as the myriad of negative consequences of pure vegetarianism). "Them ignorant meat eaters" is all too common a presumptuous attitude I get from self-righteous vegetarians. Thanks for portraying us as a bunch of ostriches with heads in the sand, while heroic vegetarians lead the way. On, comrades!
    - pyre 17y ago
      > Simply put, I do not buy the idea that by being vegetarian I'm doing significantly less harm - I may be one slight degree more removed from the animal that has to die to put food on my plate, but morally it makes little difference, and technically it makes even less difference. Those animals are going to be mauled by the machinery anyways. You are not saving them from the mauling by eating meat. If you avoid animal products or at least limit your consumption of them, you are reducing the demand to produce these products, thereby reducing the amount of animals that are ravaged by our industrialized food engine. While this might not seem to make a noticeable different due to our ever-increasing population, were all the vegetarians/vegans out there to revert back into omnivores demanding meat/dairy/eggs a resulting ramping up of production to meet this demand would occur. There are two points that I have with your argument: 1. Animals that are ripped to shreds by farming equipment are at least able to live a 'free' life in the wild. Animals that are part of the industrialized livestock industry commonly live in cages where they can't even turn around. Sometimes their flesh melds into the cage walls (as can be the case with egg-laying chickens) completely grafting them to their cage (i.e. hens whose feet have grown around the bars/wire of their cage floor leaving them permanently fixed to the cage). 2. The idea that "well animals are going to die anyways so why even bother" is not an attitude that I find healthy or conducive to change. > I object against this presumptuous attitude. Plenty of us meat-eaters ask these questions - and we decide to continue being omnivores while being entire conscious of its consequences (as well as the myriad of negative consequences of pure vegetarianism). "Them ignorant meat eaters" is all too common a presumptuous attitude I get from self-righteous vegetarians. Thanks for portraying us as a bunch of ostriches with heads in the sand, while heroic vegetarians lead the way. On, comrades! I apologize if I came off that way. Most of the time when expressing your views as a vegetarian or a vegan all you get are responses like, "I'm going to eat TWICE as much meat just to offset your moral choice! Haw haw haw!" And I agree that there are people that have at least weighed these ideas and have made the choice to eat meat. I applaud you for doing so. There are plenty of people that think of the topic as 'taboo' because it's 'unsightly.' I've met people that don't go to petting zoos because they don't want to see the farm animals that they are eating when they eat meat. The idea that they might associate the meat with the face of an animal frightens them because it means that they might end up with a moral dilemma. I have relatives that don't want to hear about the conditions in the slaughterhouses because it would make it hard for them to eat meat. I have a huge loss of respect for these people. Update: I should add that I don't 'look down' on people that eat meat like a lot of vegans/vegetarians do. Though I may have come off as having a self-righteous attitude, I don't. Unlike a lot of vegans, I don't have an extremist attitude. If we were able to ween ourselves off of the heavy dependence that we have on animals (at least in food) I think that we would be in a much better place morally and nutritionally as a society (though I am not of the mind that a vegan diet is 'automatically' healthy like some people seem to believe; there are tons of unhealthy foods that are perfectly vegan).

potatolicious 17y ago

What sort of harm, though? Instead of the (arguably renewable) leather windbreaker, now you're pumping oil out of the ground to do it with synthetics.

dschobel 17y ago
Harm as defined by the intersection of your values and your understanding of economics.
pyre 17y ago
Harm to the animals. The practices in the livestock industry are pretty horrible. There are some places where a percentage of the animals survive the 'kill' stage and are still alive as all of their parts are harvested. There are places where the animals that are too lame to make it through the slaughterhouse are just tossed onto a pile of dead bodies to freeze/starve to death (rather than at least killing the animal first). The livestock 'industry' has turned animals from living beings into 'moving lumps of commodity resources.' Is this necessarily a good thing? Don't we lose our humanity at some point? I haven't look too far into it, but for things like livestock raised for meat, we grow a lot of food just to feed it to livestock. I've seen some numbers that put a large portion of the farmland in the US as growing livestock feed exclusively. How much of our resources are being diverted into raising and feeding the livestock which could be used for other purposes? These are all questions that no one asks because it would mean that possibility of limiting the amount of meat/dairy/eggs that they eat (or eliminating it altogether). People would rather live in ignorance of these issues that face the possibility of having to undergo a lifestyle change.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  > Don't we lose our humanity at some point? I'd argue that the mere act of killing the animal would strip us of our humanity, industrialized slaughterhouses or not. In any case, there is also the implication that industrial agriculture kills millions of animals per year by robbing them of their habitats, or where they get caught and ripped to shreds by industrial machinery during harvesting. Simply put, I do not buy the idea that by being vegetarian I'm doing significantly less harm - I may be one slight degree more removed from the animal that has to die to put food on my plate, but morally it makes little difference, and technically it makes even less difference. > These are all questions that no one asks because it would mean that possibility of limiting the amount of meat/dairy/eggs that they eat I object against this presumptuous attitude. Plenty of us meat-eaters ask these questions - and we decide to continue being omnivores while being entire conscious of its consequences (as well as the myriad of negative consequences of pure vegetarianism). "Them ignorant meat eaters" is all too common a presumptuous attitude I get from self-righteous vegetarians. Thanks for portraying us as a bunch of ostriches with heads in the sand, while heroic vegetarians lead the way. On, comrades!
  - pyre 17y ago
    > Simply put, I do not buy the idea that by being vegetarian I'm doing significantly less harm - I may be one slight degree more removed from the animal that has to die to put food on my plate, but morally it makes little difference, and technically it makes even less difference. Those animals are going to be mauled by the machinery anyways. You are not saving them from the mauling by eating meat. If you avoid animal products or at least limit your consumption of them, you are reducing the demand to produce these products, thereby reducing the amount of animals that are ravaged by our industrialized food engine. While this might not seem to make a noticeable different due to our ever-increasing population, were all the vegetarians/vegans out there to revert back into omnivores demanding meat/dairy/eggs a resulting ramping up of production to meet this demand would occur. There are two points that I have with your argument: 1. Animals that are ripped to shreds by farming equipment are at least able to live a 'free' life in the wild. Animals that are part of the industrialized livestock industry commonly live in cages where they can't even turn around. Sometimes their flesh melds into the cage walls (as can be the case with egg-laying chickens) completely grafting them to their cage (i.e. hens whose feet have grown around the bars/wire of their cage floor leaving them permanently fixed to the cage). 2. The idea that "well animals are going to die anyways so why even bother" is not an attitude that I find healthy or conducive to change. > I object against this presumptuous attitude. Plenty of us meat-eaters ask these questions - and we decide to continue being omnivores while being entire conscious of its consequences (as well as the myriad of negative consequences of pure vegetarianism). "Them ignorant meat eaters" is all too common a presumptuous attitude I get from self-righteous vegetarians. Thanks for portraying us as a bunch of ostriches with heads in the sand, while heroic vegetarians lead the way. On, comrades! I apologize if I came off that way. Most of the time when expressing your views as a vegetarian or a vegan all you get are responses like, "I'm going to eat TWICE as much meat just to offset your moral choice! Haw haw haw!" And I agree that there are people that have at least weighed these ideas and have made the choice to eat meat. I applaud you for doing so. There are plenty of people that think of the topic as 'taboo' because it's 'unsightly.' I've met people that don't go to petting zoos because they don't want to see the farm animals that they are eating when they eat meat. The idea that they might associate the meat with the face of an animal frightens them because it means that they might end up with a moral dilemma. I have relatives that don't want to hear about the conditions in the slaughterhouses because it would make it hard for them to eat meat. I have a huge loss of respect for these people. Update: I should add that I don't 'look down' on people that eat meat like a lot of vegans/vegetarians do. Though I may have come off as having a self-righteous attitude, I don't. Unlike a lot of vegans, I don't have an extremist attitude. If we were able to ween ourselves off of the heavy dependence that we have on animals (at least in food) I think that we would be in a much better place morally and nutritionally as a society (though I am not of the mind that a vegan diet is 'automatically' healthy like some people seem to believe; there are tons of unhealthy foods that are perfectly vegan).