1. Edits
2. Why think about meat eating
3. Why meat eating isn't natural and why it doesn't matter if it's natural anyway
4. The suffering of farmed animals
5. Morals and animal intelligence vs. emotion
6. Meat eating and the environment
7. A word on health
8. Extra notes on veganism
9. A video on the subject
1
Edit:
1. I suppose if I was writing this now, I'd be writing it in a less accusatory manner. However, every now and again, I read through it and even though I've found a way to be less angry at everyone, I still believe everything I've written. I realise that everyone has different routes to morality which manifest in different ways but how anyone can make a claim that their enjoyment of each individual portion of meat justifies the suffering and death of each individual consumed is still far beyond me and I have no desire to reach it.
2. It may be interesting for you to note that the recommended amount of meat which should be eaten in a week, by those who choose to eat meat, is about the size of cigarette packet. About two thirds of a burger. The consumption of meat is an issue in itself, but the overconsumption of meat is absolutely insane.
3. These writings aren't a game of Jenga. You can't deconstruct one of my points and expect the whole thing to crumble. You can argue that humans are omnivores 'til you're blue in the face and I'll still tell you that eating animals is unnecessary.
Please read in depth before messaging me.
I don't care if meat is tasty and I don't care if you like blood, guts and gore. Neither are good arguments and you'll genuinely look completely pathetic if you use them as such.
2
Right now, if you eat meat, you're part of a significant majority. Chances are, you haven't thought about your actions extensively and haven't felt the need to, because there's safety in numbers. It seems, at first glance, that meat eating MUST be fine, it MUST be natural and morally acceptable, otherwise so many people wouldn't do it. It's easy to assume that because so many people eat meat, someone must have thought it through enough to have found a justification for it, so why should you bother thinking it through yourself?
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Whether or not meat eating is NATURAL is 100% irrelevant, because meat eating is UNNECESSARY. But let's discuss that since it seems to interest everyone so much.
Humans are primates. We, like other primates, have incisors and canines in our mouths, but these aren't a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to eating meat, no matter how often meat eaters throw it in the faces of vegans and vegetarians, as though it means something. Our teeth are not designed for killing and devouring animals with, they are designed as a defense mechanism. Our teeth are far smaller in comparison to those of omnivores and carnivores. We don't have teeth like sheep or cows, because we're not meant to be eating grass, we're meant to be eating fruit and veg. There is more than one kind of herbivore. Physically, none of us are capable of chasing and killing a cow or a pig with just our bodies in the wild, nor do we have the instinct to, so why do so in a factory? Generally, we don't walk through country lanes, see cows and want to rip them to shreds. And when it comes to our innards, our intestines are that of a herbivores - twice as long as any omnivores, and four times as long as any carnivores. We digest our food slowly, unlike omnivores and carnivores, and our food requires extensive chewing, whereas omnivores just break it up into smaller bits, and carnivores more often that not swallow their food whole. On top of that, we do not have the enzymes in our stomach to cope with digesting raw meat, without first cooking it. Meat is not essential for our survival in any way, it does not provide us with anything we can't get from other, non-sentient sources. There is ONE vitamin that is found in meat that isn't generally found in plants, and that is Vitamin B12. If we were still living naturally, we'd get our B12 by eating soil and our own faeces - so I'd like to stick to my marmite and fortified cereals without criticism, cheers.
Have a ponder at the following chart -
I, for one, have been a vegetarian since I was 7 and a vegan since I was 17 and I have remained in largely excellent health, with minimal difficulties, this whole time. I might have rushed to answer to the argument that meat consumption is a necessity for human health and survival, but I find that it is often the closest argument to hand for meat eaters arguing with me. It is a fact that humans do not need to eat meat and I find it a bit silly when people try to tell me otherwise. If I could raise an eyebrow, I'd raise an eyebrow and say, "I haven't had a mouthful of meat since I was making wings out of paper in primary school and I'm still here."
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So you see that even when the argument is stripped down to it's bare roots, even then, meat eating is not natural for humans. So how is it justified to debeak chickens, stuff them in cages or huge sheds where they can't turn around, pump them full of steroids until they can't stand up, beat them to death with crowbars, throw them against walls, jump up and down on them, keep them in cages where they get wounds on their feet that eventually grow right around the bars on the cage floors? All this and then an ugly death where they are hung upside down and dipped, while still conscious, into tubs of boiling water. Unwanted baby chicks are thrown into wood chippers. Justify that. Newborn calves are torn away from their continuously impregnated mothers, and made deliberately anaemic, so that the resulting veal is the right colour to fetch the highest price on the market. All baby animals are castrated without anaesthetic and have various bits of their bodies cut off in the same manner - tails, horns, ears. The industry says that 1 cent per bullet costs too much, so that death is never quick - like chickens, they are hung upside down, they have their throats slit and they are left hanging there, until they have been "bled out" - I won't go into detail about the other animal produce industries here, but rest assured that the abuse doesn't stop at the meat industry.
If you eat meat, that sends a message to the industry that you want it. They kill to meet a quota, they don't kill at random. It's supply and demand. They kill because by consuming meat, you're asking them to.
If we have the technology to survive without inflicting pain and death, there is no reason not to do so. Technology benefits us in many ways, so why not allow it to benefit us and animals when it comes to food.
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Animals killing animals does NOT making humans killing animals okay, because, yknow, I'm not a fucking lion and neither is anyone here. We have to draw the correct lines in the correct places. We are NOT similar to most other animals when it comes to diet, except for primates, so we can't claim that as our argument for eating meat. (And my pre-emptive argument against anyone who says that if we don't breed animals for meat, those animals will die out is; Yes. And all the animals we DON'T eat are all DEAD.)
However, we are similar to animals in other ways. We have to take animals into consideration when evaluating our morals because animals are capable of suffering to the same extent as humans, and like humans, animals also strive to avoid unnecessary suffering. Animals feel emotions in the same way humans do, and anyone who has ever had a companion animal would have a difficult time denying that. We have to put it into context. If a dog isn't as intelligent as a human, that's fine. Let's not award that dog a scholarship, let's not allow that dog to drive a car. But a dog can feel as much pain as a human, so that dogs rights to not have pain inflicted upon him or her have to be taken into consideration. The fact that a dog is not a human and cannot verbalise his or her pain in the way a human can, does not lessen the pain that he or she feels.
In the same way, for the cow, pig, or chicken, being apologetic about meat eating and having moments of weakness, where you just have to devour some flesh isn't good enough either. These are just tastebuds and an easily otherwise-satisfied appetite. For the creature consumed, there is no choice but birth, suffering and death.
We have to learn from the mistakes of the past. When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her books about feminism, retaliations were written by men, claiming that if these principles could be applied to women, then they could also be applied to animals, and so her claims simply MUST be preposterous. Yes, there was once a time when women suffered at the hands of men, and black people suffered at the hands of white people in the same way animals suffer at the hands of people now. The word applicable here is OPPRESSION. The comparisons are staring us in the face, and if you care about equality, you can't brush aside the rights of animals. Gynaecological surgery was pioneered by a white man operating on the genitals of black women, without anaesthesia, because he said that black women felt less pain. We NEED to learn from the mistakes of the past and stop doing whatever is CONVENIENT, in favour of doing what is right.
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Meat eating, each year, causes anywhere between 14% and 25% of carbon emissions - quick, turn the LIGHT OFF, that'll stop the ice caps melting.
Meat eating isn't just bad for the animals - it has horrendous effects on the environment as well. Here are some fun facts; Right now, in Britain 95% of farmland is used to grow grain for animal feed. If the USA alone reduced its meat intake by 10%, there would be enough grain left over to feed the whole of the third world. It take 16 pounds of grain to produce only 1 pound of animal flesh for consumption. It simply doesn't make any sense at all. Waste from the animals pollutes land and rivers, while methane from cows contributes to global warming. From an acre of land, you can get 60 kg of beef, or you could get 20,000 kg of potatoes. Eating meat is, simply put, inefficient. It's convenient for you, but causes irreparable damage to the environment. For example, the rainforest is now being cut down at the rate of one acre per minute to make way for cattle, so meat eaters can have their fucking big macs. 20 times more land is needed to feed a meat eater than is needed to feed a vegetarian. Half of all water used in the western world is used for animals, either to drink, or to irrigate crops of animal feed.
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And then theres your health. Meat eaters are at a much higher risk of having high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, various cancers, heart disease, alzheimers, impotence, asthma and a bad immune system. As a vegan, it's basically a given that I won't have to worry about suffering a heart attack.
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Extra notes, on veganism;
Cows don't produce milk at random, this is the thing. They have to be continuously impregnated in order to produce milk. When the calf is born, they are taken straight away from their mother, and raised for veal, forced to be anaemic so that the veal is the right colour. The separation also causes ALOT of distress for the mother cow, they've been noted to return again and again to the spot where the calf was taken from them. Even if the calves aren't raised for veal, they are still sold to be raised for beef and they still have to be separated from their mothers. It's not nice at any turn you take. The machines used to milk the lactating cows are also damaging to the cows, they get ulcers on their udders and there is usually a quantity of pus in every bucket of milk as a result.
As for chickens, well well. Laying chickens are kept five to a cage the size of a microwave. They are sometimes starved and kept without light for a few days at a time, and then fed up again, as this make egg production faster. They get wounds on their feet from the cage bars, and their feet sometimes heal up around the bars so that they can't move (not that they were able to to begin with). And of course, when laying chickens die, they have to be replaced. Male chicks can't lay eggs, so if there is a surplus of male chicks, those male chicks (there is no joke here, this is honesty) are ground up and made into chicken feed for their sisters. The only way to assure that the eggs you're eating haven't been produced as a result of this is if you eat eggs from chickens that you keep yourself.
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Here is a video, to provide a little back up for my essay.
http://www.youtube.com/wat
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