@Bard
Hey hot pants. Long time no see. Have you been hiding from me? I missed your nekkid body. Some bold claims you’ve advanced here. The crux of it seems to be that an omnivorous diet is natural so what’s the problem, a fallacy that’s already been dismantled sentence by sentence. Pedophilia is a naturally occurring impulse too and so is rape. How many kids have you mounted like a bison? I will report you. That a thing is natural does not mean it is moral. That fallacy out of the way, let us pick apart your statements in any event ‘cause I found them quite, quite fascinating. Grab hold of the bar-railing and steady yourself.
Why would someone not eat meat? We can't process raw unprocessed (at least beaten) meat, but Humans and human ancestors have used Fire for milions of years. We became homo sapiens because our hominid ancestors started using fire and hand axes be4 a long long time ago
The discovery of fire was not instrumental in human evolution. The driving factor was genetic mutations. And when the manipulation of fire was mastered by homo erectus, it was not for culinary ends but for warmth and light for anti-predator defence. Throwing the family dinner into the fire would have landed a guy into no small trouble with Uncle Bigfoot. Like all other carnivores Neolithic men devoured meat in the raw for eons and eons. Fire did not start his carnivorous diet. Sinking your teeth into raw animal flesh that you've captured in a wild hunt is natural. Cooking a slab of polythene wrapped lamb plucked from the supermarket shelf with your government issued food stamp not so much. And tool making has no bearing on meat consumption.
Other animals make tools for quite innocuous ends.
“Domestic animals profit from us as much as we do from them... We keep their numbers inflated (secure their existence as beings) while we get food from them... If we stopped eating meat altogether, millions of cows would die, billions of chickens would die from starvation or other predators.”
You’re confounding population with existence. Animals do not have to be artificially inseminated to maintain population levels. They manage that perfectly in the wild. It’s called the promptings of the flesh. Or in simple layman terms mounting like a bison. Artificial insemination is a profit driven motive designed to yield more livestock for slaughter. It’s analogous to conquering a race of men for rapacious ends, caging them ten to a box, impregnating their women because the confinement has robbed them of the opportunity to naturally mate and claiming how wonderful it is that you have doubled their numbers before their state of captivity. A not too dissimilar thing happened not too long ago: Slavery.
The precise rationale used to maintain black exploitation is deployed to justify animal exploitation: They are not like us so we can treat them as personal property. Species-ism like racism and sexism is the notion that a class of beings are not entitled to any consideration because they are not biologicaly similar to our own. Vegetarianism does for animals what the suffragettes did for women and the civil rights movement did for blacks, namely extend the narrow circle of moral consideration to a group formerly excluded. If there is a difference between racism and speciesism, do let me know 'cause I'm just a country boy and a little slow.
On the other hand what about tribes who inhabit the northern most parts of our world, whose existence is based on animals (homes, clothes, fire, meat, alcohol, milk etc etc)?”
No tribe is sustained only by a diet of meat or alcohol because it is not terribly nutritious. The staple diet of all human communities is to a great extent plant based. Vegetarians do not object to using wool or milk. They object to the infliction of suffering for no more pressing reason than because it’s sooo tasty.
But this evades what I think you are driving at, namely are there circumstances in which killing for meat is right? In desperate times of extremis the objection to killing vanishes. But in desperate circumstances even cannibalism is defensible. The dead can be justifiably eaten when there is no other source of food. But modern man can meet his nutritional needs quite sufficiently without recourse to mass animal slaughter.
You guys have no clue what is it like being that poor where meat is a luxury item, you have never experienced war and scarcity of food.
Come, come Bard my sweet. If you are genuinely concerned about scarcity you might realise that the meat industry is a wasteful method of feeding the poor. Oceans of water and grain are fed to livestock that could be more profitably directed to the starving poor. The meat industry puts the welfare of animals before human beings just to make a buck.
In the end of the day, i will not stop eating a food that gave birth to the Homo Sapiens as a species.... You can stop, i don't care but please do not come and tell me how disgusting it is or how sad the little piggy moma is that i am eating the little piglet
Steady Bard, nobody wants to wrench away your greasy burger with the ketchup running out of it. Stuff that pie hole till you croak my sugarplum. I will you buy another one if it makes you happy. But only if I can fondle you tonight. The point is that if you wanna say that you dine on the flesh of animals because you it’s vewy vewy tasty. That’s fine. Can’t argue with personal taste. But don’t cloth your selfishness in intellectual garb. If self-interest is the order of the day however, it does rather mean that if you raise any objection to pedophilia or rape or aggression or sexism or racism or social hierarchy, that is to say if you get involved at all in the sphere of politics, you cannot expect us to take your moral outrage seriously. Social Darwinism is a very fine thing so long as its consistent. Quit being such an emo brother, it’s all natural.
I look forward to your response.
Topic: Being Vegetarian (continued from shout box)