I know there are still wild turkeys - and not just the booze.

It's cool to see a flock of them walk wander across the property...

Consonant Dude's got it, I reckon.

That PETA are a bunch of loons does not mean that any concern for animal welfare is to be dismissed out of hand. As I see it, by god's command or by process of evolution, we humans are put in a position where we can do great and terrible things to the world. With power comes responsibility, that's what we're granted the power for. A parent is not granted power over their child so they can abuse the child; a prison warden is not granted power over the prisoners so they can extort and beat them; a teacher is not granted power over their student so they can fill their head with rubbish; and humans are not granted power over the earth and all the living things in it so they can destroy the lot.

Mccrow is absolutely right that the only way to meet the current Western demand for meat is with current abusive disease-encouraging farming methods. But it's also true that a lot of this demand is manufactured. If all the McDs and KFCs in a city were to be closed down overnight, I don't think there'd be protests in the streets. It's there so people have it.

Another point is that we're very wasteful with the food we do it. Across the developed West, about 1/4 of food is simply thrown away. That's dinners we didn't finish, stuff we put away for later and forgot about and let go off, stuff we bought because we thought we'd have it and then decided not to, and so on. A certain amount I think is unavoidable, you're never going to eat every gramme that goes into your fridge or cupboard. But 25% seems rather high. In my own home, I grow vegetables, so discarded food goes to the compost pile, and in this way returns to us in edible form again a few months later. Better than its going to landfill...

Supposing you could reduce your wastage from 25% to 10%, you'd save 15% on food bills, and that'd be 15% less land which has to be put under cultivation, or cattle butchered, and so on. Given that since WWII 2/3 of the corn and 1/3 of the wheat produced each year in the world has gone to feeding livestock, and given that demand for corn-derived ethanol is growing... it may come down to a choice, you can drive your car, or you can eat your burgers, but you can't do both. Reducing wastage and meat consumption can ease the pain of that decision...

Isn't natural selection a bear?  Humans don't damage the environment, we change the environment like all living and even unliving things do.  Sadly, as humans we recognize that changing the environment limits our species chance of success.  We try our best at resource management based on economics, politics and anthropomorphic views of the environment.  One person's pest is another person's living creature, even though everytime you flush the toilet you make it more habital for one organism and less habital for another.  There needs to be balance but what are you as an individual ready to give up to have it?  

I'm probably the worst environmental person ever.  

Quote from: James McMurrayThey still have chickens in the wild?

yes, there are still wild Prairie chickens in the midwest.

I read this on Friday night, and I’ve been thinking all weekend how to respond, so here goes.

Quote from: McrowSo I have been seeing this in peoples sigs, some sort of campaign for animal rights and such.

As far as I know, I’m the only one with this link in my sig.

Quote from: Mcrowso to answer the questions:

Yes, I fucking do.

Good. I’m glad you do.  

I didn’t.

I’d like to tell you how I came to put that link in my signature.  

Up until the first of this year, I didn’t really think about it. I was happily eating cheddar bacon dogs and meat lover’s pizzas.   I was one of those city-dwellers Consonant Dude mentioned. I had some vague awareness that animals lived on big farms and were driven to slaughterhouses when the time came, but I had a picture of a nice happy farm like the one in Babe, and that was ok. That’s what those kinds of animals were there for.

It started with a joke.

I have a chihuahua.  My fiancé and I joke that he looks like Piglet from the Winnie the Pooh stories. On one particular occasion, we joked that maybe we should get a real pig as a pet to be his brother.  She said it would be too big, so I went on a pet adoption site to show her that there were small pigs that could actually make decent pets.

While I was on the adoption site, in the description for one pig it was noted that he had been owned by someone who wanted to raise him for some holiday dinner, but for some reason they had decided not to and had given him to the adoption group.  He was a cute pig, so we made appropriate cutesy noises and said how glad we were that he wasn’t going to be eaten.  

And that’s where it started.

For some reason that pig’s story stayed in the back of my mind, and a couple days later I started to think about him, and wondered what would have happened to him if his owner had kept him.  I guess the fact that he was being adopted as a pet may have had something to do with it-maybe the blurring of the line between “pet” animal and “food” animal is what made it stick with me.  

I started to wonder about other pigs, pigs that were raised for food, and for whatever reason I decided I wanted to know more about them and what went on to get them from the farm to my plate.  And since they aren’t the only animals we eat, my curiosity extended to other farm animals.

I did some looking around online, and one of the first sites I came to (for good or bad) was that of a group associated with PETA (chooseveg.com if anyone is interested). They had a video called Meet Your Meat, which I watched. And I was speechless, and horrified.  I don’t want to start listing out all the horrible practices that they were presenting as commonplace, but it boiled down to millions of animals that are basically living a life of incredible suffering pretty much from birth up to and including death.

I’m a sensitive guy I guess, especially when it comes to animals. I treat-and almost think of-my dog and cat as if they were my kids.  I can’t imagine doing to them, or any dog, cat, or other animal, a fraction of what I saw on this web site.  I’m not talking about just keeping an animal penned up and killing them for food, but the awful living conditions and cruelty inflicted on them.

Now as I said, this group was associated with PETA, and to put it politely, they don’t have a reputation for being the most sane group around, so I wasn’t sure what to do.  I didn’t know if I should believe everything they said, but if even half of what they said was true,  I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

So I did what made the most sense to me at the time-I stopped eating meat or any animal products immediately, until I could determine whether what I had seen was true.  I started looking around more, but I didn’t know who I could trust.  There were other sites that talked about the same thing, but I didn’t know if they were animal rights nuts with an agenda deliberately slanting things or out and out lying to bring people to their side.

I finally thought to look to the Humane Society, who have a better reputation and seem to be more stable and rational than PETA, and from them I found out that a good bit of what I had seen was in fact true.  I’m satisfied for now with the facts as presented by the HSUS, so I decided I needed to make my meat ban permanent.

And that’s my story. I’m not an activist or an animal rights nut (at least I don’t think I am). I’m just an ordinary guy with a soft spot for animals who found out more than he wanted to know, and had his heart broken by it.  I didn’t know what to do at first, and I'm still trying to sort out my feelings and educate myself about it.  What I do know is that, like I said above, I didn’t know where my food came from, and if I didn’t know, there are probably other people out there who don’t know either, people who might not like it either.  

If you do know, and it doesn’t bother you, great, no problem.  It just really affected me to find out about it, and just like anyone who’s had a life-changing experience, I wanted to share it somehow.  I didn’t want to be preachy about it and lecture people, so I thought a link in my sig was a good unobtrusive way to do it, so that if anyone was interested they could click on it and find out, and if they weren’t interested they could just write me off as a nut and move on.

Quote from: McrowIn fact I worked on farms, even a slaughter house for short while. Bottom line is that without all the methods used now for raising and butchering animals, there is no way in hell the demand for meat could be met. Period.

If that’s the case, then despite the slightly hostile nature of your rant, you are actually someone I’d like to hear from. If you worked on a large factory farm, I’d be very interested in hearing your first hand account of how the animals are treated, if they really do suffer as much as the websites I’ve looked at make it sound like.

Quote from: McrowSo unless half or more of america stops eating meat, don't expect any changes.

I know that with the current demand for meat, a lot isn’t going to change.  There’s a saying that is popular with a lot of protest groups, “Not in my name”, and I’ve sort of adopted it.  It means that, while I may not be able to make any huge changes, no one is going to mistreat or abuse an animal because I created a demand for it.  It doesn’t solve the problem, but it helps me sleep a little better.

EDIT: Let me reiterate, I don't have a problem with animals being raised for food. It's the suffering and cruel treatment they have to endure their whole lives that bothers me.  Since all this started, I have sought out and found companies that do commit to treating animals well, and I happily consume their products.

Quote from: JimBobOzConsonant Dude's got it, I reckon.

That PETA are a bunch of loons does not mean that any concern for animal welfare is to be dismissed out of hand. As I see it, by god's command or by process of evolution, we humans are put in a position where we can do great and terrible things to the world. With power comes responsibility, that's what we're granted the power for. A parent is not granted power over their child so they can abuse the child; a prison warden is not granted power over the prisoners so they can extort and beat them; a teacher is not granted power over their student so they can fill their head with rubbish; and humans are not granted power over the earth and all the living things in it so they can destroy the lot.

This sums up my thoughts almost perfectly.

I went to the gorcery store last Friday - to a specific market here in town as they have the best deli and bakery for a large grocery store, better than any of the chains.  Anyway....

I had to pick up eggs to, so without thinking a grabbed a dozen, checked for breaks, and left.  When I got home my wife noticed there was no date on the eggs - which is odd.  The thing I noticed was that the business was touting that the chickens who provided the eggs were (I can't remember how it was put) raised and lived on a farm that fed them natural foods and gave them space to roam.

Now this didn't surprise me as I've seen the "free-range chicken" stuff for years. My assumption is that there's a market out there of food produced by people who don't practice what you, Tech, feel is inhumane. I say this all out of respect for your position that you don't want to support practices you feel are bad.  The wonderful thing about the market is that if there's a need, chances are somebody is filling it.

So I'm guessing you could find just about any animal-based food product that uses stock treated more in line with your comfort zone. It might take some more research and pain-in-the-ass factor of going to different stores, but if it's the practice not the principle...

Just a thought...

Me?  I know there are animals living in shitty situations only to be slaughtered so that I could have the pot roast I had this weekend. I'm OK with it.

And now I'm hungry...

...and you're making me hungry.
 Cut that out - I had a big dinner last night.


- E.W.C.

Technomancers story makes me think if Dennis Leary:

All the cute and cuddly animals over here... everyone else, get on the bus. You're fucking meat on the hoof.

First time I had rabbit it was because a sibling had gone out to use his awesome leet bow skills in the real world and shot himself a cute widdle bunny wabbit.  That was the last time he ever shot a bow.  I enjoyed me some fried rabbit (taste's like chicken!).

Which of the two of us do you think would survive in the wild without grocery money?


Of course, the million dollar question is? Does it matter? Will we ever need to have that callous insensitive nature necessary to turn a living thing into a consumable resource?  Or is it some sort of antiquated throwback to a more primative state.

Cue Unnecessary Farscape anecdote....

I continue eating meat, desite the bad conditions of animals, because I want to encourage good animal husbandry.

So I eat much less meat than people usually do.

Let me explain. The current demand for meat, grains and so on means that farmers must adopt factory-style methods, rather than being artisans. An artisan is someone who has a range of skills and products, takes time and loves their work. They take a lot of work to produce a decent amount of stuff, but they use stuff very well. The guy making furniture in his garage uses less timber to make a desk than does say) Ikea. And the farmer who has a couple of cows, a field of wheat, a vegetable garden and an orchid, that guy takes quite a lot of work to produce a decent amount of stuff.

Or put another way... in nature, what one thing takes away another adds, what's waste to one is food to another. For example, wheat takes nitrogen from the soil. So if you grow wheat in the same place for years on end, the soil runs out of nitrogen, and there's less wheat each season. But then there's beans, and beans add nitrogen to the soil. But if you plant beans year after year, the nitrogen buids up, the bean plants grow tall but don't produce as many beans. But if you plant wheat one season and beans the next, the wheat takes nitrogen away, and the beans add it, and it all balances, and you get lots of wheat and lots of beans each year.

But the demand for wheat and beans is such that farmers will tend to produce just one. And so the wheat farmer has to add nitrogen to the soil from somewhere else. Historically - and still, in much of the world - the farmer would leave some land fallow, and graze cattle on it - they'd eat grass, and turn the grass into manure which broke down and added nitrogen to the soil. But if you do that, you can only have half your fields under wheat at any one time. Sure, you get a good yield of wheat from those fields, and a good yield of beef or milk - but not as good a yield as when you specialise, and only lay down wheat, or only graze cattle. So the farmer just adds nitrogen in the form of artificial fertiliser.

This leads to what we call a "monoculture" - just one thing being grown. Thing is, year after year the same plants in the fields - diseases build up, and vermin come in. So then the farmer has got to use pesticides and herbicides and fungicides, more chemicals. But hey, it's easier to deal with just one crop than several, since you need one kind of equipment for wheat, another for beans, another for cattle, and so on. So what we get is that a monoculture is labour-efficient and resource-inefficient. It doesn't require many workers, but uses lots of energy and resources.

The old way was a "polyculture" - many things being grown. You'd grow wheat, then beans, then leave the land fallow, then graze cattle on it, then grow wheat, then beans, and so on. You'd milk the cows and make cheese. You'd have a vegetable garden and feed some chickens on the scraps. If you had heavy land and grew lots of root vegetables, you might have some pigs, they eat anything and have lots of piglets, their natural instinct is to push their muzzle into the ground and look for roots and things to eat, so they're actually good at ploughing your ground for you. But it takes quite a bit of work to maintain all those different animals and crops. But then, it doesn't take much resources - you don't need all those pesticides and so on, diseases don't build up because you're varying things. So what we get is that polyculture is labour-inefficient and resource-efficient.

If you eat a lot of meat, you're encouraging a monoculture of animals, and a monoculture of grains to feed them, and animals locked up in pens for their whole lives. If you don't eat any meat at all, then you're encouraging a monoculture of grains to feed yourself - the calories and protein you're not getting from meat, you have to get from grains etc instead, so they need to grow them for you cheaply.

Whereas if you eat a little meat, and a mixture of fresh fruit and vegetables, you're encouraging polycultures. Why should we encourage polycultures? Well, because they're labour-inefficient and resource-efficient. What does it mean if we support a "labour-inefficient" industry? Well, we'll create jobs. What does it mean if we support a "resource-efficient" industry? We'll use less resources. And here in the developed West, we have high unemployment and we're using more resources than the world has to give us. So polycultures are what we should support, if we want to create jobs and stop fucking up the planet.

That means we eat a little meat. The normal Australian consumption is about 100kg a year, or 220lbs. That's half an adult cow. That means that in Australia, they have to slaughter ten million cattle a year to feed us - or the equivalent in poultry, pigs, etc. So they need monocultures for that, and terrible conditions for the animals. Me and my woman's consumption is 10kg a year of meat each. That's equivalent to ten chickens, or one adult cow between twenty people. The cattle can live off land left fallow, they don't need to buy in heaps of grain to feed them. At that level, farmers can have polycultures.

I'm happy to exploit the Earth. I just want us to exploit it in such a way that we can exploit it again tomorrow. That means old-style mixed farms with cows and chickens and pigs and fruit trees and vegie gardens and fields left fallow and so on. Doesn't mean we all have to become farmers. Well-managed vegie gardens can produce 10lbs per square foot a year (twice that if the person is talented and active). A person can have all the vegetables they need from 100 square feet of garden beds, which take about an hour a week to maintain. So a farmer working a 40 hour week could feed 40 people, including themselves. So we don't have all become hippies and live on the land.

Of course this means you'll be eating fresh fruit and vegetables instead of processed packaged stuff, which will no doubt be a great tragedy, as the rate of heart disease and diabetes drops, and we spend less money on healthcare. Why would we want that?

So what I reckon is that we should eat as though they were already farming the way we wanted them to. I want them to have old-style polyculture farms so I eat about 220 grammes (8 ounces) of meat a week, and lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. If everyone does that, then farmers will stop cramming food down the gullets of animals stuck in concrete pens their whole lives, and stop laying down fields of wheat in or out of season. Buy as though things are already the way you want them to be, and over time, they'll end up the way you want them to be.

Market power, baby.

Edit: Incidentally, polycultures are not only labour-inefficient (create jobs) and resource-efficient (save the Earth), but since one day the oil's going to run out, and all that fertiliser production, and the manufacture of the pesticides, herbicides, etc - that all takes oil. So the more polycultures we have, the less oil we use, and that buys us more time to adjust to having no oil at all. Sow change is always easier to adjust to than quick change, so that's a good thing.

So that's another problem eating less meat helps solve.

And of course, if we use less oil, then we can tell the whole Middle East to go fuck itself, which means less wars, and less shame in associating with barbaric despotic regimes.

There's more than that we need to do, but hey, everyone's gotta start somewhere. Better a little than none at all.

Attitudes in the UK changed when we discovered that the food industry was feeding cattle their own brains, which led to BSE and to at one point estimates that potentially millions of us could be infected.

Thankfully the numbers seem to be vastly lower, but at one point some theorists thought there was a real possibility we'd basically just ended British history.  The more mainstream views still thought we were talking a serious epidemic, the actual outcome seems to be pure luck more than anything else.

It makes you think a bit more about what you eat.

As for chickens facing structural collapse, well documented.  Force fed animals kept in factory conditions with their legs collapsing under them.

I eat meat, but increasingly I try to source it to farms and producers which grant the animals some dignity during their lives and which feed them on stuff which isn't likely to lead to platelets forming in my fucking brain and causing me to die.

I'm funny that way.

Fuck Peta, the existence of cretins like that doesn't mean animal rights is not a real issue.  My main issue with Peta is they make the rest of us look like crazy people, since Peta is far more about hating the human than respecting the animal.

Me, I'm for respecting the animal.

These may not be thinking creatures, but they are capable of suffering.  Our food industry is predicated on avoiding the mass consumer learning what their food endures before it comes to the plate, I don't support that kind of intellectual dishonesty and I'm glad that increasingly others don't too.

Oh, and JimBob's posts are right on the money, solid stuff all the way through.

Quote from: TechnomancerEDIT: Let me reiterate, I don't have a problem with animals being raised for food. It's the suffering and cruel treatment they have to endure their whole lives that bothers me.  Since all this started, I have sought out and found companies that do commit to treating animals well, and I happily consume their products.

Exactly so.

And not in my name is right too, we don't have to ourselves support this treatment.

I mean, I'm as hypocritical as the next guy, I eat McDonalds sometimes for Christ's sake, but I'm trying.

And not in my name is an important principle, but then I once got suspended from school for refusing to participate in a vivisection as I argued it had no educational merit as conducted at my school and refused to condone it by participating.  Edit:  I got the same suspension as some boys who set fire to a teacher's car, which shows how much schools hate it if you question their authority, or how much they didn't like that teacher.

Good stuff all around, from JimBob, Technomancer, and Balnibus to name a few.

I eat FAR less meat than i used to, but primarily for health reasons.
I like animals more than most humans.
I'd rather see Inmates experimented on than animals.
I appreciate that groups like the Humane Society, Animal Control, and the ASPCA are out there...because of people like this. and this.

In my perfect world, there's a guy out there not unlike the Punisher that finds these people, puts them in a concertina-wire cage and makes them fight to the death, then shoots the survivor in the head.

But i digress..."Not In My Name" works well.

Um, I in no way support experiments on inmates.

Inmates are people, often from unfortunate backgrounds, they're not all child murdering sociopaths and I don't think they deserve inhumane or degrading treatment.

Quote from: BalbinusUm, I in no way support experiments on inmates.

Inmates are people, often from unfortunate backgrounds, they're not all child murdering sociopaths and I don't think they deserve inhumane or degrading treatment.

Certainly not saying you do...that's on me.