Just in case you wondered if PETA is batshit insane, the answer is yes.

:banghead:

Seriously... WTF is wrong with people?

:mad:

I absolutely hate PETA.  They disgust me.  I hate their sleazy and exploitative shock tactics.  I hate how counterproductive they are by being so ultra-extreme.

I have no doubt that significant advances in the humane treatment of animals might well have been made over the past several decades if not for how unpalatable the PETA people make the whole concept seem to the mainstream.  

The average person does not want animals treated with unneccessary cruelty.  Even most people who like to hunt don't want animals to suffer.  

I, myself, am a huge animal lover with several pets, could never bring myself to hunt anything, and hate to even see a dead squirrel on the road.  But I recognize that animals are necessary for food (because humans are designed to eat meat) and other products, and I like the taste of meat and eat it regularly.  I do wish we could use animals for food and other products in a way that isn't unnecessarily cruel, and would be happy to support any reasonable legislation in that regard.

But PETA isn't satisfied with something sane like "process food animals with minimal cruelty".  They pretend to support that and they pretend to support vegetarianism.  But what they really want is everyone to be vegan.  Period.

They are a group of nasty fascists.  And a lot of them, like the Earth First people, are practically terrorists - they actively encourage people to damage other people's property, threaten people, and break the laws as they see fit.  And talk about self-loathing, their contempt for mankind makes Walkerism seem positively Humanist by comparison.

Verily, I have seen the error of my ways. But what am I going to do with this nice chianti and my fava beans?

Quote from: jgants;233318I have no doubt that significant advances in the humane treatment of animals might well have been made over the past several decades if not for how unpalatable the PETA people make the whole concept seem to the mainstream.  

I don't think so. Basically, for domestic animals welfare is pretty good. Across most of the West, you can actually go to prison for mistreatment of animals, dog-fighting, that sort of thing. Where the most suffering happens is in confined factory farming.

And that happens simply because we eat so much meat. The average Westerner has about 100kg (220lbs) of meat annually. That's half a calf each, or two pigs, or fifty chickens. There's just no way to produce that much meat for people without packing the animals into big buildings together and stuffing them full of food. Which then means you have to give them antibiotics, and use megagallons of water hosing them all down, and clip beaks and all the rest.

If you want your burger every day, then the animals have to be locked up like that. There's no other way. If you don't want them to be locked up and mistreated like that, reduce your meat consumption to about half a pound of meat a week.

It's not really got anything to do with PETA, or even sane groups like the RSPCA. It's just our big appetite for meat. If you want animals treated better, just eat less meat. If you don't give a fuck, munch away.

PETA seems to go for shocking, lowdown tactics, which usually fail to sway anyone. Their street theatre games, where people wear coats made of meat, or go naked or whatever, get news coverage as a loony sideshow, right after the story about people dressing as Klingons at the SF convention. I think it's more about expressing their outrage than actually trying to convince anyone.

I agree with Kyle that consumption of animal products is the main cause of cruelty to animals. If you have a strong stomach, try reading the books of John Robbins, "Diet for a New America", et al, to learn about this. PETA wants to rub our noses in it, to scare and sicken people away from meat. That works for about a day. Then it's, "Mmmm, steak!" Positive reinforcement, extolling the virtues of a vegetable based diet, have better success, IMHO. Vegan/ raw foodist David Wolfe says it over and over, "The diet paradigm, don't eat this, fear, shame, guilt, don't work. Tell a child 'no', what does the child say? 'Yes!' Tell an adult 'no', what does the adult say? 'Yes!'"

Horrible acts like this murder seem to attract crazies with an axe to grind, no pun intended. It first hit me in the aftermath of the murders at Columbine. The library was still locked down, for fear of explosive devices. The victims were still in there. Wing nuts were writing to my local paper how this was caused by getting rid of prayers or school uniforms in public schools. Seriously. It's like clockwork. Tragedy + loonies = more lunacy.

I sometimes believe these people were not smacked sufficiently as children.

Quote from: Leo Knight;233402I agree with Kyle that consumption of animal products is the main cause of cruelty to animals.

Excessive consumption of animal products.

Greater than your own bodyweight annually in meat consumed is definitely excessive, in terms of your long-term health, environmental impacts, and animal welfare. For your health, you don't need any meat, but well-run farms will be polycultures, the old-style mix with different crops and animals; some of those animals will be more than the land can handle, so that you have to kill them. And if you kill them, you may as well eat them.

Pure veganism works in health terms, but not in environmental terms, because animals must be part of a well-run farm; a farm without any animals must import fertility from elsewhere, which means either some other farm has animals (import manure), which is just getting someone else to do the dirty work for you; or else artificial fertiliser (made from natural gas) which is not sustainable since natural gas is finite and we face problems of climate change.

As usual, the maximum good in all three of health, environmental and animal welfare turns out to be the sensible middle ground - not no meat, but not heaps of meat. 0-24kg (0-53lbs) per person annually (0-1lbs weekly) in combination with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables and basic grains and legumes, is the best for that threesome.

Quote from: Leo KnightI sometimes believe these people were not smacked sufficiently as children.

Certainly. Neither the PETA loons, nor the "ME MAN MUST EAT STEAK EVERY DAY URGH MANLY MAN!" guys were beaten enough as children.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;233414...animals must be part of a well-run farm; a farm without any animals must import fertility from elsewhere...

Why would that be?

Quote from: Engine;233440Why would that be?

I grew up on a ranch (cattle, pigs, horses and fowl). You can trade fertilizer to vegetable farms in trade for fresh veggies. When (usually in the fall) cattle go to slaughter you can do likewise with meat for veggies. One model does not fit all.

Bill

Quote from: Engine;233440Why would that be?

A farm is most sustainable when it most closely resembles natural processes. In nature we do not find that there are only animals (like in a concreted confined animal feedlot) or only plants (like in a wheat field). Rather, there's a mixture.

Essentially, growing things removes fertility from the soil. Animals consume the plant material growing, and turn it into manure; this returns the fertility to the soil, and helps it keep its structure.

You can import manure from someone else's livestock, and this is just as good for your soil as if the animals were on your own land. However, if your concern is animal welfare, and/or you're a vegan, all you're doing is getting someone else to harm or kill the animals.

You can import plant manure from someone else's land - compost - and this is also good for your soil. However, what happens to the fertility of their land? The fertility they export must be replaced from somewhere. So they will keep livestock, or use artificial fertilisers. Thus, your vegan organic farm can only exist because someone else's farm is not vegan or organic.

You can also look at the history of civilisations and countries. The regions which grew just a few crops and cut down their forests were once fertile, and are now deserts (such as the Tigris-Euphrates in Iraq, or the USA's southwest). The regions which grew several different crops and kept a variety of animals and kept their forests have had continuous agriculture for 4,000 or more years (such as southern China).

Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I should have been: when you say "fertility," what do you mean? Which nutrients can only be produced through manure, which cannot be as efficiently produced in another fashion?

I actually don't disagree with some of what Kyle is saying.  By and large, we do eat way too much meat in the US (not sure about other countries).

Beef prices are being driven up by ethanol production, and I made a comment a few weeks back at a lunch with friends that it was actually a good thing because people should eat less red meat (both for health reasons and environmental ones).  I got looks like I was insane.


That said, I disagree that a reduction in consumption is the only way to improve things.  We can regulate the auto industry to make more efficient cars without people first needing to stop driving as much.  We have historically made safer factory working conditions without the demand for manufactured goods decreasing first.  We can regulate coal mining more without necessarily reducing energy consumption first.

Granted, regulations drive up prices, which will end up reducing demand.  I'm just saying we can regulate certain things without waiting for demand to decrease first.

Quote from: Engine;233459Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I should have been: when you say "fertility," what do you mean? Which nutrients can only be produced through manure, which cannot be as efficiently produced in another fashion?

I know you aren't talking to me but I need to point out an aspect of ranching. You can have a narrow view of the situation, as in having everything on one plot of land, and this works but not well (the problem having to do with skill sets, time requirements and work loads). Or, just maybe, take a broader view and allow for trade and exchange of goods. If you are vegan, you likely will not be dealing with ranchers on favorable terms regardless. However, in the the UP and northern WI, farmers and ranchers often trade goods produced between farms. It is an ecosystem of sorts.

Bill

Edit to add: Also, artificial fertilizer production and use can be environmentally unhealthy.

Okay, remember that you asked for it

Quote from: Engine;233459Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I should have been: when you say "fertility," what do you mean? Which nutrients can only be produced through manure, which cannot be as efficiently produced in another fashion?

None; but animal manure does it most efficiently.

You may know of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring where she observed that as you go up the food chain certain substances become concentrated. So if in the water there is 1ppm some deadly substance, it may be 5ppm in the algae in the water, 10ppm in the fish eating the algae, and 100ppm in the birds eating the fish. It's the same with non-poisonous things.

In basic agriculture, grains and vegetables remove nitrogen from the soil, and legumes (beans and nuts) add it to the soil. Animals remove nitrogen from the soil by eating plants, they concentrate the nitrogen in their bodies (to make proteins) and piss and shit out the excess. So if you grow wheat in summer and then wheat in winter, too, you'll lose nitrogen from the soil. You can replace it by artificial fertilisers, by growing legumes, or by letting livestock eat the leavings in the field and drop their manure on it.

In the West fossil fuels are cheap, so we use artificial fertilisers to add nitrogen, while animals are confined in feedlots and their manure is washed away into the water system.

There are also other important elements like phosphorus (concentrated by birds and excreted in their shit) and potassium (potash, can be got from ash).

If you don't want to involve livestock at all, then you can just have crop rotation: grains followed by legumes. There are two difficulties with this.

The first is that this isn't possible everywhere in the world, and typically people don't want to eat as much legumes as they do grains. So the general practice is to grow mostly grains, let the land be depleted of nitrogen, and then either abandon the land (slash and burn agriculture) or add nitrogen to it from artificial fertiliser or animal manure.

The second is that growing legumes takes a season, and the material rotting down into the soil takes another season, so that from planting the legume seeds to having the field ready for other crops again is 3-6 months; or you can do it in a couple of weeks by passing the material through the guts of an animal.

Manure also improves soil structure. Soils are of three basic types, from left to right below: sandy, loamy, and clay. Clay and sand are just what they sound like, while loam is a mixture of the two with a lot of rotted plant and animal matter in it. It's that dark, light and crumbly stuff they always show on tv shows about gardening.



Sand is nice and loose so the plant's roots can get into it, but it can't hold nutrients or water; if you added artificial fertiliser to it, most would drain away past the sand. Clay soils have a lot of water and nutrients held up in them, but it's hard to get them out, since clay clumps together. Adding a mixture of plant and animal manure to either clay or sandy soils makes them more loamy. Some plants such as potatoes prefer clay soil, some such as date palms prefer sandy soil, but almost anything will grow in loamy soil. So that having animal manure added to your soil improves its structure, makes it better able to hold onto moisture without getting drowned in it, and better able to hold onto nutrients.

Some but not all animals also improve the structure by basically ploughing your land for you. In the wild pigs tear up the soil looking for roots, tubers and bugs, so that letting them into a field after you've had beans or root vegetables, they'll clean it up, turning those things into manure and ploughing it into the ground for you. Chickens naturally scratch at the ground looking for seeds, they'll scratch their own phosphorus-heavy manure into it, too.

In the last place I lived in, we had a small backyard which was a patch of muddy weeds. The soil was clay, very thick - I couldn't get my spade more than a couple of inches into it. After rain you'd get your boots stuck in it, because water just wouldn't drain through it. I shovelled the soil into piles for raised bed gardens, put paving stones over the lower areas, and wooden supports around the raised parts.

The soil being clay had a lot of fertility, but it couldn't get out, so I had to improve the structure. As it was only about 100 sq ft and I was renting, I couldn't keep any animals. So I had to import materials. I simply kept kitchen scraps - potato peelings, any food which was uneaten or went bad - and put them in a pile alternating with grass clippings. This broke down into compost, and I added that to the soil.

I could have imported animal manure, but since I was producing kitchen scraps anyway, I didn't see the point. If I didn't use them in the garden they'd only go to rot in landfill.

Within a couple of years the clay had turned into loam, and was very productive. But to do that, I had to import fertility - or more specifically, organic material to give structure. And the stuff I imported had itself been fertilised by fossil fuels or animals.

So that you can have an individual farm, small or large, which itself has no animals and uses no artificial fertilisers. But at some point either the place will wither away, or you will have to import animal and plant materials and manure from some other farm.

You will find that not many members of PETA have ever had to grow all their own food. I am sympathetic to the idea of not killing animals; but you cannot really get away with not using animals in agriculture. Or rather, you can, but only so long as we have plenty of cheap fossil fuels. After that you either use animals or starve.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;233484If you don't want to involve livestock at all, then you can just have crop rotation: grains followed by legumes.

This is my point. I favor limited usage of animals, mostly just because I like having them about, but they're by no means essential to the running of a self-sufficient farm [or community].

Still, I personally favor having sheep about, because they're cute and you don't have to kill them to get money out of them; they serve both as an exchange for goods which cannot be produced on the farm [say, cars, which I still find marginally useful], and as something pretty wandering about pooping on the ground. Sheep manure's got lots of K and P, but not so much N that it makes the fallow field look awful. Ultimately, it's a lot like horse shit, depending on what you feed 'em, but with maybe 50 percent more K. And it doesn't smell quite as powerfully.

Can't ride 'em, though.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;233484...typically people don't want to eat as much legumes as they do grains.

Without disagreeing, let me say this: fuck them. Fuck them hard. Too much emphasis is placed on "want" in the first world. Our utter lack of sustainability is a direct result of the immense piles of "wanna" that we've accumulated through our success.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;233484The second is that growing legumes takes a season, and the material rotting down into the soil takes another season, so that from planting the legume seeds to having the field ready for other crops again is 3-6 months...

If you're not trying to feed a billion mouths, three-crop rotation works fine, and gives you a ready pasture for your sheepsies. Or Alpacas, if you're trendy. But of course, the industrial revolution - and three- and four-crop rotations - made feeding billions of mouths possible, and thus here we are, shoving nutrients into the soil so we can feed more people. Sustainability just wasn't something we'd thought of, and it may now be well too late. Unless walkerp and I get in charge, and "do something" about the "human problem."

Anyway, I just wasn't certain if you were aware that livestock aren't necessary to the process, but as it turns out, I think we both know a lot more on the subject than the other was aware. Thanks, Kyle!