I’m a serious meat eater. I like my steaks rare, and I like the taste of blood.
But, at 30, I’m seriously thinking of going vegetarian. Gosh, I don’t even know if I spelled it right. It’s strictly for health reasons. If there is a substitute, I want to learn about it.
Lately, my desire for meat has diminished. I believe my body knows what it wants, and I eat accordingly.
I have very high blood pressure, and continuously eating sausage doesn’t help…
There’s always another beer.
BEER: If you have high Chol., yes, you should cut back on meat, and dairy, and “tropical oils”. If your one of those people who can’t do things in moderation, they switching to a vegan diet might be a good health choice for you. See your Dr… Remember, tho, that things like macadamia nuts are verboten also.
Umm, if you are overweight, maybe you should cut back on the beer, too. Try wine, in mod, it’s better for you.
I’m maybe 5-15 lbs. overweight, depending on which chart I look at. I’m 5’9" and 175 lbs. I wouldn’t want to lose 15 pounds though, then I’d be too small, and possibly wimpy.
As for wine, I honestly tried to like it. It is good with some foods, though. I just can’t imagine sitting at the bar with rough and tough bikers while drinking white wine…
I don’t worry too much about red meat anymore. I don’t have the urge to eat it as I used to. I suppose my body knows best. Then again, I should see a doctor.
Some of that fake meat tastes horrible at first, but I think if I can just get used to the taste, it might not be so bad.
There’s always another beer.
I don’t know how qualified I am to answer the OP, because while I am vegan, I do it almost completely to avoid the downright yucky effects of animal farming on the environment. Animal exploitation is a factor in my decision, but by far not the largest.
Like PLDennsion said earlier, there’s a whole lot of potential for serious inner conflict when one makes such a huge life change as veganism (or even vegetarianism). Does one continue to wear leather? Visit Zoos? Have a pet? Support potentially life saving reasearch even though it involves the deaths of large numbers of animals? Some of these are easier to answer than others.
The last has been the most difficult to answer for me. I heart science, as is evidenced my my devotion to Cecil and all he surveys. And I just can’t seem to get a straight answer from anybody on the issue of animal experimentation. PETA says that in no case have animals ever really been needed for any research ever. Sounds sorta dubious, IMHO. The other side seems equally biased. Since I haven’t had a chance to research the issue on my own, my jury’s still out on this one.
In many cases, the examples in the OP are just special cases of the above. There’s a big difference between the harm an animal would endure awaiting death in a slaughterhouse and any pain from leading a blind person around in exchange for room and board, and the benefit to a person who gets to eat a steak vs. the benefit to a blind person who is no longer homebound also needs to be taken into account. In a similar fashion, picking out a dog from the humane society is amazingly different from grabbing a puppy from the store in the mall who gets their animals from puppy mills.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that even vegans don’t have it all figured out. I’m wary of those who claim to. What’s really important to me and my vegan friends is that, on the issues that one does believe in, one supports ones opinions (hope I’m not sounding too pretentious here with all this ‘one’ business, but using ‘they’ all the time just bothers me). If someone has different (supportable) opinions, it doesn’t make her a hypocrite at all. For a lot of people, veganism or otherwise striving for a “cruelty free life” is a progression. It’s very hard to do it all at once, and taking this one step at a time is accepted in the vegan community.
Meaning–one can be a committed vegan without believing that any of the acts on the list in the OP are exploitation. On my way to trying to be the very bestest human I can be, I’ll keep taking more situations into account in my daily life. But, and this is among vegans, as I said, nobody expects me to be completely aligned with PETA or any other ‘authority’ all the time.
And to everybody going veggie for the first time…it’s probably best to avoid fake meat entirely. It’s not gonna taste like a steak, it’s never gonna taste like a steak. If you close your eyes and take a big bite of Tofurkey (tofu turkey, how clever), it ain’t gonna taste like thanksgiving. My advice is to get a veggie cookbook, and start cooking non-meat based things, that way you’ll have all these neato new tastes instead of thinking about how this soy crap doesn’t live up to the real thing.
Speaking to MandaJo on the subject of pets and other animals being over-specialized:
Yes, I agree, a lot of dog breeds look over-specialized, as though they couldn’t possibly survive in the wild, but bear in mind how quickly loose dogs will turn feral, even purebred AKC champions. AFAIK (yes, this is anecdotal) the only dogs I know that don’t survive well as feral dogs are the really small ones like chihuahuas. But even slightly larger dogs like the larger terriers, given half a chance, will be out there in the state forest roaming around, doin’ just fine, thank you. Even starting with purebred dogs, within a few dog generations they revert to a primal “dog” type, usually about 35-40 pounds, with a tail curled up over the back, the kind of village dog that in the Far East is called a “pi” or “pariah” dog.
Cats are even quicker to go feral. Look at the average “barn cats”, they’re hardly domesticated at all.
And as for other kinds of domestic animals, horse, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs will all turn feral immediately, given half the chance. The mustangs and the longhorn cattle of the American West, the feral goats of Australia, razorback hogs in Arkansas, I can’t think offhand where the feral sheep are, but it’s probably in the Mediterranean or Asia Minor someplace, anyway, they’ll all do it. So it’s really not a good argument, for people to say, “We’re responsible for them, they couldn’t survive without us.”
Let’s face it, humans keep pets around because we happen to like it, not out of some altruistic desire to keep noble but helpless animal species alive. (Don’t even get me started on the subject of zoos. :mad: ) And we keep domestic animals around because it’s easier to go out and catch a pig in the farmyard, than it is to spend all day traipsing around in the woods looking for a deer.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Notthemama:
I don’t have time for a full post, but I just wanted to say that dogs do not turn feral very well. A constant irritation for people that live in the country is people who do not have the balls to just have there dog put down or even send it to the pound, so they take t out into the country, usually along the interstate, and dump Fido. SOmeone on this board was posting the otherday about how when he was growing up these dogs were a major nusiance–they would worry cattle and horses, causing property damage, but when brought down they were inevitably skin-and-bones, diseased, misrable animals. Domestic dogs almost NEVER survive for more than a few misrable, pain-racked months in the wild. Hell, wolves don’t survive in the wild very well without a full pack—you expect a a dog too?
UW: the verdict is still out whether ranching is any worse than farming, re the environment. Try living in Bakersfield, CA, big cotton area. Cotton: ruins the soil, uses a huge amount of water, uses lots of insectacides, AND the only way to harvest it is to spray defoliant on the fields, which poisons the air (the air is almost unbreathable for 2 weeks in the fall, I used a mask & stayed inside as much as I could)and the soil. I’d rather live next to a sheep ranch than a cotton farm.
Not that there aren’t some nasty things ranching does to the environment, also, especially on those “factory ranches”.
MandaJo: Yeah, you’re right. I realized after I posted that I should have made it more clear that I was talking about domestic animals and pets in the long term, like a thousand years. If the Chinese dropped some kind of germ warfare bomb on the U.S., killing all the humans but leaving the animals, individual dogs might not survive, but “dogs” as a race would turn feral very easily, I think. You might come back in a thousand years and find canines that weren’t exactly wolves and weren’t exactly coyotes occupying an ecological niche somewhere.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen