Breaking it down: climate change is bad and we should treat the poor better.
Can’t argue with that.
So stop eating meat.
Huh?
Climate change:
[ul]
[li]18% of climate change is attributable to animal agriculture…which is about 40% than all planes, trains, trucks and cars combined.[/li][li]meat creates 52 grams of greenhouse gasses per calorie, 25 times more than legumes[/li][/ul]
Therefore less meat eaten, less greenhouse gasses, less impact on climate.
The poor:
[ul]
[li]animals must be fed nine calories in feed grains for each calorie the animal turns into meat[/li][/ul]
Therefore stop feeding food to animals and instead feed the poor.
Of course I don’t hold the Pope as an authority on, well, anything really. But does he have a point here? Assuming the facts check out, this seems a persuasive argument to be vegetarian, or at least severely restrict the amount of meat in my diet.
The Pope didn’t say that. That guy on the opinion page did and he is loudly crowing that he’ll be watching to see if Francis eats any meat, because presumably if so it’ll prove that the Pope is a hypocrite on the issue of climate change. All according to this one guy in his not very humble opinion.
But are these calories really supplied in a way that would be readily usable to humans? I mean, grazing fram animals basically convert non-accessible calories to accessible ones, as far as humans are concerned; additionally, not all land is arable, but much may still be suitable to farm cattle on. So in this way, cattle could be a means to convert inaccessible sources of nutrition to accessible ones.
This is not something I know the numbers on, by the way, so I’d be glad to hear from somebody better versed in this sort of thing.
In 3rd world countries, meat is grown on terrain that won’t support anything else (even hemp, the wonder-crop). If they don’t grow meat, the poor grow nothing, have nothing, and starve. Probably not what he’s going for, here.
There is already plenty of food. The problem is that some people produce nothing of value for anybody, not even themselves, and so cannot buy it. Producing more food is not going to change that.
I’m still of the opinion that animals fart. If you get rid of cows, some other animal will eat the grass and fart. CO2 and methane production isn’t an artifact of human agriculture, it’s an artifact of life.
Even leaving aside the environmental implications of an omnivorous diet, I submit it is impossible to make a moral case for eating meat*
While there may be some people who need to eat meat for health reasons, they are very few in number. For everyone else, the existence of millions of healthy vegetarians proves that we don’t need to eat meat and inflict suffering on animals to sustain ourselves.
[sub]*And no, “Fuck off. I like eating meat.” isn’t a moral case.[/sub]
Yep. I’ve lived in “developing” countries (god I hate that term, just say “poor”), among the most “developing” of people. They usually had pigs rooting around the yard and chickens running around the house. The chickens ate trash and bugs and the pigs ate trash and…trash. (Literally: anything they could find laying around and anything the family threw out.)
Any nutritional or economic value those animals represented to the family in the end was pure manna from heaven and otherwise irreplaceable and unrecoverable, until we spend the money to provide poor peasants with sophisticated composting systems and the kmow-how to use them.
It would depend on the axioms of your morality, no? Surely you’re not suggesting that there is only one, objectively true morality, are you? Or that any morality that justifies eating meat is objectively false. For instance, what if I eat only road kill? Or only wild meat that I hunt?
Why not? Where is your evidence that such a case is not moral? Do you have the word of a God that allows you to resolve a moral issue with such certainty?
It would be a strange moral code which didn’t have “minimise harm” as a founding principle. We can easily go some way toward minimising harm by not eating animals.
I don’t think there exists a single, definitive moral code that’s applicable to every conceivable situation. However, I do believe that the primary goal of any moral code should be to minimise harm. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Okay, fair point. I hadn’t thought about eating only roadkill. I can’t see that there’s anything immoral about that. You haven’t actually caused any harm by doing that. Similarly, there’s no harm in eating animals who die of old age. I’ll modify my original claim: Instead of saying it’s immoral to eat meat, my new position is that it’s immoral to kill animals for food. That would include hunting (obviously), but I do think that hunting animals in the wild is a far better (ie. more moral) way to get meat than buying it from the supermarket, because animals hunted in the wild suffer much less than animals raised on industrial farms.
Animals are capable of suffering. A moral person should, ideally, try to avoid directly causing suffering whenever possible. Since it is perfectly possible to live a healthy life without eating meat, a moral person should refrain from eating meat whenever possible. Of course, as John Mace pointed out, there are some instances where it is possible to eat meat without causing animals any harm, like eating roadkill, for instance. As far as I can see, there’s nothing immoral about that.
Hunting, in many cases, reduces animal suffering. It reduces starvation in herds that have grown too large for the available forage, and death by gunfire is less odious than many forms of natural death.
It’s an interesting question, since of course wild animals suffer terribly most of their lives. They are plagued from without and within by parasites, riddled with disease, suffer from appalling wounds and most often die horribly. Either ripped apart by predators or succumbing to disease or injury-mediated starvation if an old macro-predator themselves.
Is getting shot in the head worse than dieing slowly of sarcoptic mange? Serious ( if probably unanswerable ) question by the way - I’m not trying to bait anybody. But the fact is that most animals do not have idyllic existences.
Not just in the third world. Sheep and goats are a great way to get something out of fertile mountain slopes or otherwise broken/rolling country (e.g. the Alps, northern Scotland…) while pigs turn low density forests and unpalatable food (rotten stuff, acorns…) into meat.
Our ancestors did not turn to grazing animals because they were so rich they could waste land willy nilly and bacon is awesome, they did so because it was just one more way to profit from every inch of what land they could defend.
[QUOTE=harmonicamoon]
It is because he is a fisherman. And is trying to help the union.
[/QUOTE]
Well , he won’t have to wait long:
Pope Francis eats meat every single day, his first food of the day. And says “Hoc est enim corpus meum” (“For this is my body”) as he eats it.
Unless this journalist as some heathen who doesn’t believe in Transubstantiation.
