Killing animals for food

[Seanette]

I fail to see any reasonable ethical objection to humans participating in the food chain by eating meat. Sure, it’s better if it’s killed humanely, but let’s face it, nature isn’t fluffy Disney happy niceness. Animal predators don’t worry about being kind to their prey, they just catch it and chow down.

[standingwave]

@running_coach

Better than eating them alive.

If we aren’t supposed to eat animals, why are they made out of meat?

[Trinopus]

@Isamu

I’m a vegetarian because I hate vegetables and want them all to die. Is that morally wrong?

Do you kill them in an unnecessarily cruel fashion? That should probably be discouraged.

[nearwildheaven]

@Trinopus

Do you kill them in an unnecessarily cruel fashion? That should probably be discouraged.

I’ve eaten fruits and vegetables alive. :eek:

I cannot find any “Day In The Life Of A Food” episodes online, but these vignettes were a staple of late-night weekend programming, on “Night Flight” and other programs. In short, they would chop vegetables and you’d hear all these screams, and the skits were hilarious.

The human body is designed for eating and digesting meat, and we also know how to raise and butcher it humanely, and in addition know if an animal is diseased and we shouldn’t eat it.

I live by a creek, and the cute baby ducks have a way of disappearing. One of my neighbors has said that they’ve seen hawks carrying them off, and I do know that whenever one flies overhead, they run to the creek, stand up on their flippers, and flap their wings to make themselves look bigger.

[Riemann]

In all seriousness, while I have no problem with the concept of eating meat, I feel that we should pay far more attention to the treatment of animals. And I’d go so far as to say that an ethical precondition for eating meat should be a willingness to appreciate what’s actually involved - that children should be exposed to the process of raising and slaughtering food animals as part of their education. And if under current conditions little Johnny would be traumatized by a slaughterhouse, then we should work both to improve the conditions for the animals and expand the education of little Johnny about the reality of what’s in in his burger to a point that none of the process is so utterly shocking and inhumane that it needs to be hidden away.

[Crazyhorse]

@Leaffan

I have no moral issues with eating animals. The fact is that humans are omnivores and always have been. Just because we are intelligent enough to know that we’re eating other creatures doesn’t mean we should abandon the process.

We need protein, and yes, it is available by other means. Most animals eat other animals. We are just animals ourselves and pretty close to the top of the food chain.

@cochrane

I don’t have a problem with killing animals for food. Early man used to hunt animals for meat. When man invented agriculture and began keeping herds of animals, it just became easier. Humans do need protein for survival, and meat is just the best source of it.

@snfaulkner

Animals are routinely killed for food in nature. And have been long before there were humans. It’s the circle of fucking life. What’s the problem? It tastes good because you are a carnivore and evolved to eat meat. What crazy blog are you reading this time?

@Seanette

I fail to see any reasonable ethical objection to humans participating in the food chain by eating meat. Sure, it’s better if it’s killed humanely, but let’s face it, nature isn’t fluffy Disney happy niceness. Animal predators don’t worry about being kind to their prey, they just catch it and chow down.

Unlike any other natural predators humans are the only ones who routinely take much more than we need. Arguments that it’s all part of the natural order of things aren’t relevant unless you live in a cave and kill bison with a pointed stick.

In order to support the greater than necessary portion of meat in the diets of many countries, raising livestock has become probably the single biggest environmental impact across the entire planet out of any human activity.

So alongside any moral arguments about the life of the animals or how they are treated, that alone is a pretty compelling argument against the overconsumption of meat that we enjoy.

To those arguing it’s just part of the natural order of things, like a lion taking a zebra, to the other moral question, that’s just a sad rationalization. I readily admit it is hypocritical, but I can intellectually know that an animal died in order to make my supermarket purchase possible and still acknowledge that isn’t the same thing at all as having to experience it myself to get the meat.

If I had to actually wrestle a screaming, panicked animal down and cut it’s throat and carve it up every time I wanted to eat meat, I know I would eat way less meat if any at all. I’d probably wind up with a bunch of rescued cows and pigs living in my yard.

[eschereal]

Cobalamin is an absolutely essential vitamin that can be produced industrially, but without industry, there is almost no way we can get it except by eating animals (or milk or eggs).

[Blake]

@Crazyhorse

If I had to actually wrestle a screaming, panicked animal down and cut it’s throat and carve it up every time I wanted to eat meat, I know I would eat way less meat if any at all.

And if you had to personally poison 5000 mice to get the same amount of protein from vegetable sources, would you then stop eating plants?

Or do mice dying slow deaths matter less than cattle dying quick deaths?

Or is it OK to kill animals to get your food, so long as it’s one step removed? You can ask a farmer to kill mice to produce food for you, but you can’t eat the mice she kills? Isn’t that both wasteful and cruel?

The fact is that people need to kill animals to eat. The only real question is whether you eat the animals that you have killed, or leave them to rot.

[Crazyhorse]

@Blake

And if you had to personally poison 5000 mice to get the same amount of protein from vegetable sources, would you then stop eating plants?

Or do mice dying slow deaths matter less than cattle dying quick deaths?

Straw man. It takes anywhere from 300 to 600 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of beef, depending on the practices in various parts of the world. We are already killing more mice to grow the crops to feed the cows if your correlation between agriculture and rodent death is accurate.

@Blake

Or is it OK to kill animals to get your food, so long as it’s one step removed? You can ask a farmer to kill mice to produce food for you, but you can’t eat the mice she kills? Isn’t that both wasteful and cruel?

You appear to have not fully comprehended my post. I said I readily admit it’s hypocritical to be able to consume meat when it is killed one step removed but not if I had to kill it myself. I think a lot of people are pretty much the same way.

I’m just saying being aware that an animal dies to provide a grocery store purchase doesn’t qualify someone to believe they are totally OK with it all morally based just on that knowledge.

If they had to do it themselves, and couldn’t, it is just a happy delusion/rationalization. The one step-removed part doesn’t actually absolve any questions of morality one may have about it, obviously, yet a large number of people including myself fail that simple test.

@Blake

The fact is that people need to kill animals to eat. The only real question is whether you eat the animals that you have killed, or leave them to rot.

I haven’t heard anyone ask that question but certainly I’m not in favor of leaving dead animals to rot. If you ever find yourself living in a cave hunting wild animals, always one kill away from starvation. you’re right. If you’re eating 10x more meat than you need and contributing the waste and pollution and whatever you believe about animals suffering in bad conditions, etc. but still arguing that all you’re doing is fulfilling your natural role in the food chain, you’re wrong.

[panache45]

@Riemann

My living human body contains around 3 times as many microorganisms as human cells, each a little independent life of its own, entirely dependent on me for its survival.

List of human microbiota - Wikipedia

So for me, it’s simple utilitarian ethics. If by eating a single cow I can sustain the life of 100 trillion bacteria, I would have to be some kind of genocidal monster to refuse to eat that cow (medium rare, preferably, green salad with balsamic dressing on the side; or some nice asparagus if it’s in season).

But you haven’t accounted for the trillions of microorganisms that no longer have the living cow that had sustained them.

[Blake]

@Crazyhorse

Straw man. It takes anywhere from 300 to 600 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of beef, depending on the practices in various parts of the world.

CITE!

This is utter and total, ignorant rubbish. Quite frankly I think we can discount your input simply based on this balderdash.

The idea that any feedlot in the world has a 600 feed conversion ratio is utter nonsense that only someone hopelessly ignorant of beef cattle husbandry could believe.

In actual fact, a 600kg beast will typically consume 1,500kg of grain, or about 2.5kg for every kilogram of kg of beef.

That’s actual science, and it’s not even within two orders of magnitude of your nonsense numbers.

Honestly why do people read PETA screeds and then try to pass the figures off on the Straight Dope without even trying to confirm them with actual scientific studies? :rolleyes:

Then, of course, you can show us how your evidence that free range beef uses* any grain at all*. Of course you can’t because this statement is ignorant bullshit. And if free range beef uses no grain, then why isn’t free range beef (1 animal killed humanely/200kg protein) better than eating plant foods (5, 000, 000 animals poisoned slowly/200kg protein)?

Your answer is actually totally unresponsive in addition to being fantasy.

At this stage I think we can probably all simply ignore what ou have to say as ignorant silliness, can’t we?

[Crazyhorse]

@Blake

CITE!

This is utter and total, ignorant rubbish. Quite frankly I think we can discount your input simply based on this balderdash.

The idea that any feedlot in the world has a 600 feed conversion ratio is utter nonsense that only someone hopelessly ignorant of beef cattle husbandry could believe.

In actual fact, a 600kg beast will typically consume 1,500kg of grain, or about 2.5kg for every kilogram of kg of beef.

That’s actual science, and it’s not even within two orders of magnitude of your nonsense numbers.

Honestly why do people read PETA screeds and then try to pass the figures off on the Straight Dope without even trying to confirm them with actual scientific studies? :rolleyes:

Then, of course, you can show us how your evidence that free range beef uses* any grain at all*. Of course you can’t because this statement is ignorant bullshit. And if free range beef uses no grain, then why isn’t free range beef (1 animal killed humanely/200kg protein) better than eating plant foods (5, 000, 000 animals poisoned slowly/200kg protein)?

Your answer is actually totally unresponsive in addition to being fantasy.

At this stage I think we can probably all simply ignore what ou have to say as ignorant silliness, can’t we?

I should have been more clear. It takes 300-600 kg of food to produce 1 kg of *protein *from beef. Here is one of about 50,000 non PETA or otherwise biased cites. Educate yourself. The environmental impact of livestock is far, far greater than that of agriculture. I’m not even sure how you might possibly be arguing otherwise.

Each year the livestock sector globally produces 586 million tons of milk, 124 million tons of poultry, 91 million tons of pork, 59 million tons of cattle and buffalo meat, and 11 million tons of meat from sheep and goats. That 285 million tons of meat altogether — or about 36 kg (80 lb.) per person, if it were all divided evenly. It’s not — Americans eat 122 kg (270 lb.) of meat a year on average, while Bangladeshis eat 1.8 kg (4 lb).
Of the 95 million tons of beef produced in the world in 2000, the vast majority came from cattle in Latin America, Europe and North America. All of sub-Saharan Africa — a region with nearly three times as many people as the entire U.S. — produced just 3 million tons of beef.
1.3 billion tons of grain are consumed by farm animals each year — and nearly all of it is fed to livestock, mostly pork and poultry, in the developed world and in China and Latin America. All of the livestock in sub-Saharan Africa eat just 50 million tons of grain a year, otherwise subsisting on grasses and on crop residue.
The poor feed quality in impoverished regions like sub-Saharan Africa means that a cow there may consume as much as 10 times more feed — mostly grasses — to produce a kilogram of protein than a cow raised in richer regions. That lack of efficiency also means that cattle in countries like Ethiopia and Somalia account for as much as 1,000 kg of carbon for every kg of protein they produce — in the form of methane from manure as well as from the reduced carbon absorption that results when forests are converted to pastureland. That’s 10 times higher than the amount of carbon released per kg of protein in many parts of the U.S. and Europe, where livestock production is much more intensive.
About that: in North America or Europe, a cow consumes about 75 kg to 300 kg of dry matter — grass or grain — to produce a kg of protein. In sub-Saharan Africa, a cow might need 500 kg to 2,000 kg of dry matter to produce a kg of protein, because of the poor feed quality in arid countries and because of the high mortality rates in herds of often undernourished and sick animals.
The highest total of livestock-related greenhouse-gas emissions comes from the developing world, which accounts for 75% of the global emissions from cattle and other ruminants and 56% of the global emissions from poultry and pigs.
The most climate-friendly meats comes from pigs and poultry, which account for only 10% of total livestock greenhouse-gas emissions while contributing more than three times as much meat globally as cattle. Pork and poultry are also more efficient for feed, requiring up to five times less feed to produce a kg of protein than a cow, a sheep or a goat.

[Riemann]

@panache45

But you haven’t accounted for the trillions of microorganisms that no longer have the living cow that had sustained them.

Well that throws off my utilitarian calculus. How many bacteria are there in a duck?

[Blake]

@Crazyhorse

I should have been more clear. It takes 300-600 kg of food to produce 1 kg of *protein *from beef.

More ignorant bullshit. Nowhere does your article make such a claim. The closest it comes is that a beast may need to consume 300kg of grass. But grass of course is not human food, nor is it a crop. A cow eating grass doesn’t kill other animals.

The ignorance that you spout in this topic is quoite wonderful. Please keep it up. Nothing highlights the total lack of any in depth research quite like it.

So would you care to answer my questions now?

Is it OK to kill thousands of mice to get your food, so long as it’s one step removed? You can ask a farmer to kill mice to produce food for you, but you can’t eat the mice she kills? Isn’t that both wasteful and cruel?

If free range beef uses no grain, then why isn’t free range beef (1 animal killed humanely/200kg protein) better than eating plant foods (5, 000, 000 animals poisoned slowly/200kg protein)?

If you can get 6 months worth or protein from humanely killing one grass fed cow, then isn’t that better than getting from eating a pulse crop that killed 10, 000 rats slowly?

Want to try answering this time, instead of spouting feed conversion numbers that are unbelievably silly to anyon with any understanding of agronomy?

[Crazyhorse]

@Blake

More ignorant bullshit. Nowhere does your article make such a claim. The closest it comes is that a beast may need to consume 300kg of grass. But grass of course is not human food, nor is it a crop. A cow eating grass doesn’t kill other animals.

The ignorance that you spout in this topic is quoite wonderful. Please keep it up. Nothing highlights the total lack of any in depth research quite like it.

So would you care to answer my questions now?

Is it OK to kill thousands of mice to get your food, so long as it’s one step removed? You can ask a farmer to kill mice to produce food for you, but you can’t eat the mice she kills? Isn’t that both wasteful and cruel?

If free range beef uses no grain, then why isn’t free range beef (1 animal killed humanely/200kg protein) better than eating plant foods (5, 000, 000 animals poisoned slowly/200kg protein)?

If you can get 6 months worth or protein from humanely killing one grass fed cow, then isn’t that better than getting from eating a pulse crop that killed 10, 000 rats slowly?

Want to try answering this time, instead of spouting feed conversion numbers that are unbelievably silly to anyon with any understanding of agronomy?

I’m not sure exactly what argument you’re trying to make here.

Did you see the 4 posts that I quoted in the post to which you are replying? They all said that the moral question for them is settled because predation is just part of nature. I replied to them that to me the question isn’t that simple

Humans, especially in North America and Europe, consume so much more meat than could be considered necessary nutritionally it has created an industry of livestock production that is contributing, perhaps more than any other single human activity, to our destruction of the environment.

Are you arguing that if the livestock production industry produced half of what it does now, and all other things being equal and accounting for an increase in agriculture to produce enough grains, fruits and vegetables to make up for the difference, it would not have a net positive result to the environment? Forget your cherry picked links and strawmen, address the real issue at hand.

You seem to be finding an almost irrelevant point in a larger post, and then trying to pick it apart until I get tired of it and declare some kind of victory in the larger argument.

The issue I’m debating is if over consumption of meat in much of the world is having a net negative impact on the environment all around the world. It is.

I don’t intend to argue how many kg of grain make 1 kg of beef anymore. The cite I gave and many others support exactly the spirit of what I said. You are trying to argue a small detail to the larger issue at hand. Whether its 50kg of cashews and 34kg of wild buffalo grass - its unnecessary food production. It isn’t feeding the masses of the world, it is feeding a small portion of the population of the planet while stinking up the environment for everyone (including your odd, non sequitur focus field mice.)

[Blake]

More non-responsive nonsense. More ignorant, provably untrue nonsense

I never mentioned the environment. I was responding to your statement that “If I had to actually wrestle a screaming, panicked animal down and cut it’s throat and carve it up every time I wanted to eat meat, I know I would eat way less meat if any at all.”

Nothing about the environment in there. Nothing at all,

Final chance Crazyhorse!

Are you able to answer my questions? Or are you just going to keep posting provably wrong statements and weaseling away?

They are simple questions. Last chance to answer before I (and most other Dopers I suspect) write you off.

[Crazyhorse]

@Blake

More non-responsive nonsense. More ignorant, provably untrue nonsense

I never mentioned the environment. I was responding to your statement that “If I had to actually wrestle a screaming, panicked animal down and cut it’s throat and carve it up every time I wanted to eat meat, I know I would eat way less meat if any at all.”

Nothing about the environment in there. Nothing at all,

You replied by saying it would mean the death of thousands of mice, and something indicating you didn’t understand the rest of my post.

OK can you tell me what exactly are you debating about my description of the way I would feel if I had to kill an animal for food?

@Blake

Final chance Crazyhorse!

Are you able to answer my questions? Or are you just going to keep posting provably wrong statements and weaseling away?

I am asking you the same thing.

@Blake

They are simple questions. Last chance to answer before I (and most other Dopers I suspect) write you off.

I wouldn’t pretend to speak for most other Dopers. I think they can speak for themselves if they so desire. In all honesty I doubt it is my argument that will be written off by most, at least those who comprehend it and consider the overall point.

[Blake]

@Crazyhorse

I don’t intend to argue how many kg of grain make 1 kg of beef anymore. The cite I gave and many others support exactly the spirit of what I said. You are trying to argue a small detail to the larger issue at hand. Whether its 50kg of cashews and 34kg of wild buffalo grass - its unnecessary food production. It isn’t feeding the masses of the world, it is feeding a small portion of the population of the planet while stinking up the environment for everyone (including your odd, non sequitur focus field mice.)

More provably wring ignorant nonsense.

1. Most of the world eats grazing animals not a small proportion.

2. It’s not unnecessary. People need protein to survive. If they can get that protein from directly, humanely killing one cow rather than poisoning 20, 000 rats to grow mung beans, how is it unnecessary?

3. Its not unnecessary because most cattle and sheep graze on land that won’t produce any other type of food. if we stopped eating grazing animals we’d need to stop farming 2/3 of the world’s agricultural land and make up the shortfall by clearing forests.

Seriously, you post so much provably erroneous silliness that i am now giving you your final chance. Answer the actual question as it relates to your actual post, or I’ll just give up an let others judge your level of knowledge and credibility on this subject.

It won’t be hard, given what you’ve written in your last 3 posts.

[Blake]

OK. He has refused to answer yet again. I don;t see any need to continue this. I think anyone who cares has fair idea of his level of knowledge on this subject as well as his ability engage. Long on emotive rhetoric, short on knowledge and argument.

Good luck convincing Dopers with ignorance and evasion, my friend. You’ll need it.

[Seanette]

I’m on your side of that dispute, granted, but given what time it is, I’d give someone longer than about three minutes before writing them off as non-responsive.