I’ll take option 1. My chances of getting a fatal or serious disease from a cow are much less than getting a fatal serious disease from somebody walking down the street.
I still walk down the street.
I also drive, fly in airplanes, walk outside without sunblock, jog in hot weather, or when it’s cloudy (lightning,) eat raw oysters, etc.
Everyday I confront thousands of minutely small chances for disaster. I don’t let it change my life.
Ah,pld, you are a sensitive soul, as you have amply demonstated in this thread. 
For what it’s worth I apologize for any intemperate remarks. I do have sympathy for some of your arguments and agree that at the very least we should do our utmost to make the lives of the animals we eat reasonably comfortable and to eliminate cruelty in the process to the greatest possible extent.
By the way, do you eat fish?
I think your answer is fair enough Scylla - with one important caveat. In your opinion the dangers are acceptable. And that’s fine. Goes for me too, as it happens. But for others, the dangers are not acceptable. And that’s fine too, since they can live perfectly healthily (if not more so) by being vegetarian. And so we have at least one* entirely sensible reason for being a veggie that has no call to be ridiculed and lambasted in the manner of your OP.
Do you agree?
pan
*to go with at least one other entirely sensible reason, which has been expounded by Phil.
spoke, I did eat fish for a while, but I don’t now. I was never a huge seafood fan anyway–with the exception of the occasional tuna steak or Lake Erie perch. I pretty much stayed away from your shellfish and molluscs altogether. I gave it up more out of deference to my wife than to any strong feelings on my part.
kabbes:
Sorry, but I don’t agree. Not trying to be contrary, but the fear of contracting a disease from eating meat really isn’t a reasonable objection in my view.
Somebody may spend their days inside for fear of getting hit by meteors. It is a risk. It is a personal choice, however it’s not a reasonable one.
Getting sick from meat consumption is not a risk that a reasonable person would consider in making the decision, because it is so minute.
Down that path lies your Howard Hughes and Unibomber types living like hermits, and striving for sterility.
If you are looking for a reason you’ll see that goboy made some good points earlier about general health, and heart disease. Those seemed like sound reasons.
But, one shouldn’t decide on vegetarianism first, and then look for reasons. Hopefully it would be the other way around.
Upon reflection, I want to take back what I said to Milo above about “judge not lest ye be judged,” etc. I recently took Ben to task for that same kind of thing, and if I’m going to be honest and practice what I preach, I can’t be pulling that. It isn’t my place to judge whether Christians behave in a manner that pleases God. So, Milo, please accept my apology for that and other Christianity-related comments. They’re irrelevant and gratuitous. I stand by the rest of my statements, however.
Really Scylla? And do you have any statistics to back that up? You seem to be claiming that the chances of contracting a disease from unorganic rearing processes are analogous to the chance of being hit by a magical watermelon from space! As someone who evaluates risks for a living, I’m keen to know how you came to this conclusion.
As far as I know, nobody even knows what the dangers are of the crap we pump our meat with. So why should you think stupid a vegetarian who decides not to mess with the whole area?
pan
In the Pit?!? Are you mad?!?
I wasn’t asking him to post them SPOOFE 
I’m just pointing out that without hard data (which is something the medical community and government scientists would be very interested in), he can’t just make sweeping statements about probabilities, comparing things to space melons, and expect to get away with it. I just want him to admit that to himself - he needn’t to it to me.
(Mmmm… space melons…)
pan
Kabbes:
Well, it seems to me you would evaluate the risk of disease from consumption of beef injected with supplements at 0.0 until and unless you had some kind of persuasive scientific evidence to do otherwise. I mean you do now that they just don’t shoot up beef with any old thing and slaughter them. There are strict controls in the U.S. What you can and can’t supplement a cow with, and how long you must wait afterwards before slaughtering them so that it leaches out of the system.
Before you could even begin to suggest that there is a risk here, you would need to provide proof that these drugs are retained in significant quantities within the meat after slaughter, and that they have a deleterious effect on human health.
Barring that kind of evidence, one could only evaluate the risk at 0.0.
You of course, should know this. I have know idea you are so hung up on this. You throw the words “injections, growth hormones, and drug cocktail” around as if they should mean something. They don’t.
In evaluating the other risks of eating meat i.e. contracting a disease, the primary risk is of food popisoning due to spoilage (rarely the slaughterer or raiser’s fault) or fecal contamination. This latter is very rare in beef and simply inexcusable when it occurs, because it’s rather simple to prevent.
SInce the food poisoning is not innate to beef, I don’t considerate a specific risk of beef. It’s more a risk of final preparation.
That leaves us with disease. I don’t beleive that there are many diseases contagious to humans, of which cows are carriers in their meat. Cooking would ameliorate most of those risks. Again, final preparation.
So, that leaves us with the mad cow disease panic, and one or two other things like African sleeping sickness, and a blood disorder transmitted by biting flies.
The latter two are unknown outside of Africa.
How many confirmed cases of mad cow disease in humans are there? Why don’t you check?
You’d be better off worrying about space melons.
Hey if you want to opt out of the whole thing based on fear, that’s fine with me. I used to hide under the covers as a little kid because of monsters. Now however, I know better. So should you. The fear is irrational. The risk if any is miniscule.
From the WHO factsheet on CJD:
And there’s lots more on a similar vein.
How many CJD cases?
A few more than have been hit by space melons.
Is it conclusive proof of a link? No. Is it a disasterous epidemic? Probably not, though we won’t actually know for a few more decades yet, due to the incubation periods. Are vegetarians stupid for acknowledging the risk and choosing to circumvent the whole thing? Emphatically not.
pan
PLD -
**
Umm … thanks?
You’re an asshole, a prick, and a shithead – but I take back what I said about you being a low-life.
**
My, aren’t we presumptive? I don’t believe I’ve ever commented on another person’s vegetarianism in my life, outside of this thread.
I’m not “irrationally offended” by vegetarianism; I’m offended by people who have misguided beliefs about the net effect of their vegetarianism, and who use those beliefs to take on an air that there’s is a more moral lifestyle than that of a meat consumer.
Any vegetarians here that don’t fit that bill? Move along, then. I’m not talking about you.
**
So, you don’t eat meat to make yourself feel better, and to perhaps stop the suffering of some cow or pig, somewhere. You don’t feel a meat-eater is making an immoral or unsophisticated choice by choosing to continue to eat meat? Then I don’t understand what you are taking from my comments that causes you to focus on me. I think it’s somebody else in this thread who called your choice flaky.
**
Hear, hear, -spoke.
So 100 people in the whole UK got sick probably from eating contaminated meat.
What’s the population of the UK these days?
We’re talking an astronomically small chance. Again, you have a much higher chance of contracting a serious disease walking down the street.
It probably doesn’t even make the top 1000 leading causes of death in the UK
Granting for a second (though it’s almost surely untrue,) that there is a significant unknown health risk to eating beef in the UK, I don’t have the slightest idea how you take that fact and turn it into a justification for Vegetarianism. At best you could suggest that not eating beef might be a prudent step.
How many people get sick and die in the UK from eating bad vegetable products? Insecticides, tapeworms, fecal contamination, parasites. You get all these from fruits and vegetables.
How does mad cow disease affect the consumption of chickens, fish, et al? It doesn’t?
You simply can’t say that someone who becomes vegetarian due to mad cow disease is making an informed or even remotely reasonable choice.
Now beef is consumed worldwide. Divide 5.5 billion by 100. These are your approximate chances of contracting mad cow disease from eating beef.
OOOOOhhhhhhh. Scary.
I noticed you completely dropped your “growth hormone cocktail bit” for the time being. I trust we won’t hear about that again until you are prepared to back it up.
Come on Kabbes. This is just getting stupid. A vegetarian lifestyle is healthier from a fitness standpoint. Veggies aren’t as obese, and don’t suffer from heart disease at the same rate as their bloddthirsty brethren. It’s also cheaper. Those are goboy’s points. I conceded them.
Those would be rational and informed decisions.
Becoming a vegetarian because you’re afraid of some overblown mad cow growth hormone boogeyman is just stupid.
Scylla - I only have to show that there is one harmful disease that could result from modern farming practices to justify someone choosing vegetarianism on these grounds. I’m going with CJD since it’s such a current hot-button issue and sources are easy.
But you’re not making yourself look good - either you don’t realise or you haven’t accounted for the fact that CJD has an incubation period of several decades. It’s believed that it could be as much as 30 years. So, frankly, who knows how many of us have it? We could be sitting on the brink of an epidemic and we wouldn’t know it. There’s not even a reliable test.
But we do know that there were no cases in the UK prior to 1986. Now suddenly there’s 100. A strong link to BSE in cows has been found. BSE in cows is linked to feeding cows ground up bits of other cows. This practice has only been going on in the last few decades. Ah.
How widespread the problem is going to be and how much you’re going to let that affect you is pretty much a personal judgement call. But it’s a hell of a lot more sensible than space melons.
And when you’ve been let down once by the meat industry, you’re less likely to trust them again. What effect will cows eating chicken shit have on them and hence us? Who knows! We’ll just have to wait and see. Yum yum.
As for the growth hormones business, maybe I’ve been addressing this wrong:
You have to bear in mind people like the kabbess. She treats her body as the proverbial temple. She makes sure she drinks 5 pints of water a day. She makes sure she gets 5 servings of fresh fruit and veg a day. She tries not to take any medicines unless she really has to. She only takes such health supplements as are strictly necessary, and then only in chelated form, since pills can cause stress on the liver. She steams her vegetables. She only uses olive oil. She never eats packet or tinned food, unless it’s things like tinned chick peas that have been freshly stored. Avoids monosodium glutamate. Definitely avoids e numbers. Basically, she just doesn’t like to put any shit in her body.
Now why the fuck would she want to put meat stuffed with growth hormones in there? It runs contrary to her whole eating philosophy.
That’s why some vegetarians won’t eat meat due to the crap they put in the animal. It’s not “flaky” - it’s consistant with their entire eating habit. If it were entirely organic meat, then maybe it would be a different argument. But it’s a lot simpler for them to simply sidestep the whole issue and not eat meat at all.
Note that this is not the same argument as “vegetarianism is more healthy”. It’s not the meat so much as the second order chemicals you are ingesting due to eating the meat.
pan
Kabbes:
Using your logic, let’s examine another disease.
Alcoholism, as you know is cause by the consumption of certain plant products.
Compared to MCD, the statistical risk of becoming an alcoholic is huge.
Strict carnivores who consume absolutely no products derived from plants cannot become alcoholics.
based on this huge risk, people who decide to become carnivores to avoid the perils of alcoholism are making an informed personal choice, rather than say, a stupid one.
They are certainly avoiding a larger risk than MCD, no?
Scylla - did that make any sense at all? Is alcoholism a disease that one catches? How on earth you even begin to make an analogy between alcoholism and CJD is entirely beyond me.
The risks of getting CJD from beef are probably small - we don’t actually know at this stage. But 15 years ago nobody had even heard of CJD and people such as yourself would have been denying that there could ever be a problem in feeding cattle ground up bits of other cattle.
How you can have the arrogance to say that vegetarians are stupid for not choosing to play Russian roulette with their health when there is no compelling reason to eat meat anyway is so far beyond me that it’s probably closer to you.
And now it’s my turn to notice that you’ve decided to ignore the bit about shit injected into cattle. Tell me - is my girlfriend a “flake” for taking care of what she puts into her body? Or should she abandon the rest of her eating principles jst because Scylla tells her that she is stupid to have that as a reason for not eating meat?
pan
kabbes wrote (quoting her authority):
So unless you dine on cow brains, you’re OK?
Am I really jumping into this on page 6??
I guess so. Since many of the things I found outrageous in the OP have already been recanted or clarified, I’ll just hit on something fresh.
scylla, you seem to be leaving out two very important parts of any risk analysis: cost of avoidance and cost of incidence. Basically, you say “eating meat has only a small associated risk for disease, therefore any action taken to avboid that risk is silly”. That is incorrect. The question of risk can never be assessed in a vaccuum. Let’s use your space melon example. A few hypothetical boundaries.
Chance of melon impact: 1:100,000,000,000,000
Negative consequence of impact: smelly melon stains on hair and clothes.
Cost of avoidance: $86 Billion for SMDI research and implementation. Until SMDI is complete, all citizens are urged to dig bomb shelters and huddle inside.
reasonable: No. Feel free to taough at your huddled neighbor.
Chance of melon impact: 1:100,000,000,000,000
Negative consequence of impact: Lingering death from extraterrestrial melonomas
Cost of avoidance: Don’t wear wide ties with 2-button suit jackets. Space melons only hit people who make that sartorial choice.
*Reasonable:[/]i Yeah. To be safe, I avoid suit jackets and ties altogether.
Now, for you (and me – a bloody prime rib is heaven! Heaven I say!!) theh cost of avoiding meat outweighs the risk factor. But I don’t see that the equation is so far out of balance that someone might have the scales tip toward avoidance. I know several people who simply don’t care for the taste of beef (I pity them, but try not to show it). Giving up something you don’t value to minimize even a slight risk is not an unreasonable sacrifice.
I still walk down the street, but if a streetwalker offers me a freebie if I take her anally without protection[sup]1[/sup], I say no. The risk that I would catch aids is minute. It is nevertheless reasonable for me to demur, since the “sacrifice” is minute and the potential impact is sever.
[sup]1[/sup] [sub]Ignoring, for the purposes of this hypothetical only, the fact that my risk factor would aproach infinity as soon as Mrs Mundi found out.[/sub]
spoke - that may indeed be the case. Although in a slaughterhouse it’s easy for non-CNS meat to come into contact with material that has itself been in contact with the CNS. This would be just as bad.
pan
Kabbes:
Yeah, I think your friend’s being stupid. Seeing as you have still not made any reasonable link between beef supplements and human risk, it’s hard to figure out why you seek to avoid it.
But, let’s assume for a moment that these are bad and evil chemicals that you don’t want to consume, yet are somehow beneficial to the raising of cattle. What evidence do you have that any of these growth hormones, chemicals, or antibiotics remain in the meat?
They leach out quickly, you know, and you are recquired to wait between the giving of supplements and the slaughter. They determine the time scientifically as well to avoid passing on these substances to the consumer of the meat, just to be safe.
So, assuming that this stuff is somehow bad for you, you’re really not consuming any of it anyway.
Your precious temple remains pure.
We in the western world eat a lot of imported fruit and vegetables that are raised under far less stringent standards than cattle. And, as you know, plants are fertilized with manure and rendered animals, so there might even be a risk of contracting MCD from improperly cleaned plants. In fact prions are poorly understand, they may be in the plants themselves. Right now they think the cause was feeding cows cow meat, but they could have gotten it from plants in contaminated ground. Prions can stick around a long time.
If you are not eating organically grown veggies, you are facing the exact same risk.
Besides, I also think it’s stupid to treat your body like a temple. Who wants to live in a temple?
I treat my body like a well-used and maintained truck. I give it all prudent care and maintenace without being insane about it. I use it and enjoy it.
And yes, Kabbes, Alcoholism is a disease. You contract it by consuming alcoholic beverages and becoming chemically dependant.
In fact, all chemical addictions come from plant products. Still another reason to steer clear of those plants.