elelle:
I don’t think plants are conscious. I don’t think chickens are either.
Cosncioussness though is one way in which we measure something like the right to sanctity of life. Plants may have their own version of suffering. Certainly plants do react to traumatic stimuli. Who is to say they don’t suffer some strange analog of pain?
WHy is it valid to define a plan’t right to life or worth by criteria that don’t apply to plants?
Good question, Scylla, but what criteria are you ascribing to plants?
I can’t believe I’m the first one to catch this:
Because cows always look for the truck stop with the “clean restroom” sign, and like my wife, will wait 3 or 4 more exits to find one?
Worth. What any living thing has. By what animocentric criteria do we judge the chicken more noble than the oak?
Because I am a stupid, dirty, flaky, tree-hugging hippie, I would not like to cut down an oak tree either.
I already told you hippy girl that our love must be unrequited. Why do you torture yourself?
I do see the point of that, Scylla. In studying herbal medicine, I’ve found that many teachers I’ve had, in long established traditional methods: Cherokee, Tibetan, and Mayan, require that the gatherer approach the plant with respectful intent, and offer a prayer; it’s abhorrent to take from the plant without this predisposition. Well, is this flakiness? They are ascribing to plants the ability to discern intent from a human being, and that in asking, politely, and “listening” to the plant, suffering will be avoided. The same method is found in traditional herbalists around the globe. So, are they attuned to a plant consciousness?
What’s up Scylla? not getting laid enough so you have to take out your frustrations on the poor vegans? 
Actually you’re stereotyping a bit, just because you’ve met a few nut veggies doesn’t mean every kernal in the cornfield is fucked. I thought your op was kinda funny but I didn’t expect you to try and back it up so much.
Anyway I think I know what the problem is…
You eat too much red meat.
Which in turn is making you occasionally hostile and prickish!
But never fear! - ‘cause good ol’ Silo has a remedy for your distress!
You know, diet can affect your state of mind as much as your health.
So here’s my suggestion:
Th optimum diet for low levels of stress and peace of mind is roughly an 80:20 mix between acid producing foods (fruits, grains & vegetables) and alkaline producing foods (meat, sugar, processed foods).
So here, Scylla… have a salad… bond a little with the vegans… peace of mind is just around the corner.
Beats me, elelle. My guess would be that their beliefs probably are flaky. Plants probably don’t have anything like consciousness as we know it.
I do know though that if some plant were going to come walking up to me and hack a part of my body off, I wouldn’t care one wit whether it was respectful or not. I’d prefer to keep my body parts.
I think the atittude is right.
I think an ethical human being must recognize the value of the world he’s in and of all things in it. Conspicuous waste is always bad, and one must judge the consequences of their actions.
One who kills needlessly or wantonly risks not only the plants and animals suffering, but more importantly the degradation of themselves.
I just don’t judge all plants to be inferior to all animals. I think a dead life is a dead life, regardless. If you chop down a tree to get a toothpick you’ve done a bad thing, just as if you kill any living thing without need, or waste a nonliving thing as well.
When I collect firewood for the winter, I prop of dead trees so they’ll season or cut off dead limbs first. The year I hit a deer with my car, I didn’t bother hunting because I already had all the deer meat I could eat.
I try not to be wasteful, but I recognize my life causes suffering and death to other creatures. This is an unavoidable consequence, and, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Ultimately I will suffer and die, and become worm’s meat. The molecules of me have been other living things countless times in the past and will be again in the future.
What kind of fool hypocrite measures the value of death, or dares to measure the value of a life. We are unwilling participants in the passion play of nature. Life and death is inevitable and we’re a part of it.
The idea of not eating meat because you don’t want to participate in the suffering of animals is to me a cosmically stupid standpoint.
You are involved in life and death and suffering. Inextricably. By simple existance it is so.
It seems to me that the people who try not to participate are missing the whole friggin’ point of existence.
You are a participant in suffering and death. You can be a participant and grow from the experience and be a good compassionate person, or you can choose to ignore it’s fact, and substitute artificial and invalid standards to make yourself feel good. They’re just not real though.
They just aren’t.
Many people have a Victorian atittude towards death. It’s prudish and foolish.
It’s inevitable. So’s suffering.
So let’s say you’re a vegetarian. You’re hungry. All that’s available is a hamburger. It came from a steer that was slaughtered, and suffered some in the process and in it’s short life.
Let’s say your a moral objector to meat. so you don’t eat the burger and it gets thrown away. That part of the steer’s suffering represented by the burger has been wasted, and you’ve gone hungry.
I would say you’ve behaved foolishly and disrespectfully. Better you had stepped up to your natural part in the order of things and eaten the burger. The steer’s death and suffering brought you and others succor. It wasn’t all a bad thing.
But, if you waste it, you throw away the opportunity to make the most of that inevitable death, and something else must die to feed you.
Either you starve or you participate in the death of things of value, plant and animal.
Every motion of your life causes pain and death and suffering to beings. It is foolish to try and stop this natural order of things, or even partially or symbolically deny it.
The real wrong is to waste your life on such foolish ideas, to not do something worthwhile with the life that has been given to you at such great cost.
They say wearing leather shoes and a leather belt. This makes me laugh. (Not all vegitable-arians do this, I know, but it’s not too uncommon.)
-Rue. **
[/QUOTE]
I always hear this, but I don’t know any vegetarians who wear leather. I know they are out there, but I don’t know any. In my family, we buy our shoes and such from http://www.veganstore.com/
My current veggie Birkenstocks have lasted me over 2 years with not that much visible wear, and they are the only shoes I own, so they get a lot of wear.
Silo:
I didn’t expect to back it up either. Another slow day, but it was werth it since I converted This year’s girl. Another hippy chick saved and returned to the fold.
The fact is them Vegan’s is just fooling themselves. Only Dr. Lao made any valid points, and PLD comported himself with his usual style.
Milo got shot up in an ambush.
A whole bunch of organisms died today, and the ole Vegans didn’t make a bit of difference to themselves or any of the dead things.
Gee… last time I heard this, it was Burger King (in place of McD’s), rain forest (in place of jungle), and Brazil (in place of Africa).
Please offer up a citation for this (web or non-web), because it is setting off my BS detector.
I’ve never been in a situation where I was SO hungry, and ALL there was to eat was meat. If I was hungry though, and all there was was a hamburger, I guess I’d eat the bun and give the burger to the next passing cat or dog. Meat not wasted - NEXT.
I’m overweight, it would do me good to miss a meal (or three). Besides, I’ve given the meat to a cat or dog, so it’s not wasted, OK? I will concede one thing, though - if I was stranded on a desert island, and had fasted for many days and lost all my extra body fat, at that point I would probably eat some meat rather than die. I’d eat meat rather than starve to death. Happy now? :rolleyes:
I still don’t understand why this has you all hot and bothered. And clearly it does. You see, I don’t buy that it’s just another topic to be discussed. If it were “just another topic”, it wouldn’t come up so frequently. And it wouldn’t be brought up so frequently by meat-eaters especially. Some of you meat eaters have a hard-on about ragging on vegetarianism. I don’t get it.
Opal:
No offense, but I wonder how many plants and animals die and how much suffering occurs and how much damage is done drilling for the oil that makes up the plastics in a pair of Doc Martens, and the habitat that is destroyed obtaining gums and resins.
The truth is quite probably that the cost of a pair of Doc Marten’s is much higher in terms of life (animal and plant,) habitat, and resources than curing leather.
As an environmentally conscience and stylish man about town, I wear all leather shoes (even the laces,) wool suits, and silk ties. Cotton shirts though.
I don’t eat meat because I love animals. The thought that someone killed one just so that I can have X on my dinner plate instead of Y is just ludicrous to me. The concept of eating an animal’s body is revolting to me. I never said I was saving the planet. I never said I was enlightened or that I do no evil. I simply have a very soft spot in my heart for animals. I carry bugs out of my house rather than squishing them because it’s just as easy and it rests better on my conscience. I have caught snakes in my neighborhood and let them loose in the woods because I know the neighbors would kill them if they found them. What exactly is WRONG with me personally not wanting to participate in something that causes pain and suffering? I never said I could end all pain and suffering in the universe. But it’s pretty damned easy for me to not contribute to this particular aspect of it, and I really don’t see how that is any concern of yours Why on earth do you care?
And as others have said before me… I’m sure you’ve met some uppity vegetarians and vegans who preached at you. Boo hoo. Vegetarians are soooo mean and rude. Let’s just ignore the zillions of carnivores out there who decide to preach, belittle, insult, taunt, deride, and castigate anyone they find is a vegetarian. How many times has your all-vegetarian group of co-workers (managers included) backed you into a corner (literally! on the floor!) hurling insults at you for half an hour because of your personal food choices? Oh, never? Hm. I’ve had people throw meat at me, put dead things on my desk in high school… all unprovoked. The minute people find out you’re a vegetarian it’s like all bets are off for manners. Sure, it’s not everyone. But I bet that the numbers of meat eaters who harrass vegetarians is exponentially larger than vice versa.
So your basic point is “if there is going to be some suffering and death anyway, why not go whole hog?” I guess you would also say that since some people are always going to die of cancer, we should stop cancer research that may save some of them. Endangered species are going extinct, let’s just kill them all rather than trying to save what we can. Your car goes out of control, you can either hit the solitary pedestrian on one side or the whole class of schoolchildren on the other… why not go for the kids? I mean someone is gonna die, why try to limit it?
Already addressed that five or six times.
When you carry that bug outside, how many thousands of microorgansims die as a result of your movement and respiration?
Surely enough to populate a city.
To save a bug, a million or so other bugs die.
You’ve participated in their deaths, and you’re directly responsible.
That snake you didn’t kill will go and eat a whole bunch of bugs and little froggies and such (maybe the one you saved, too. Wouldn’t that be ironic?)
By saving the snake haven’t you murdered them? You’re directly responsible.
Maybe that snake left the area and came to your house because of pressures on its ecosystem. Maybe it sensed prey and would have gladly cleaned your house of bugs and vermin, but you took it out of the balance that it found and returned it to an unbalanced ecosystem that had no place for it. Now your house will be unbalanced with an overpopulation of vermin and bugs that havee had the natural predators removed, and will breed freely in your food and house, and you’ll have to get an exterminator to spray deadly chemicals to get rid of them.
You just messed with whatever forces of nature put that snake there in the first place.
If you truly respected life and nature shouldn’t you just let the snake do its own business?
It bothers me not at all, but it seems ignorant, yes?
That’s not what I’ve said at all, and even a casual reader knows better.
Scylla, I respect your position, but beg to differ. It’s been important to me since realizing that other creatures must die for me to live, to act in a conscious manner to not cause more suffering than I have to. Perhaps, as a human being, I’m historically accorded through my biological makeup to eat as the majority of my species does. I choose not to. And, at this point in time,I can make that choice without fear of any physical detriment. Food is plentiful here, and with a little education, ya can meet your daily requirements pretty easily.
You seem to have agreed with a respectful attitude toward plants as proper, so I don’t quite understand your position on vegetarians as being “flaky”. It’s just the same respectful attitude towards animals. ???
I have to head to sleep now. I have a new job at a Wildlife Shelter that means 10 hrs a day feeding and caring for injured animals. If that don’t give one a clue to the needs and sentience of critters, I dunno. 10 hours of shit, death, and need… I’m rambling… 'Night.
Probably the same amount as would have died if I didn’t take the bug outside. Life cost of me living: 100,000. Live cost of me living and smushing a bug rather than taking it outside: 100,000 + 1 – which is preferable?
The snake needs to eat them to survive. I don’t need to eat animals to survive. Our intelligence and progress has allowed us to make choices the snake does not have.
I hardly think that the “ecosystem” is that different in front of my house where the mailboxes and parking lot are vs behind my house where the woods are. It’s about a 1 minute walk. The snake probably just came out to the pavement to sun himself. Unfortunately he was a target to get a shovel to the head where he was, so I moved him.
Chances are the “vermin” that might come into my house are also coming from the woods, not the parking lot, so I’ve helped to prevent such things as exterminators.
No, not at all.