I would suggest that the ethical decisions of vegetarians are based less on considerations of taxonomy than of sentience. Although these two coincide in most cases, if there is conflict, “moral” vegetarians try to reduce suffering, not achieve taxonomic consistency.
The other issue is intent. Ethics can apply only to intentional behavior. A vegetarian who incidentally ingests a microorganism is not being ethically inconsistent.
My wife is a sometimes/pseudo/quasi vegetarian. She feels healthier when not eating red meat or poultry. She first starting observing vegetarian rules due to her conversion into the 7th Day Adventist Church. (Please don’t go there.) I’ve been treated to quite a number of explanations as to why some foods are acceptable and others are not.
Dairy products are usually considered to be milk, milk by-products, and derivations from milk. That is, cheese, cottage cheese, ice cream, etc…
A woman nursing her baby is as natural and acceptable as a cow nursing her calf. The consumption of dairy products is simply borrowing from the cow that which is intended for consumption and nutrition.
My wife is a sometimes/pseudo/quasi vegetarian. She feels healthier when not eating red meat or poultry. She first starting observing vegetarian rules due to her conversion into the 7th Day Adventist Church. (Please don’t go there.) I’ve been treated to quite a number of explanations as to why some foods are acceptable and others are not.
Dairy products are usually considered to be milk, milk by-products, and derivations from milk. That is, cheese, cottage cheese, ice cream, etc…
A woman nursing her baby is as natural and acceptable as a cow nursing her calf. The consumption of dairy products is simply borrowing from the cow that which is intended for consumption and nutrition.
PLdennison: thanks for the great laugh. “Sloth steaks”- my stomach still hurts from laughing.
That tummy ache ain’t from the sloth steaks; it’s that damn ferret jerky. Wait until you start passing that stuff. Put you on tofu for life, it will.
This coming from a man who ATE the trees they put on our plates at the last NYCSDMB Clambake and Jamboree.
Here is PETA’s page on dairy products. I’ll agree that there’s nothing inherently wrong (morally/ethically) about cow’s milk but I’d think that someone who’s opposed to killing animals would also be opposed to mistreating them the way the dairy industry does. If you’re getting your milk from your own cow, or from a small farm that doesn’t do this to their cows, then I don’t see any problem.
Oops… this is the PETA page I wanted to link to.
BTW, Oblong, I think you’ll find a great many “moral” vegetarians don’t wear leather either.
Please forgive me if I don’t share your sympathy for those cute fuzzy widdle bull calves.
When I was 12 an adult bull backed me into a barbed wire fence. The only reason he didn’t kill me is because when his head rubbed up the front of my chest he pushed me up and over the top of the fence. 17 years later I still have scars on my butt from where the barbs dug in.
Put me firmly in the “kill or be killed” camp.
As for Oldscratch’s post…
Yes, I firmly agree. Cows on those big 10,000 head dairies go from milking parlor to holding pen to another holding pen and back to the barn. Our family milks about 40 head, and the cows are in the pasture (in good weather) from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Winter is another story, as their teats will freeze off if they’re left outside too long.
ruadh: you’re using PETA as a source on animal husbandry? Isn’t that like using HCI as a sounce for handgun safety, or the right-to-lifers writing an manual for arbrtions?
Daniel, probably. If you have any evidence to offer that the procedures detailed on that page do not, in fact, occur, I would be happy to take a look at it.
I cannot spot one out & out lie. Everything happens, but just not always often, nor in all dairies, nor does all this happen in any dairy I know of.
Yes, manure causes pollution, but is also one of the best & most commonly used organic fertilizer.
Nowhere near all of the male calves are turned into veal.
And, yes, a modern large commercial dairy farm is a pretty sterile & souless place. But there are many family organic dairys where the cows are treated like family. If you have concerns over hormones, etc, and the way cows are treated, go organic, not vegan. There is not a single health concern that is not disputed, or could be not be equally applied to a 100% vegetable product.
And as far as “cows milk is meant for calves”: fruit is meant to spread seed, not as human food. Same thing can be said for most veggies. Offhand, I cannot think of one animal or vegetable product that evolved naturally as human food*. Possibly the most stupid quote of 2000.
Granted, this is personal experince, not factoids of a web page, but my grampa is a cattle dealer and I spent lots of days on farms besides ours.
“Milking machines often cause cuts and injuries that would not occur were a person to do the milking.”
Have never personally seen this, although it may happen on factory farms where cows don’t really get individual attention. In my experience, cows are most likely to injure their own teats - they step on their own when getting up or get stepped on out in the pasture. Almost as horrible is when cow A steps on the tail of cow B 
“In some cases, milking machines even give cows electric shocks due to stray voltage…”
True, but I don’t know that it’s caused exclusively by the milking machines. Every now and again a whole herd is electrocuted in their stanchions when a stray wire or stray voltage zaps the steel. On the other hand, every now and agin a whole herd is electrocuted because they took shelter underneath a single tree/grove of trees during a thunderstorm. Your call.
“Large dairy farms also have a detrimental effect on the surrounding environment…”
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It’s why I really hate factory farms of any sort, be it hogs or chickens or cows.
“Cows on today’s farms live only about four to five years…”
I think we keep them around for 7-10 years. Dad really doesn’t like to get rid of them when they stop producing, but after a certain point you put more money into feeding them then you get out of them in milk. Small farmers are on the margin already and don’t have the cash to run a retirement community. It sucks, but that’s life. Humans give their old people to nursing homes, dairymen give their old cows to Mickey D’s.
“…as opposed to the life expectancy of 20-25 years enjoyed by cows of an earlier era…”
What earlier era?
“Farmers also use an array of drugs, including bovine growth hormone (BGH); prostaglandin, which is used to bring a cow into heat whenever the farmer wants to have her inseminated…”
We don’t use this, and while I’ve been out of the farming loop for a while I don’t think many small farmers do.
“…tranquilizers…”
Damn, wish I had known about that one BEFORE I got kicked by those fresh heifers that had never been milked before 
“antibiotics”
Well, duh. If a cow gets sick or gets an infection, what do you want us to do? Let her die?
“Perhaps the greatest pain suffered by cows in the dairy industry is the repeated loss of their young. Female calves may join the ranks of the milk producers, but the males are generally taken from their mothers within 24 hours of birth…”
Ehhhhhh, well…All calves are taken from their mothers ASAP after birth. I suppose it might be a bad thing, but not nearly as bad as taking puppies or kittens from mama, and not nearly as noisy as taking a foal from its mare. Also, and this is just opinion, it seems that it would be safer for a calf to be separated from the herd and put in a pen with animals of its own size.
Backtracking slightly to the OP, I became a veggie under the influence of my then partner, who was a Hindu - indeed, still is.
This involves eating no animal / derivatives of animal at all - so no fish, no shellfish, not even things like Worcester sauce (because it has anchovy in it). As for dairy products, I try to hold out for veggie cheese (ie, made with vegetarian rennet). This makes restaurant eating a bit limited, but I’m in London, so there’s a good selection of Indian and Buddhist retaurants which allow for this diet. I’ve got to be honest and say that sometimes I just don’t enquire too closely into the exact nature of the cheese on a pizza or exactly what went into the pastry - but then, I’m not a Hindu myself.
As for milk, when I can, I go for kosher or organic milk, but otherwise I’ve got to admit I just take what comes. I can’t stand soy milk, so I don;t think that’s an option.
With regard to leather, I’m working towards leatherlessness, but again, no-leather shoes are either unbelievably expensive or they’re cheap and nasty and make your feet sweat something awful and fall to bits in three months. I justify it a bit by claiming that cows aren’t slaughtered just for the leather (“Look, it was dead anyway - why waste it?”), but no, it doesn’t convince me either…
Could one of the earlier posters who mentioned something about about drawing the line at sentient animals please elaborate, I am confused on this point. Which animals are these?
Tretiak said
Sure can. First of all, there isn’t really a “line.” Sentience—meaning the capacity for sensation, feeling, or consciousness—occurs along a continuum, with humans, presumably, near the higher end. If your goal is to minimize the amount of suffering you cause other beings, you need to consider other beings’ capacity for suffering. Thus, if forced to choose, you would harm a cow rather than a human, a planarian rather than a cow, and a plant rather than a planarian.
In terms of dietary ethics, a person would consider sentience when deciding what to eat and what not to eat. (So in this case, I guess, there is a line.) If you are concerned about causing suffering, you would try to eat things with a limited capacity for suffering. TheThill made an evolutionary argument, suggesting that a person could justify eating fish on the grounds that, since we all accidentally ingest microorganisms, some of which are animals, no one is really a vegetarian anyway. Therefore, the best course is to avoid eating animals that are closely related to us. Since fish are more distant relatives than other mammals, eating fish is acceptable.
This argument is perfectly valid IMO, if you use taxonomy as your guide for dietary ethics. I said that I thought most “moral” vegetarians, when pressed, would admit that they did not consider evolutionary relationships to be as important as sentience in their dietary decisions. Therefore, eating microbes, even those that are classified as animals, was acceptable to vegetarians because microbes are not sentient; eating fish, on the other hand, is not acceptable, since they are sentient.
Danielinthewolvesden said
Daniel, a little friendly advice: if you’re going to insult someone’s intelligence, make certain that your own reasoning is rock solid first. Otherwise, you’re kind of stepping on your own point.
Seed dispersal is, indeed, the purpose of fruit. However, the plant’s method of dispersal is this: 1) make a seed; 2) wrap it in some tasty, nutritious stuff to attract animals who will eat it and then walk or swim or fly around depositing the seeds in a tasty, nutritious manure; and 3) repeat. Does the plant’s method also work on intelligent animals, such as humans? I dunno. Have you ever heard the story of Johnny Appleseed?
Biologists call this mutual interdependency “symbiosis,” and it isn’t restricted to fruit. Some naked seeds cannot germinate until they’ve been eaten and passed through the digestive tract of an animal. And then there’s nectar, developed by plants to feed the birds and the bees so they could spread pollen to other single, attractive plants. Overall, it is in the plants’ best interest to keep their seed- and pollen-dispersers well fed. That includes humans.
And “mother’s milk” is an animal product regardless of who considers it such.
sandyr pretty much covered a lot of the stuff I was going to say about the PETA.
We’ve been through the osteoporosis issue on the board before.
Stray electricity from milking machines ? All the milking machines I’ve ever milked with have rubber for milking the teats and the metal part of the machine doesn’t touch the cow.
Machines causing cuts and scratches ? Visit a farm ask the farmer to let you stick your finger into a working milking machine then stick it into a calves mouth and let him suck on it. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the rubber machine in comparison to a calf.
I have heard of stray electricity coming through the metal stanchions but it’s rare and most farmers use nylon collars.
Prostoglandin ? I don’t even know as if many large farms use this anymore. A cow comes in heat every 21 days you can figure it out yourself by keeping track of her menstrrual cycle. Most large farms around here are now just keeping their breedable stock in a seperate pen from their stock in early lactation and putting a bull with them. No artificial breeding fees and the cows have a better conception rate, eminently cheaper though it is harder to control genetics.
As for PETA’s web sites. After seeing one with pictures that they stated represented mistreatment (I think this was during their drink beer campaign) I had to shake my head at the last photo. The closing photo was a cow laying on a table with an ugly fat guy standing over her. I suppose PETA thought it would bring home a point with it. They either didn’t know, or didn’t care, that it was a photo of a hoof trimming table. The cow walks up to it, is strapped in and is gently lowered into a horizontal position where the hooves can be trimmed easily and quickly and swung back upright. Either PETA doesn’t know what they have pictures of or they misrepresent them.
tretaik: that was me, and besides Humans, an argument could be given for any great Ape, or the Dolphins, etc… So I don’t eat Human, Ape (altho you could argue I am being redundant) or Cetaean.
When you eat certain veggies & fruit you are consuming hundred of nematodes, mites, etc. so even a strict vegan can’t help but to eat some animals. But they have to draw the line at animals they can’t help but to eat- Fair enuf.
Some “semi-vegetarians” (please don’t call them vegetarians, it annoys a couple of experienced female posters who i don’t want to piss off more than I already have) draw the line at fish, as in some religions, fish are not considered “animals”. A few include insects, shrimp, etc.
So, you have to draw a moral line somewhere, remembering to keep YOUR health in mind ( ie Vegans should add B12& watch their protien mix, Omnivores should watch their fat & chol, and get more fiber, and fruitarians should make out their will )
DumbOX (how apt!): Modern cultivated plants are no longer normal, and only depend on humans to “spread their seed” by means of machines. And when we DO eat one of the few unaltered plants that has seeds we can pass thru our bowels, we pass those seeds unto the sewer system, not buryied in a field somewhere, ie we are no longer doing for the plant what it intended with its seeds. ie, we no longer “disperse the seed” except in a highly un-natural fashion, with highly un-natural seeds, and highly un-natural plants.
And most vegans do not consider “mothers milk” to be an 'animal product", in the sense of verboten.
Very good. You’re learning. Remember, the female vegetarian mafia is watching you. 