gleameil

Crossposts: http://gleameil.livejournal.com/9602.html

I've been concerned about animal welfare for years and have not done anything about it--to the extent there's an excuse it's that I love meat and dairy and know that one person's diet, without my getting into political activism that's beyond me right now, will make that much of a difference. Possibly I should go vegan and definitely intend to aim for humanely produced dairy until / if I do, but working out a vegan diet is going to take up too much of my time and is risky health-wise to boot.

I would really be interested in my friends' take--ethically and scientifically--on vegetarianism or any animal rights issues. To be very plain--are most species sentient / conscious enough that it matters? My intuition from living around animals for years the way we all have says ABSOLUTELY, but intuition is fallible, and many scientific sources seem to say no. My impression is that we don't know nearly enough yet to have any idea. Why are or aren't you a vegetarian?

If you are lurking on my journal and going to poke up your head and reply, this is the entry to do it on.

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From:

http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/

I have personally ventured all around the animal rights/ethical eating spectrum. I was basically vegetarian for several years, considered veganism for a week, and now eat a diet with a lot of meat in it but have cut down my milk intake (from what it was, anyway.)

Here is the short version:
1. Vegetarianism was not healthy for me. I started skipping periods.
2. Even if I were competent enough to maintain my weight on a vegetarian diet, I wouldn't try at this point, because I honestly don't react well to refined grains. Last time I ate oatmeal, the results were, well, bad.
3. I honestly think that refined grains/sugars are the biggest problem with the American diet, contrary to food pyramid instructions.
4. In general, I think we should take our ancestral human diets as guidance in our foodways. Cows' milk, though it tastes yummy, is probably not really something that adult humans should be eating. Grains of various sorts have been part of the human diet for a long time, but not refined in these quantities. Meat, fish, veggies, nuts, and real fruits have been part of the human diet for longer than there have been humans.
5. In general, I think we could stand to eat a lot more veggies and nuts and organ meats and lot less white meat chicken breast. We Americans probably do eat too much protein, generally speaking.
6. That said, different people will do better on different diets. East-Asians tend to have difficulty digesting wheat and milk, but have no issues with rice. Inuit populations do very well eating meat and fat, and don't handle plants well at all.
7. I have yet to see evidence that people can absorb vitamins as effectively from pills as from food. I have seen what vitamin B12 deficiency does to a person, and I would never risk that. And frankly, I can eat liver first thing in the morning without it making me barf. Can't say the same for my prenatals.

That's the practical end of things. On to the moral.

1. I will eat whatever it takes to be healthy, and will not feel bad about it. I don't begrudge the lion his kill, and the lion doesn't begrudge me mine.
2. Agriculture requires *some* animals. Unless you want to make all of your fertilizer out of oil, you're going to need poop somewhere in the system, and animals can eat parts of the plants that we can't. If you look out at nature, healthy biomes have plants *and* animals, living in balance with each other.
3. Even the harvesting of plants requires the deaths of many animals, from bugs killed by pesticides and tilling, animals displaced by humans using the land, to small creatures killed by combines. A wild-caught fish or free-range animal requires far less killing to bring the same nutrients to your plate.
4. Different climates support different foods. Some places grow corn very efficiently, and eating corn is a good idea there. Other places produce fish, beef, milk, or other products most efficiently. Inefficient land use is bad for both people and the animals who would otherwise live on that land.
5. The most nutritious food, IMO, also involves the most concern for animal (and plant) welfare. Animals kept in healthy, humane environments produce more nutritious products than animals fed feces and kept in a tiny cage for their entire lives.
6. I see nothing wrong with avoiding more intelligent animals like cows and pigs, but don't feel too bad for fish or mollusks or chickens.

In short, I think the healthiest thing for us and the environment is to eat plants and animals which are ethically and sustainably produced under good conditions, with personal and local factors taken into account.

From:

gleameil.livejournal.com

Thank you for your honest and thoughtful response.

re health:
Personal experience so far suggests vegetarianism shouldn't be much of a health problem for me--I tend not to eat much meat anyway--but time will tell.

Perhaps I should take the health issues with dairy more seriously, but unless it's doing me way more harm than I realize, I like it too much to stop for health alone.

re ethics:
1. I understand that tho' I'm not sure I agree.
3. Very good point and I hadn't thought of
it.
4. Could you point me toward sources? What I've seen is that raising livestock is in general grossly inefficient (don't remember the statistic but it shocked me) but there wasn't any kind of breakdown.
6. I'm afraid of making assumptions here.

Edited Date: 2011-12-28 04:39 am (UTC)

From:

http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/

I love, love dairy, but have seen enough scary things on the subject to believe that the anti-milk crowd has a reasonable argument worth considering. My brother is allergic to milk, which unfortunately actually gave him diabetes, which really sucks. But like I said, different people do well on different diets, and there are plenty of people who seem perfectly healthy on diets with lots of milk.

I should add that juice may not be all that better, since it is a refined sugar. I don't know.

4. Vegetarians like to talk about how it takes 10 units of food to make 1 unit of meat, and if we're talking cows in a feedlot, they're basically right. However, this is a pretty incomplete picture. I'll use my dad's ranch as an example. They have a couple hundred acres and can produce a hundred cows on a good year.

The area is very dry and doesn't have enough rain for agriculture unless you want to pump a ton of water from the aquifer, and to be honest, water levels are so low that my dad's well doesn't work and he has to go to my grandma's house to use the toilet.

Cows, however, can eat the brush and cacti that grow on the land--things we can't. They can eat corn husks and hay (or if they can't, pigs can,) and other agricultural leftovers that we can't. Feeding these things to the cow not only produces food from something that wasn't, and makes fertilizer as a convenient by-product--very useful if you want to keep growing plants.

Now, my dad is not one of those lucky farmers who get to sell their animals as free-range organic blah blah, even though they basically are. Instead he sells them to the feedlots, making, like, $20 bucks a cow, where they're shipped out to a big stinky barn to be fed mass quantities of corn shipped in from Kansas or wherever for a couple of weeks to fatten them up for slaughter. But if you are buying free-range, pasture-raised beef, then you'll looking at an animal which wasn't eating imported human food, but brush and grass that humans can't digest anyway.

Many parts of the Earth are too dry, cold, or have growing seasons that are too short for agriculture. You will have trouble raising plants in Alaska, for example, but native peoples have survived by fishing and hunting for thousands of years. Other parts produce plants so abundantly, raising animals is a silly waste of resources, except inasmuch as someone needs to turn those cornhusks into poop. It all depends on where you are, what you're eating and how it's raised.

I'd also note that different animals convert feed at different rates. Chickens are very efficient at producing eggs; cows much less so at making meat.

Let's see, sources. I'd recommend starting with something general about animal husbandry, like Barnyard in your Backyard, which ought to talk about feed and conversion ratios and pasture and such. Almost anything by Joel Salatin is probably good for getting a wider perspective of the whole farm, and he has been doing some very innovative and interesting work--you've heard of him already if you've read Pllan's Omnivore's Dilemma. The book Collapse by Jared Diamond looks a lot at environment and I think it was this book which first inspired this line of thought for me.

Tangentially, if I could recommend only one book on food, it'd be Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Price.

6. As I see it, no matter what you're eating, you're killing something. Even vegetables require the deaths of animals, so at some point, you'll have to chose.

From:

http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/

I'll add that I like chickens, as people, and am not terribly pleased about eating them. I wouldn't eat them if I believed that I could be healthy without them. I do think that eggs are a nice solution, since a lot fewer chickens die to make an egg. I have a lot of issues with the factory-farming artificial blah blah method of raising and breeding animals, and try to buy only free-range, pasture-raised eggs whose producers have lived better lives, because it's better for the chicken and the eggs. When we cut corners and mistreat our animals, we end up with inferior food.

From:

gleameil.livejournal.com

Very much agreed. (re the latter, I brought a crippled chick home from biology in high school and my mom and I got very attached to her before we gave her away to an animal rescue group that had her put to sleep--she purred when you pet her. Apparently she was because they're bred to put on weight so fast that sometimes their hips give way. So yeah. Chico.)

From:

http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/

My grandparents used to have a lovely little flock of chickens. It was really the kind of place you imagine when you think of a farm, with the chickens bock-bocking about in the yard, the rooster crowing, the geese snapping at you :P No crops, obviously, but back when my granfather was alive they had a nice garden and I loved my grandma's fresh asparagus.

Mostly the chickens just laid their eggs in old barrels in the barn, but at some point they built a big hen house, and later moved the (much smaller) flock into a smaller roost. By that time she only had about 4 hens and one rooster, dominickers*, and then one night a possum got in and that was the end of that. My grandma's still sad about them, but she's had too many difficulties lately to get new ones. It's sad, because they had such character, and they made such good eggs--nothing beats eggs from happy chickens allowed to pursue their true chickeny natures.

When I was a kid, we had hatchlings in the the spring. My grandma kept them in a little kiddie pool in the yard to keep them from wandering off. You could pick them up and they'd panic, but hold them under your chin and they'd calm right down, because it felt like being under their mother's wing. I had a little pet chicken for a while, until something (probably a hawk) ate it.

Even baby chicks have this basic, instinctive desire to love and be loved and protected and comforted by their mothers, and mother chickens have the same in return.

I think what they do in factory farming, both the way they treat the animals and the way they've bred them to be nothing but meat machines, is simply atrocious.

*Some people call them dominiques, which is supposedly the "right" name, but my grandma calls 'em dominickers. They're very handsome birds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_%28Chicken%29 If I ever get my wish and have my own farm, I'd like some dominickers.