h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Here's a suggestion - eat meat less often, and then it'll be an end to intensive farming without breaking the bank. You have to consider that, when eating meat, you are taking a sentient being's life - fine, if you want to, but I think, in return, you owe that animal some dignity. The animal has been raised simply to die and be eaten - essentially for your convienience - I feel that in return you should ensure that the animal's life is comfortable, its death swift, painless and, above all, not wanton.

Okay, I speak as a smug veggie, but most of the meat eaters I know would rather eat a really nice bit of meat once a week (with the leftovers etc. turned into bits of other meals) than rubbish meat everyday. From memory, intensively farmed meat (not just the chicken) tastes bland and fatty, whilst free range/ organic has better muscle tone, more flavour and is lower in fat. Vegetarian food is generally cheaper and provides all the nutrients needed on a day to day baisis, leaving money to treat yourself to a nice leg of lamb/ more ethically produced chicken once or twice a week.

This arguement is compounded by the fact that meat eaters argue that they LIKE meat. I like Quails eggs. Actually, I love quails eggs but I buy them rarely because they are not nutritionally nessecery and they are expensive. I can think of other examples of things I love, but don't buy often for the same reason. However, when I buy quails eggs, I buy them from a farmer's market, from a trader who has fre-to-fly birds. This costs more but they taste better as a result - ultimately making them more of a treat. I could afford to eat them more often if I bought factory farmed eggs, but this would involve lower quality products and unnessecery suffering of animals, plus it would still cost more than ordinary, free range chicken eggs, or other sources of protein and iron. I think you can apply something similar to meat - if you enjoy meat, have it less often and be able to spend more on it when you do. Then, you'll have something you will really enjoy.

I feel that supermarkets lose sight of the fact that the carcasses they sell were once living things - okay, we farm, we raise animals for our consumption, but they are still living beings who feel pain, can develop attachments, and will suffer if kept in unhealthy environs. By insisting on lower prices, the supermarkets reduce the value of that life, and therefore the quality of said life is considered unimporant. You need to remember that until recently ordinary people consumed very little meat; normally a pig was reared on a yearly baisis, and slaughtered, the meat being preserved to last a whole year. On the day the pig was killed (special occasion) larger quantities would be consumed, but most days only the tiniest amount would be eaten. On other special occasions a chicken might be slaughtered, or else a meat product would be bought. The only other source of meat was wild game, such as rabbits, fish and pigeons. The only people who ate large quantities of meat were the rich, who could afford it. Although I don't approve of this way of running the world, it is clearly still the case, for the rich still eat good quality meat frequently, whilst the less well off will buy meat which is reared unfairly, unhealthily, and frequently pumped full of hormones.

Surely a less carnivorous diet would be better? Remember - you are what you eat.

Sorry, you lost me at "you have to consider that, when eating meat, you are taking a sentient being's life"

You aren't.

Question of whether the animals are self aware has been batted back and forth for a long time. *Sentient* is in fact from the Latin verb *sentire* - to feel. I think no one would argue that these animals don't feel anything when they are battling for self preservation or making loud noises when wounded. Science has proved that even fish have nerve endings, ending that old canard our fishing forefathers told us to the contrary.

By the way, would you eat your cat or your dog? If so you are definitely in the minority in Western society and for good reason, if you don't get to know an animal it's much easier to kill it or have it killed. Just like in the battlefield with humans.

You all can carnivore your way through life without bothering me, just be aware of your actions.

In response, 'you have to consider'. I don't, people who don't eat meat don't. Or if the qualm was that one doesn't actually take the animal's life, saying 'indirectly causing the animal's life to be taken by creating demand for meat products' is a touch verbose, I thought the meaning was implicit.

Was using sentient to mean 'able to feel pain' Personally, I think they're self aware as well, but that, as you say, is under discussion. I'd go with the whole 'knowing an animal' thing. But I probably couldn't kill a cat, but then it's not healthy to eat carnivores.

It’s not under discussion any more. The sentience/ self-awareness/ consciousness of non-human animals is about as well established as the fact that the earth is round.

As if it wasn’t obvious to anyone who’s worked with animals, or ever had a pet, study after study has shown that their behaviour is essentially the same as ours. Add to this the genetic and physiological similarities and it just doesn’t make any sense to believe that animals are just unconscious automatons.

Only the religious still harp on about some kind of qualitative difference between humans and everything else.

eat drink and be merry

Eat, drink and be merry. I'm with you on that! As a vegan I find it odd that some people are so concerned about eating dead animals and do not appear to have any concern about the welfare of the livestock that give us our dairy and eggs. I choose my diet because of my beliefs. People eat animals and live off of their produce, allways have, allways will. My belief is that any animal raised for meat or dairy/eggs should have a decent life and a quick death. Cheap food my arse! "I can't afford it on my budget" Yeah, most of those budgets come from benefits taken up with smoking and drinking and fast food/ready meals. (I smoke and drink and have two jobs) Pay that little extra for knowing what you shove down your neck has had a good life.

Having worked in and around farms most of my life I can comment on battery hens and feed lot cattle and intensive feed piggeries.
You do see some awful things, enough to turn some folk off meat; From pigs being whacked over the head with hammers to put them out of their misery if there is something wrong with them(cheaper than a bullet you see)to battery hens that are weak being pecked and eaten by their fellow inmates, the prescient squeals of pigs approaching the gas chamber (A more humane way than bolt guns or bleeding); the list can go on and on.

But if you want to eat meat then you have to kill it and 99% of the population has never seen an abattoir in full swing or the assembly line killing and skinning of chickens. If they did then they could competently express a view about the pro's and con's of the mass meat market.

I love my chicken stir fry and my prime rib fillet and my roast pork and crackling, I've killed my own chook before as well as a steer but haven't done the coup de grace on a piglet as of yet and yet I can't remove myself totally from these animals plight.
Sentient?
Perhaps in a chicken it's aware of where the food and water is and when it's time to sleep and wake up but that's about it. Same with bovines and ovines, their on about the same rung on the ladder a fair way down from us although the odd politician can be found down that region of the evolutionary ladder too.
I prefer free range chooks and eggs, and hormonally fast grown battery hens are not my preferred fare at all but obviously the great majority of people couldn't give a rats arse about where their meat comes from as long as it's cheap and available and until they do, then intensive farming like this will just continue and grow.

No amount of hand wringing by animal libbers and various other lobbyist groups is going to change anything unless you school the general public in how their meat is grown and dispatched, dispatched being the operative word here.

I don't eat commercial meat because of what I saw at an abattoir some twenty years ago. I saw processed meat that has to be dyed red to look edible. I saw animals being killed with obvious pain and suffering. I saw rivers of blood and meat touching feces. I was horrified and pained.

I have seen venison prepared in the wild and organic meat prepared on farms. I can deal with that. That's me. I don't want and can never tell anyone else to feel the same way I can deal with that as well.

*You* aren't doing anything wrong, I am doing what I think is right for me, OK?

What a fair attitude cl zoomer - focus.
Abattoirs are gnarly places and pain is a part of them I'm afraid.
We all have choices to make and worrys to worry about.

Be. And be happy. Thus we muddle on.

As a vegan I have my beliefs. I eat no meat or dairy but would wish that wild animals are hunted fairly and for food only, and farmed animals reared as nature intended, and killed humanely. I have no qualms with people that eat meat or take dairy. To each his own. You all should visit a slaughter house and know the source of your food.

Exactly. I'm sure there would be less meat eaten if your average citizen was given a tour through the local abattoir...


Well that seems to have summed up the thread heading...
Is it me or are h2g2 threads becoming shorter and shorter? "My Conversations" seem to be a case of reply this week or don't reply at all because the thread will be dead or being watched by one or two people(apart from the game threads of course) if your lucky.

Ooh, I've finally come back to this thread... (I should really take more responsibility for my rants...)

In response to clzoomer, I've no problem with people eating meat - I just like an aware attitude. Yours seems healthy enough - I became veggie to young to try out venison. I'm curious. Is it delectable? I doubt I'll convert just to eat bambi, though.

Here's a question, even if animals aren't sentient or are inferior in some way (not my view perhaps) does that say something about humans in that people are willing for them to be treated in a needlessly cruel way just cos they aren't like us? Of course, I'd love to sort out world poverty, pollution, human right abuses and all, but that takes sustained effort, international intervention, huge pressure on govenrment, succesful deployment of aid etc. Ending intensive meat production in this country is comparitively easy. Anyway, who's to say we can't do both? (One is reminded of Maid Marion and her Merry Men).

Both my brothers in law hunt as does my step-father, all as part of subsistence. Family get togethers usually include some game and fish so I've had lots of opportunity. Having eaten store-bought meat several decades ago I can say that the game is superior in every way.