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

I agree, everything suffers. Hence why I prefer, and would pay more for teh meat that I eat to be kept in good conditions and killed in a humane, quick and effective way. For several reasons, the purely selfish one being it makes teh meat taste better whne the animal has led a stress free life.

I have always eaten meat but at about 16/17yrs old when a lot of people (for whatever reasons) were becoming vegetarians, I began to feel guilty that the meat I was preparing and eating was presented in such a clean and easy way.
I wasn't willing to give up meat because of the extra effort and expense vegetarianism would incur, and to be honest I didn't know how to make many meals that didn't include meat. Not the best of reasons but they were the reasons.
So I began to realise that I didn't feel bad that was eating something that "had once had a face" but that if I wasn't going to do the dirty work, kill it/them myself I shouldn't eat meat!

So a couple of survavalist books (trying to ignore the "How to kill your neighbours" chapters) and a £35 air-rifle later I'm crawling on my belly through a bush towards a cute little bunny rabbit. Trying desperatly to remember the evil "Death rabbit" from "Watership Down" and that miserly bloody Easter Bunny that only ever gave me a "Smarties" egg when my mates got loads, I aim and fire...
BANG (well more a pathetic pop) and the poor wee things deader than a can of Spam, anyway I did gut it, skin it, cooked it and ate it. It was bloody nice and I figured that I at least proved I didn't need my dead animals disguised as food and so I still enjoy meat (just not Buggs bunny cartoons, j/k).
Eating meat is wrong, I am doing something that is wrong but at least I know that I'm responsable, if there punishment getting doled out I'll get punished for killing and eating and not shopping. For some reason that makes me feel a lot better about myself.

Merangadan

I've just given up meat. I don't know whether eating meat is wrong for humans but I think the way meat is produced for mass consumption is wrong. Some people have to eat meat (Inuit) and some people have problems digesting certain foods so I wouldn't condemn meat eaters, just the meat industry. The foot and mouth outbreak we still have here in Britain -- the size and spread of it were made worse by mass production and transporting animals all over the country. 2,500,000 mostly healthy animals have been slaughtered and burned or buried so far, causing all sorts of environmental problems (quite apart from the suffering of the animals and farmers). I want no further part in that kind of insanity.

Still, what you said makes cock-eyed sort of sense to me

If it is wrong, why are you still eating meat? if you are still eating meat, then how wrong is it?
I will quite happily stand up and admit to being able to imagine scenario's where I would have to eat human flesh (a notable plane crash springs to mind) and I like to think I would not have any problems doing so to survive. given that, I also see no problems with catching and preparing my own fish, rabbits, pidgeons, hedgehogs, and snakes. All of these I have done, and if I can eat the wild ones, I see no problem with eating farmed one. I am a meat eater, and proud of it, and will not apologise for doing so. having said that, things like the ld50 test (lethal dose 50%) are an abomination, and should be got rid of.

Looks as though Merangadan feels it's wrong but not wrong enough. He feels a bit guilty but not guilty enough to give it up. It takes a bit of effort if you've eaten meat all your life, have been brought up by flesh eaters and so on.

I can see how someone who has had to struggle against family and social pressures to do what they believe is the right thing, might feel a modicum of pride in that achievement.

Why would you feel proud of being a meat eater though? Did it take a huge effort for you to become a meat eater?

We do things that are bad all the time knowing there bad.
I believe that eating animals when we dont have to is not moral but frankly i dont realy care if its wrong! I dont feel guilty doing something i know is wrong but i would feel guilty pretending it wasn't, if i hadn't ever killed my own food then it would be easy to feel that it wasn't my responsability!
I dont feel guilty!
But dont worry xyroth if we were involved in a survival situation like that plane crash I wouldnt feel guilty about eating you, how much do you weigh?

Merangadan

I think the whole "if I kill it and eat it myself, then that's OK" argument is a funny one. I eat meat, loads of it, but I don't kill any of it. At the same time, I use a lot of computers, but I don't program them myself.
The whole point of society is to get people with diverse skills to come together for the greater good. There's millions of things I can't do, or don't have time for. I don't make my own clothes or medicine, i don't drive my own trains or busses. Am a bad?

wide

To some people, there's a subtle difference between killing and programming or driving a bus. It's so subtle, that some people just can't see it. Shouldn't let it worry you though. You should be ok if you don't get the urge even though you can't tell the difference

Yes I think i can just about get my head around the difference between using a computer (look I'm doing it now) and eating meat!
One difference in particular would be that using a computer doesnt kill anything and there are moraly dubious issues in delegating an imoral act and in doing so avoiding feelings of guilt and responsability.

Merangadan

ps; "wide" I dont know if your bad but you certanly are being condescending.

proud probably isn't the right word, but looks a lot better than saying that I steadfastly refuse to be an apologist about deigning to eat meat, and where pride does come into it is in the being able to catch, kill, and prepare my own food. technically speaking, none of these steps are that easy to do, so i am justly proud of being able to do them.

I have recently given up eating beef and chicken. Lots of reasons really. For me too it is a problem to eat creatures that I would not be willing to kill myself. And honestly, I would not be able to kill a cow or a chicken. The fact that other people kill them for me means that lots of cows and chickens are dying but their deaths don't distress me the way they would if I were killing them myself. So I would say it is a solution if a person found that he/she was able to kill animals personally for food. If you kill the animal yourself you know in what way it died, at least. I am sure that animals can feel pain, but looking at predation in nature, it seems to me as if animals do not suffer unbearably from being killed by predators.

I would say there's a right way and a wrong way to kill animals. If you look at people such as the native north Americans and the San of Southern Africa, they often had/have great respect for the animals they hunted, even to the extent of asking the animals permission to be killed and explaining that their deaths were necessary. Now whether or not the animals are aware of this, I think at least this kind of respect towards animals will discourage humans from unnecessary killing.

I feel that at the moment there is too much meat consumption in much of the developed world. I am concerned about the living conditions of cattle, pigs and chickens. I think an animal should for its natural lifespan roam freely and live in interesting natural environments. I am also concerned about the amount of vegetation that is destroyed for the sake of cattle ranching. I am also worried about the unnatural diets of many farm animals, the chemicals which end up in the meat. Also many chickens especially are fed diets that are geared towards the maximal rate of weight increase, which leads to most of the weight of the chicken being composed of fat. Also because of the limited diets of farm animals their meat is not nearly as nutritious as that of wild animals. So humans may need more of it to get what nutrients they need. I believe the reason for so many people in developed countries being overweight is that the kinds of food they eat are high in calories but low in essential nutrients. They have to eat a lot to get enough nutrition and much of what they eat consists of superfluous calories.

At the moment I eat a mainly vegetarian diet, with some cheese and eggs from free-range chickens, as well as a small amount of fish. I can live with eating fish because I am willing to catch fish myself, and I don't mind letting other people do it for me. Fish may have feelings, but at least for their lives they can roam around freely in the open ocean. Fish is also much richer in essential nutrients and lower in fat than the meat of farm animals. I don't eat a lot of fish, just a little. I try to get the vast majority of nutrients from vegetable foods.

Ah.. but then we get back to the whole "is it morally wrong" argument. As I don't see it as morally wrong, I find no problem in letting people do it for me. I can see you point that if you do believe it to be morally wrong, then to delegate is almost Hitleresque.
It stil backs up my argument though, either it's wrong or it's not, it doesn't matter who does it, you or the slaughterman.

wide

I have/do know/n a lot of people in the farming industry and one man that worked in a slaughter house. Many have said that the slaughter process was not a kind or painless one. The animals are subjected to hours of battery hen style traveling conditions then spend more time being crushed from area to area surrounded by the smell blood and fear before being shocked or bled to death sometimes having to be shocked more than once.
The guy I knew that worked in an abattoir wouldn't have called himself a "professional", infact he left because he couldn't take the numb, cold attitude his colleagues had and that he would have to assume.

So I dont hold with the idea that it is more cruel to fish or hunt and eat, than bying it off the supermarket shelf.

Merangadan

I'm a mead-eater. From what I've seen of our abitours(sp?), they are relatively painless. A lot more painless than, say, the methods used in the US for executions. Over here we use a bolt-gun - basically a pistol with a blank cartridge which fires a sharpened bolt into the animal's skull. I can't really think of a quicker method.

I'd have to say I'm against testing on animals for cosmetics, but am for medical research, if animal models are required.

We get a lot of postes and stickers stuck everywhere around campus saying "Stop vivisection", always showing a picture of a cute puppy or kitten or bunny. Having said that, the only animals I've heard of used here for research are labrats and Drosophila (fruit flys). Oh, and we did use fresh-water crayfish and eels once. But they were from farms and were treated very well.

Excuse the ramble, but I'm tired...