you're taking the only life this animal had. Like us animals want to live, don't want to die, form bonds with others of their own kind, protect their young, seek out pleasurable activities (for them) like sunning themselves, dust bathing, perching in trees, pecking at interesting things like bugs, etc., and try to avoid painful ones. They are more like us than most people want to admit, even if they look and act very differently than we do.

Most people's justifications for meat eating boil down to "I like it and want to do it", like their feelings and opinions are all that count.

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The contrast between corporate farming and the type of farming described here is striking. Certainly the life of a wild chicken, what ever a wild chicken once was, would be the ideal life for that chicken. But if the conditions on the farm are as close as that ideal setting as could be possibly imagined then the life of that chicken is as ideal as could it could possibly be. I have a couple of foxes that live in the back yard where I live and if there were any wild chickens roaming freely around, they would quickly become the baby foxes next meal like the rabbits that were once roaming freely around in the backyard. Death is a part of life and there is no escaping it. If chickens are living beyond their prime, they soon fall prey to disease and a diminished quality of life and death . Without human intervention, the domesticated chicken doesn't stand much of a chance, so when a farmer cultivates chickens with the idea of giving those chickens the best cultivated life possible I think that the chicken and the people enjoying the succulent meat both come out winners.

Thanks for a good article

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Seriously! I get the whole thing of making sure they have a decent life between birth and the time you slaughter them, and I get making the whole thing as stress-free as possible, but seriously! Luring them sweetly to come to you so you can slit their throat? There is something a bit sick about extolling that. You are still destroying a unique life. I find this article gruesome in a very bizarre way.

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I have four hens in my back garden and they are the best pets I've ever had. Easy to care for (though not problem-free), friendly (especially when they see me holding the treat bowl), providers of delicious eggs (plus lots of manure for the veg plot) and always worth watching as they scratch, hop, flap, dustbathe and peck for bugs.

Getting to know them close up and personal hasn't put me off eating chicken entirely, but I do eat chicken less often and more mindfully. I never buy chicken that has been factory-farmed. (Google "River Cottage" or "Chicken Out" to see videos contrasting the lives of factory and free range chickens.)

I have vowed never to eat my chickens (and hope that conditions will never require otherwise), but I think I have to be prepared to kill them if it means delivering them from suffering.

Death as a relief from pain and misery is what I would want for myself, so I am obliged to do the same for other sentient beings.

Killing to eat is not for me, but as a (somewhat restrained) carnivore, I am letting someone else do it for me.

I hope that humans are on a big learning curve and that we all become more thoughtful, kind and useful.

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The killing of the chicken was described simply as follows: "Therese was as careful and as kind as could be as she cooed to the bird, and quick as a wink in her execution with the knife."

You omitted any details. Someone must have restrained the bird since I doubt it was a willing participant. There must also have been thrashing, noise, blood, and clean-up. Perhaps you were attempting to minimize the death process so as not to upset the readers and turn them against you. It also may make it easier on your conscious. Tell me, was it really that easy? I have my doubts.

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People do most things in their lives. whether it's to believe in God, kill a chicken or drive a Porche, because they want and because they can. The fact is you can get all the protein requirement your body needs by eating the eggs the hens produce without killing the hen itself to eat its body. I believe that the life of a chicken on a farm as described on this article is still better than the life of any chicken in the wild. Basically the chicken lives free without the stress of predation all its short life. It's not as bad as in the wild. And it's killed faster with a knife than if a fox would do it. I do not and will never idealize the life of animals in the wild. Still, you choose to kill when you don't have to to stay alive. Again, you can get all the proteins you need by drinking the milk of your cow, making cheese with her milk and eating the eggs of our chickens. Don't try to build justification or build yourself a more decent world, you know, the one that pretends that you know what you're doing, that you're actually maintaining the law of life on your farm, blah, blah, blah!
You do it because you want and because you can.

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I am thoroughly fed up with people trying to justify the murder of other living beings. There is simply no justification other than "I want to and I can." Killing something "sweetly?" Please, you're disgusting. Anybody who can take the life of another living being is simply trash.

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This article and some of the comments suggest a more healthy, realistic approach towards nature and life.

Our arrogant, unnatural attitudes about life and death have caused so much unnecessary suffering to both animals and humans. "Human life" has become such a sick, twisted obsession that we've devoted unnecessary resources toward prolonging it beyond its natural course. So instead of a dignified end, we spend our last couple of years pumped up on drugs, hooked-up to tubes, hanging by a thread in nursing homes, while healthy children die of hunger.

Meanwhile, we pay others to raise our animals in factories because we're too squeamish and full of ourselves to hunt them in the wild or raise them in more natural surroundings. I have more respect for lions, tigers, and bears than I do for a bunch of self-righteous vegi-nazis buzzing in my ear.

As the article implies, we eat too much meat because it's too easy to get, and we've been separated from the sometimes difficult, but more wholesome ritual of raising, killing, and processing it ourselves.

To be honest, I'm not quite there myself. But the more I see and read, the more I want to get there, and the more I see the non-tangible benefits of getting off-the-grid.

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More than 25 years ago I moved to the countryside with the idea of "living off the land". One of my projects was to raise about a dozen chickens for food. Don't remember the details but ended up with about a dozen chicks and most turned out to be roosters - really colorful and beautiful birds. Well the time came to put them in the pot! Actually freezer. By the time I got them in my freezer I was a nervous wreck (wielding the axe etc.) although I had grown up in a household that had chickens mostly for eggs but we ate one time to time. Nevertheless I couldn't imagine eating one my roosters after putting them up. It was more than a year later before I got up enough nerve to try eating one. I thought they would be a total waste if not eaten. And to my shock and surprise they were the best tasting chickens I have ever eaten! Still, the whole experience was very traumatic and it pushed me over the edge to became a vegetarian. And I have never regretted becoming a vegetarian for one second.

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I've always been of a mind that if you're going to eat meat, you should participate in the death of a animal at least once, so you have a better appreciation for what you're eating. Watching someone pick at their "steak" and ending up throwing half of it away is irritating to me. There would be a lot more vegetarians in the world if things worked this way.

In the grand scheme of things, some animals are prey for other animals, it's part of nature. If there were no predators, there would still be at least as much pain among the prey species as they overpopulated their habitat and food resources dwindled and became scarce. Starvation and disease would end up taking many lives in unappealing ways to reestablish ecological balance.

Too often, we humans are in denial about where we fit into it all and that attitude manifests in what is pretty odd behavior, when you step back and look at it objectively. Witholding our own bodies from returning to the earth from whence they came when we no longer have use for them is one such behavior. The elaborate charade of the "meat industry" to protect our silly sensibilities from the reality of who we are and what we are doing is another.

Our assignment for tomorrow is to list five silly things that we do to delude ourselves into believing that we are something other than what we really are. The class will then vote on who created the most interesting list and the winner will be killed and eaten for lunch.

Just kidding. But I recommend we laugh at ourselves more often, and consider that the world order we have created is just one of infinite possibilities.

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Most of my wee bit of land is given over to veggies, fruit trees, herb gardens... We also have 7 chickens. There used to be 9.

We keep them mainly for the eggs. And they all have names.

But I'm not sentimental.

Next spring we are adding a meat bird run.

It's food security I'm concerned with.
With my overrun (I plant a row for the hungry) of eggs and veggies. I'll be able to provide protein too.

And helping my neighbors and the folks on my freecycle looking for food.

This is the kind of community we are going to need to build.

I'f you're a vegan, learn how to grow your soy, peanuts, onions, and potatoes.

If you're a vegetarian, get a couple of chickens for the eggs. AND grow a huge garden of greens. Kale, chard, collards, beets.

Grow and Eat your philosophy. Conviction comes hard for the hungry.

Look for opportunities to turn the neigbors into a community.

Give what ya got, and share what you have.

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...all the time growing up on a farm. No ig deal; it was a way of life and the way of nature. Funny how this seems so strange to people today.

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Somehow she put the chicken's head between her fore and middle fingers, swing the chicken's body, then by snapping her wrist the body was separated from the head. It was my job, when I helped her, to retrieve the body, hold it by the feet to drain the blood.

On my grand parent's farm we never "celebrated" a chicken's life. It was dinner, pure and simple.

But in reading the description of the Salatin farm in "The Omnivore's Dilemma" I was struck by how familiar it was. Joel Salatin runs his operation like my grand parents, diversified and labor intensive, 24/7 no weekends, no holidays, very few vacations. Most of today's young "agri-businessmen" don't want to work that hard.

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As far as I am concerned, Makenna Goodman, Shel Silverstein (Giving Tree) and most of the rest of the world feel that Nature and all it entails is there for us. Notice the last part of this sentence "But unlike a public prisoner execution, we were there to celebrate the chicken's life, and what it had to offer us." Nothing about whether the chicken offered anything voluntarily, yet, voluntarily, they took its life.

I am also sort of confused about the "celebration" part.

Peace.

Jim Mayor
South Albany, Vermont

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I grew up on a fairly large family farm in the midwest. We had a huge vegetable garden, a large orchard as well as various animals. After giving them a pretty good life, we would kill our pets for their meat. Which is why I became a vegetarian at the age of eight - not an easy task in a farming community, esp. in the late 60's. Killing an animal for food didn't make sense to me, we had an abundant supply of delicious home grown fruits, vegetables, and soybeans - meat wasn't necessary.
I think if more people actually raised and personally killed the animals that they eat, they would be more thoughtful in their eating habits. And children could become aware that meat actually comes from a living animal, not the supermarket.

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You guys must see this movie!

< href="http://www.eatingalaska.com">


(from the website):
What happens to a vegetarian who moves to the last frontier?

Eating Alaska is a serious and humorous film about connecting to where you live and eating locally. It is about trying to break away from the industrial food system when that means not only buying fresh seasonal food from local farmers, but taking part in a world of hunting and gathering. Made by a former city dweller now living on an island in Alaska and married to fisherman and deer hunter, it is a journey into regional food traditions, our connection to the wilderness and to what we put into our mouths.

The film portrays a wry quest for safe, healthy, meaningful, and sustainable food that leads to climbing mountains with women hunters, scrutinizing food labels with kids, talking moose meat with teens in a small village public school, and exploring how others in the last frontier, Alaska Natives and non-Natives, are eating.

Eating Alaska takes viewers from a lower 48 farmer's market to the tundra to look for caribou, from fishing for wild salmon to visiting a vegan cooking class in Wasilla. Along the way we will visit with people who are grappling with what is on their plates and trying to balance living off the land with the convenience and speed of reaching for what's on the shelf at the supermarket. This is a story about connecting to where we live, urban or far from it, and coming to terms with what we eat and how we come by it.

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i'm vegan and i think all meat eaters should try killing and disemboweling their own food animals...because most of them couldn't do it...and then there would be so many more vegetarians and vegans. it's only because animals are slaughtered away from the "consumer" that meat is so prevalent. if cats and dogs were slaughtered akin to cows, pigs, chickens, most of us would be vegetarian and vegan.

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It constantly amazes me that people who oppose war, mass murder, and torture (and rightfully, I must add), at the same time contribute to death by eating meat (and basically do so mostly for the very selfish reason that the meat supposedly tastes good).

Don't you know you are hypocrites? Don't you know that killing or contributing to killing (if you buy the meat at the store), especially when nothing more than your pleasure is obtained through that killing, is evil. Yes, evil. There, I said it.
We don't need meat to survive. You can get all the protein you could ever need via vegetarian sources. The mass-murder isn't necessary.

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Seeds are living embryos. Greens are living things. Why draw the line based on whether something is capable of locomotion? We must face this -- in order to live, we kill things. Different people draw that killing line at different places – but it seems only people who stop eating have moral authority in the food/kill debate. Maybe we can focus instead on honoring the life that we take by using our brains/being to honor each other? If one can't kill what one eats, don't eat it. If one would rather not kill something that moves for food, then that is a decision I can respect. But I can and do kill what I eat -- I'd bet one who beats me up about it, by extension, minimizes the life I have taken into myself. With animals, I understand that people feel a duty to protect something that can't protect itself from humans. Most of us feel a duty to protect humans from abusive humans. But all of this becomes real, instead of theoretical argument, when one decides to grow what one eats. How much productive land can one afford? How many people am I in community with? I need more land if I want to hunt/gather, especially if the land is marginal. I need less land if I partner with plants and animals, cycling everything. How many people are competing for the land in other ways? The more we populate, the more difficult it becomes beyond a certain point. It appears we are beyond that point. Beyond that point, we can turn on each other, or we can stop eating. Whose life do you value more? Yours, or something/someone else’s? Your choice. But if you choose to value yours more than mine, I just may fight you. Strength and ingenuity wins in the material world. If chickens were stronger than us, we’d be their food. Currently, HIV, H1N1 and others are having humans for lunch.

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I also feel the same everytime they slaughter animals at the farm. It seems like they are crying for mercy. What else can we do? God created them to fulfill our needs. Up to now, eating animals' meat is a big issue. There are organizations that fight for the animal's right.

excessive sweating

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how about when you take the life of a growing plant??? science has shown that plants do respond to pain... does anyone besides us thank a plant before we pick it for food???

do you think before you pick up a fresh laid egg???

see how far down the list we can take this thread... if you don't take a life of some sort, including that tomato in the yard, you starve to death... period...

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In China,Korea and some other countries, they kill dogs and cats for food. It's time to evolve; no, you wouldn't kill your dog sweetly (or softly)at that "idyllic" farm. And chickens like to enjoy life too. I would suggest rice and beans on that farm table. This was my daily diet while spending six months in Cameroon, Africa at a chimpanzee sanctuary. Why? Well, some people there like to eat chimpanzees and gorillas even though it's illegal and part of the bushmeat trade. My rice and beans vs chimpanzees, chickens, cows, dogs and cats is the best! And please, stop making invalid health excuses. Meat is after all an addiction...Try tofu, tempeh AND rice and beans. Yum!

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The frugivores (gorillas, chimpanzees and other primates) have intestinal tracts twelve times the length of the body, clawless hands and alkaline urine and saliva. Their diet is mostly vegetarian, occasionally supplemented with carrion, insects, etc.

Flesh-eating animals lap water with their tongue, whereas vegetarian animals imbibe liquids by a suction process. Humans are classified as primates and are thus frugivores possessing a set of completely herbivorous teeth. Proponents of the theory that humans should be classified as omnivores note that human beings do, in fact, possess a modified form of canine teeth. However, these so-called "canine teeth" are much more prominent in animals that traditionally never eat flesh, such as apes, camels, and the male musk deer.

It must also be noted that the shape, length and hardness of these so-called "canine teeth" can hardly be compared to those of true carnivorous animals. A principle factor in determining the hardness of teeth is the phosphate of magnesia content. Human teeth usually contain 1.5 percent phosphate of magnesia, whereas the teeth of carnivores are composed of nearly 5 percent phosphate of magnesia. It is for this reason they are able to break through the bones of their prey, and reach the nutritious marrow.

Zoologist Desmond Morris makes a case for vegetarianism in his 1967 book, The Naked Ape: "It could be argued that, since our primate ancestors had to make do without a major meat component in their diets we should be able to do the same. We were driven to become flesh eaters only by environmental circumstances, and now that we have the environment under control, with elaborately cultivated crops at our disposal, we might be expected to return to our ancient feeding patterns."

In The Human Story, edited by Marie-Louise Makris (1985), we read: "...recent studies of their teeth reveal that the Australopithecines did not eat meat as a regular part of their diet, and were mainly peaceful vegetarians, rather like chimps or gorillas. The popular image of the murderous ape is now as extinct as the Australopithecines themselves."

Dr. Gordon Latto notes that carnivorous and omnivorous animals can only move their jaws up and down, and that omnivores "have a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth, a blunt tooth, a sharp tooth--showing that they were destined to deal both with flesh foods from the animal kingdom and foods from the vegetable kingdom...

"Carnivorous mammals and omnivorous mammals cannot perspire except at the extremity of the limbs and the tip of the nose; man perspires all over the body. Finally, our instincts; the carnivorous mammal (which first of all has claws and canine teeth) is capable of tearing flesh asunder, whereas man only partakes of flesh foods after they have been camouflaged by cooking and by condiments.

"Man instinctively is not carnivorous," explains Dr. Latto. "...he takes the flesh food after somebody else has killed it, and after it has been cooked and camouflaged with certain condiments. Whereas to pick an apple off a tree or eat some grain or a carrot is a natural thing to do; people enjoy doing it; they don't feel disturbed by it. But to see these animals being slaughtered does affect people; it offends them. Even the toughest of people are affected by the sights in the slaughterhouse.

"I remember taking some medical students into a slaughterhouse. They were about as hardened people as you could meet. After seeing the animals slaughtered that day in the slaughterhouse, not one of them could eat the meat that evening."

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Author R.H. Weldon writes in No Animal Food:

"The gorge of a cat, for instance, will rise at the smell of a mouse or a piece of raw flesh, but not at the aroma of fruit. If a man can take delight in pouncing upon a bird, tear its still living body apart with his teeth, sucking the warm blood, one might infer that Nature had provided him with a carnivorous instinct, but the very thought of doing such a thing makes him shudder. On the other hand, a bunch of luscious grapes makes his mouth water, and even in the absence of hunger, he will eat fruit to gratify taste."

As far back as 1961, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that: "A vegetarian diet can prevent 97% of our coronary occlusions." More recently, William S. Collens and Gerald B. Dobkens concluded: "Examination of the dental structure of modern man reveals that he possesses all the features of a strictly herbivorous animal. While designed to subsist on vegetarian foods, he has perverted his dietary habits to accept food of the carnivore. It is postulated that man cannot handle carnivorous foods like the carnivore. Herein may lie the basis for the high incidence of arteriosclerotic disease."

Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), responds to the argument that killing animals for food is natural:

"This is quite an admirable argument. It explains practically everything; why we do not eat each other, except under conditions of unusual stress; why we may kill certain other animals (they are, in the order of nature, food for us); even why we should be kind to pets and try to help miscellaneous wildlife (they are not naturally our food). There are some problems with the idea that an order of nature determines which species are food for us, but an examination of human history indicates the broad outlines of just such an order, though inhibitions against eating certain species may vary from culture to culture.

"The main problem with this argument is that it does not justify the practice of meat-eating or animal husbandry as we know it today; it justifies hunting. The distinction between hunting and animal husbandry probably seems rather fine to the man in the street, or even to your typical rule-utilitarian moral philosopher. The distinction, however, is obvious to an ecologist. If one defends killing on the grounds that it occurs in nature, then one is defending the practice as it occurs in nature.

"When one species of animal preys on another in nature, it only preys on a very small proportion of the total species population. Obviously, the predator species relies on its prey for its continued survival. Therefore, to wipe the prey species out through overhunting would be fatal. In practice, members of such predator species rely on such strategies as territoriality to restrict overhunting and to insure the continued existence of its food supply.

"Moreover, only the weakest members of the prey species are the predator's victims: the feeble, the sick, the lame, or the young accidentally separated from the fold. The life of the typical zebra is usually placid, even in lion country; this kind of violence is the exception in nature, not the rule.

"As it exists in the wild, hunting is the preying upon isolated members of an animal herd. Animal husbandry is the nearly complete annihilation of an animal herd. In nature, this kind of slaughter does not exist. The philosopher is free to argue that there is no moral difference between hunting and slaughter, but he cannot invoke nature as a defense of this idea.

"Why are hunters, not butchers, most frequently taken to task by the larger community for their killing of animals?...If any form of meat-eating is justified, it would be meat from a hunted animal."

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In his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes:

"Killing an animal is in itself a troubling act. It has been said that if we had to kill our own meat we would all be vegetarians. There may be exceptions to that general rule, but it is true that most people prefer not to inquire into the killing of the animals they eat.

"Very few people ever visit a slaughterhouse; and films of slaughterhouse operations are rarely shown on television...Yet those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed have no right to be shielded from this or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy.

"If it is distasteful for humans to think about, what can it be like for the animals to experience it?"

Peter Singer concludes in Animal Liberation that "by ceasing to rear and kill animals for food, we can make extra food available for humans that, properly distributed, it would eliminate starvation and malnutrition from this planet. Animal Liberation is Human Liberation, too."

Dr. Milton Mills' "The Comparative Anatomy of Eating,"

www.vegsource.com/veg_faq/comparative.htm

and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine,

www.pcrm.org ,

argue persuasively that the optimal diet for humanity is a vegan diet. However, even if humans really are omnivores and not frugivores, the diet of natural omnivores is mostly (80 percent) plant food.

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Excerpted from

"The Comparative Anatomy of Eating", by Milton R. Mills, MD

Which category are humans most suited for?

*Facial Muscles*
CARNIVORE: Reduced to allow wide mouth gape
OMNIVORE: Reduced
HERBIVORE: Well-developed
HUMAN: Well-developed

*Jaw Type*
CARNIVORE: Angle not expanded
HERBIVORE: Expanded angle
OMNIVORE: Angle not expanded
HUMAN: Expanded angle

*Jaw Joint Location*
CARNIVORE: On same plane as molar teeth
HERBIVORE: Above the plane of the molars
OMNIVORE: On same plane as molar teeth
HUMAN: Above the plane of the molars

*Jaw Motion*
CARNIVORE: Shearing; minimal side-to-side motion
HERBIVORE: No shear; good side-to-side, front-to-back
OMNIVORE: Shearing; minimal side-to-side
HUMAN: No shear; good side-to-side, front-to-back

*Major Jaw Muscles*
CARNIVORE: Temporalis
HERBIVORE: Masseter and pterygoids
OMNIVORE: Temporalis
HUMAN: Masseter and pterygoids

*Mouth Opening vs. Head Size*
CARNIVORE: Large
HERBIVORE: Small
OMNIVORE: Large
HUMAN: Small

*Teeth: Incisors*
CARNIVORE: Short and pointed
HERBIVORE: Broad, flattened and spade shaped
OMNIVORE: Short and pointed
HUMAN: Broad, flattened and spade shaped

*Teeth: Canines*
CARNIVORE: Long, sharp and curved
HERBIVORE: Dull and short or long (for defense), or none
OMNIVORE: Long, sharp and curved
HUMAN: Short and blunted

*Teeth: Molars*
CARNIVORE: Sharp, jagged and blade shaped
HERBIVORE: Flattened with cusps vs complex surface
OMNIVORE: Sharp blades and/or flattened
HUMAN: Flattened with nodular cusps

*Chewing*
CARNIVORE: None; swallows food whole
HERBIVORE: Extensive chewing necessary
OMNIVORE: Swallows food whole and/or simple crushing
HUMAN: Extensive chewing necessary

*Saliva*
CARNIVORE: No digestive enzymes
HERBIVORE: Carbohydrate digesting enzymes
OMNIVORE: No digestive enzymes
HUMAN: Carbohydrate digesting enzymes

*Stomach Type*
CARNIVORE: Simple
HERBIVORE: Simple or multiple chambers
OMNIVORE: Simple
HUMAN: Simple

*Stomach Acidity*
CARNIVORE: Less than or equal to pH 1 with food in stomach
HERBIVORE: pH 4 to 5 with food in stomach
OMNIVORE: Less than or equal to pH 1 with food in stomach
HUMAN: pH 4 to 5 with food in stomach

*Stomach Capacity*
CARNIVORE: 60% to 70% of total volume of digestive tract
HERBIVORE: Less than 30% of total volume of digestive tract
OMNIVORE: 60% to 70% of total volume of digestive tract
HUMAN: 21% to 27% of total volume of digestive tract

*Length of Small Intestine*
CARNIVORE: 3 to 6 times body length
HERBIVORE: 10 to more than 12 times body length
OMNIVORE: 4 to 6 times body length
HUMAN: 10 to 11 times body length

*Colon*
CARNIVORE: Simple, short and smooth
HERBIVORE: Long, complex; may be sacculated
OMNIVORE: Simple, short and smooth
HUMAN: Long, sacculated

*Liver*
CARNIVORE: Can detoxify vitamin A
HERBIVORE: Cannot detoxify vitamin A
OMNIVORE: Can detoxify vitamin A
HUMAN: Cannot detoxify vitamin A

*Kidney*
CARNIVORE: Extremely concentrated urine
HERBIVORE: Moderately concentrated urine
OMNIVORE: Extremely concentrated urine
HUMAN: Moderately concentrated urine

*Nails*
CARNIVORE: Sharp claws
HERBIVORE: Flattened nails or blunt hooves
OMNIVORE: Sharp claws
HUMAN: Flattened nails

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I'm vegan, and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article. I am not an animal rights activist, I decided to adopt a vegan diet two years ago after investigating the industrialized meat industry in the united states. I think killing and eating animals is a perfectly human undertaking, as we are omnivores.
I decided to stop participating in the industrialization of the meat industry and its byproducts because of the disgusting methods they use to create the unrecognizable packaged meat you see in the supermarket. avoiding eating the flesh of animals that are fed nothing but corn products, pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones and spend their entire lives in their own fecal matter was an easy choice for me. And USDA organic doesn't mean much of anything except that there are no antibiotics or growth hormones in the food. because they have almost no regulations on organic food as of yet, so animals are fed, slaughtered and processed almost the same way as non-organic.
I would go back to eating animal products if i could exist on a farm like this one someday, (right now im stuck right smack in the middle of a city); it sounds like a great place to raise food. I think that taking the extra steps to raise, slaughter, and process your own animal products is a perfectly natural human instinct, as we have been doing it for thousands of years. Industrializing food for mass consumption is a new process in the spectrum of human existence, so it is unrefined, and designed to make money. Eliminating capitalism from our food probably makes it taste better!
So overall, this article made me happy to know that there is still hope for the family owned farm, and that humans can still consume animals without the use of massive scale industrialization.

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When I was growing up in the fifties in rural California, we bought live chickens at the market. For a little more money they would kill the chicken for you or you could take it home and do it yourself. Needless to say, a squawking chicken in the station wagon is, well, not cool. But we had fresh chickens without the chemicals and god-knows-what that corporate farms force-feed the poor things. We would take the chicken home and pluck the feathers--something everyone should experienec to appreciate a Sunday chicken dinner--and then my aunt would cut it up and prepare the best fried chicken dinners that I will ever experinece again in my life. We didn't eat it everyday--like folks to today. It was a treat.

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Thank you to Alternet and the author for posting an intelligent article about food. I get very tired of the ignorant vegan attitude that seems to prevail. Humans first evolved as hunter/gatherers, we would not be here had we been unwilling to kill and eat other animals. We must always do it with respect and compassion. I have killed many animals for my freezer and I understand the process that I am putting animals through. For this reason I usually hunt alone as I do not like others to see how choked up I get when confronting a fallen animal. But, I do it again anyway because that is the process of life. To all those vegans who think we can get along without killing animals I say, pull your head out and look around. You cannot cut a forest, plow a field, and plant vegatables without killing thousands of small creatures and displacing tens or hundreds of larger creatures. You Mr. Vegan have the blood of a thousand beings on your veggies, but refuse to acknowledge the world you create.

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All the psychological investment that these cultural radical vegans put into hyper focusing on animals is sad. My cat likes chicken and so does my dog. What is wrong with you people?

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"A diet that can lead to heart attacks, cancer, and numerous other diseases cannot be a natural diet," writes Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook. "A diet that pillages our resources of land, water, forests, and energy cannot be a natural diet. A diet that causes the unnecessary suffering and death of billions of animals each year cannot be a natural diet."

I understand there are conservative Christians who fear vegetarianism...which is kind of like being afraid of nonsmoking, nondrinking, or recycling. Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain fed to livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

A pamphlet put out by Compassion Over Killing says raising animals for food is one of the leading causes of both pollution and resource depletion today. According to a recent United Nations report, "Livestock's Long Shadow," raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined. Researchers from the University of Chicago similarly concluded that a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating animal products than by switching to a hybrid car.

A 2007 journal published by the American Dietetic Association found "meat protein production required 26 times more water than vegetable protein on rain-fed lands." The journal further states that dieticians "can encourage eating that is both healthful and conserving of soil, water, and energy by emphasizing plant sources of protein and foods that have been produced with fewer agricultural inputs."

"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation."

---Union Nations' Food and Agriculture Association

A single dairy cow produces approximately 120 pounds of wet manure per day, which is equivalent to that of 20 to 40 humans.

70% of the grain grown and 50% of the water consumed in the U.S. are used by the meat industry. (Audubon Society)

On average 990 liters of water are required to produce one liter of milk. (United Nations)

Over 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to grow grain for livestock. (Greenpeace)

It takes nearly one gallon of fossil fuel and 5,200 gallons of water to produce just one pound of conventionally fed beef. (Mother Jones)

Farmed animals produce an estimated 1.4 billion tons of fecal waste each year in the U.S. Much of this untreated waste pollutes the land and water.

The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.

“If anyone wants to save the planet,” says Paul McCartney in a PETA interview, “all they have to do is stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let’s do it! Linda was right. Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century.”

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A vegetarian since 1982, I attended my first anti-vivisection protest in the spring of 1985, as anti-apartheid demonstrations rocked the UC San Diego campus. I first got interested in promoting vegetarianism in mainstream society after reading John Robbins' Diet for a New America (1987). Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it makes veganism seem as reasonable and mainstream as recycling.

Half the water consumed in the U.S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce 20 times as much excrement as does the entire human population; creating sewage which is 10 to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause 10 times more water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes three times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined. Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contribute to half the water pollution in the United States.

Joanna Macy, author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, depicts the advantages of America moving towards a vegan diet in her foreword to Diet for a New America:

"The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis...

"The social, ecological, and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale...

"The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes, begin to grow again. Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.

"The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and farm factories had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants..."

Joanna Macy admits, "This scenario is wildly, absurdly utopian. It is also clearly the way we are meant to live, built to live." What could possibly make it a reality? "It is this very book!"

Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights similarly says:

"Merely by ceasing to eat meat
Merely by practicing restraint
We have the power to end a painful industry

"We do not have to bear arms to end this evil
We do not have to contribute money
We do not have to sit in jail or go to
meetings or demonstrations or
engage in acts of civil disobedience

"Most often, the act of repairing the world,
of healing mortal wounds,
is left to heroes and tzaddikim (holy people)
Saints and people of unusual discipline

"But here is an action every mortal can
perform--surely it is not too difficult!"

When I first read Diet for a New America, I felt it could have the same kind of impact on mainstream American society that Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet had in the '70s.

John Robbins spoke before the United Nations in 1994, where he received a standing ovation.

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"Global hunger could be directly attributed to meat-eating." ---Chrissie Hynde

Half the world's population does not receive an adequate amount of food to eat. Ten to twenty million die annually of hunger and its effects. The Institute for Food and Development Policy reports that, "Forty thousand children starve to death on this planet every day," or one child every two seconds.

The livestock population of the United States today consumes enough grain and soybeans to feed over five times the entire human population of the country. We feed these animals over 80% of the corn we grow, and over 95% of the oats. Less than half the harvested agricultural acreage in the United States is used to grow food for people. Most of it is used to grow livestock feed.

Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain-fed livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

The world's cattle alone, not to mention pigs and chickens, consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. According to Department of Agriculture statistics, one acre of land can grow 20,000 pounds of potatoes. That same acre of land, if used to grow cattlefeed, can produce less than 165 pounds of beef.

In his book, The Hungry Planet, Georg Bergstrom points out that protein-starved underdeveloped nations export more protein to wealthy nations than they receive. He calls this "the protein swindle." Ninety percent of the world's fish meal catch, for example, is exported to rich countries. One-third of Africa's peanut crop winds up in the stomachs of European livestock. Half the world's cereal crop is fed to livestock and the United States annually imports one million tons of vegetable protein from Third World nations--just to feed its farm animals.

Bergstrom writes: "Sometimes one wonders how many Americans and Western Europeans have grasped the fact that quite a few of their beef steaks, quarts of milk, dozens of eggs, and hundreds of broilers are the result, not of their agriculture, but of the approximately two million metric tons of protein, mostly of high quality, which astute Western businessmen channel away from the needy and hungry."

Jeremy Rifkin, author of a dozen influential books and President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, writes in his 1992 bestseller Beyond Beef:

"Cattle and other livestock are devouring much of the grain produced on the planet. It need be emphasized that this is a new phenomenon, unlike anything ever experienced before.

"Contrary to popular belief, the poor are getting poorer each year...Increased poverty has meant increased malnutrition. On the African continent, nearly one in every four human beings is malnourished. In Latin America, nearly one out of every seven people goes to bed hungry each night. In Asia and the Pacific, 28 percent of the people border on starvation, experiencing the gnawing pain of a perpetual hunger."

"In the Near East, one in ten people is underfed. Chronic hunger now affects upwards of 1.3 billion people, according to the world Health Organization--a statistic all the more striking in a world where one third of all the grain produced is being fed to cattle and other livestock. Never before in human history has such a large percentage of our species--nearly 25 percent--been malnourished.

"The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains represents an...evil whose consequences may be far greater and longer lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against their fellow human beings."

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if we can survive on a vegetarian diet, instead of promoting and sugar coating a particular lifestyle, justify it. Explain in simple terms why its alright to murder animals when we have "no need" to whatsoever?!

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The following quotes, facts, figures, and statistics are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007), by Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

---Albert Einstein

"Each year, the meat industrial complex abuses and butchers nearly 9 billion cows, pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and other innocent, feeling animals just for the enjoyment of consumers. Each year, nearly 1.5 million of these consumers are crippled and killed prematurely by heart failure, cancer, stroke, and other chronic diseases that have been linked conclusively with the consumption of these animals. Each year, millions of other animals are abused and sacrificed in a vain search for a 'magic pill' that would vanquish these largely self-inflicted diseases."

---Alex Hershaft, PhD, president, Farm Animal Reform Movement

When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24 percent reduction in death from heart disease.

Similarly, in the famous Oxford Vegetarian Study, where 6,000 vegetarians were compared with 5,000 meat-eaters over nearly two decades, scientists found that the rate of death from heart disease was 28 percent lower in vegetarians than in meat-eaters.

One study analyzed eighty scientific studies in leading medical journals. The analysis found that vegetarians had lower blood pressure, and were less likely to suffer from stroke, heart attack, and kidney failure.

A large German study of nearly 2,000 vegetarians found that deaths from heart disease were reduced by over one-third, and that heart disease itself was far less than that of the general population.

Another large study examined the coronary artery disease risk of young adults ages 18 to 30 and vegetarians were found to have much higher levels of cardiovascular fitness and a greatly reduced risk of heart disease.

"The process of gradual blocking of the coronary arteries begins not in adulthood but in childhood...and the main cause of this arteriosclerosis is the steadily increasing amount of fat in the American diet, particularly saturated animal fats such as those found in meat, chicken, milk and cheeses. If there was another disease that caused half a million deaths a year, you can be sure that the public would be acutely aware of the danger, and that the cure or prevention would be universally practiced."

---Dr. Benjamin Spock, author, child expert

"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."

---Dr. Dean Ornish, author, Reversing Heart Disease

Stroke is the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. Vegetarians have a 20 to 30 percent reduced risk of having a stroke. Stroke, like heart disease, is associated with diets high in saturated fats, and the vegetarian diet is naturally low in these fats.

The Oxford Vegetarian Study found cancer mortality to be 39 percent lower among vegetarians when compared with meat-eaters. The European Prospective Investigation of Cancer found vegetarians suffer 40 percent fewer cancers than the general population.

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Studies have shown that decreasing a woman's animal fat intake can reduce the chances that she will die from breast cancer. A large-scale, long-term study in the Netherlands found a powerful connection between the amount of animal fat consumed and the rate of prostate cancer. A review of a dozen studies found dietary fat strongly correlated with prostate cancer.

Ovarian, uterine, and endometrial cancers have all been shown to be strongly correlated to the amount of animal fat in one's diet, and vegetarian women have significantly lower rates of these cancers.

"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all the natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined."

---Dr. Neal Barnard, Executive Director, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rate of coronary disease of any group in the country. They have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate."

---William Castelli, MD, Director, Framingham Heart Study

"Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores."

---Dr. William Roberts, editor-in-chief, American Journal of Cardiology

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Dear Ms. Goodman,

At the top of your article, you say that killing animals for meat is necessary. But in the article, you do not return to this idea. You do not say why killing animals for food is necessary.

Why is it necessary, Ms. Goodman?

Respectfully,
Bob Doede
Eugene, Oregon

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I think everybody who wants to eat meat, use leather products, etc. should familiarize themselves with what's actually going on. I couldn't kill a cow, chicken, etc. unless I felt that I had to do it to survive, so I do not eat meat.

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Vasmurti is attacked for his "cut and paste" comments but no one addresses the vast body of documentation and wisdom he cites. The overwhelming scientific consensus (anti-vegetarian poster boy Dr. Weston Price notwithstanding) is that a balanced vegetarian diet is much healthier for humans and dramatically less ecologically disastrous for the planet. In addition, eliminating the wanton torture and massacre of animals by the billions should be a desirable goal of any enlightened society.

What seems perfectly acceptable to many people today will likely be part of a long list of atrocities our grandkids will look back upon with horror and puzzlement.

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Although it is an agnostic moral philosophy (i.e., no recognition of a personal God) a few centuries older than Christianity, Buddhism teaches a consistent ethic of reverence for all life. No wars have ever been waged in the name of Buddhism. Similarly, the act of abortion is explicitly condemned in the Buddhist canonical scriptures. Sir Edwin Arnold’s poetic biography on Siddhartha Gautama, The Light of Asia, caused quite a controversy in Victorian England: centuries before Jesus, an earlier teacher lived “the Christ life.”

The ethical teachings of the Buddha are quite similar to those found in the Gospel of Jesus: One must never be proud nor harbor anger against anyone. He who humbles himself shall be exalted, while the one who exalts himself shall be degraded. Harsh language must never be used against anyone.

Avoid lust, anger and greed. One should not scrutinize the mote in a neighbor’s eye without first noticing the beam in one’s own. One must “turn the other cheek” if attacked or abused. One’s own possessions must be shared with the less fortunate. If a man obtained the whole world and its riches, he still would not be satisfied, nor would this save him.

In 261 B.C., the Indian emperor Ashoka witnessed firsthand the innumerable casualties he caused during one of his many military campaigns. His heart was filled with grief. He converted to Buddhism. 19th century scholar and writer H.G. Wells considered Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism one of the most significant events in world history.

Ashoka, formerly a bloody and ruthless emperor, became a remarkably kind and gentle leader. Ashoka established some of the first animal rights laws. He stopped the royal hunt, stopped the sacrifice of animals in his capital city, stopped the killing of animals for food in the royal kitchens, and gave up the eating of meat. Ashoka made it illegal to kill many species of animals, such as parrots, ducks, geese, bats, turtles, squirrels, monkeys and rhinos. He forbade the killing of pregnant animals, or animals that were nursing their young. He declared certain days to be “non-killing days,” on which fish could not be caught, nor any other animals killed. He established wells and watering holes, places of rest and hospitals for humans and animals alike.

Ashoka educated his people to have compassion for animals, and to refrain from killing or harming them. He sent missionaries to all the neighboring kingdoms to teach mercy, compassion and nonviolence. Through Ashoka’s patronage, Buddhism was spread all over the Indian subcontinent. Buddhism would eventually reach the rest of Asia; today there are an estimated 300 to 600 million Buddhists worldwide.

The first precept of Buddhism is: “Do not kill, but rather preserve and cherish all life.” There is an ancient poem, reputed to be the only text ever written by the Buddha himself, which states:

“Let creatures all, all things that live, all beings of whatever kind, see nothing that will bode them ill. May naught of evil come to them.”

The Buddhist emperor Ashoka (268-223 BC) declared in one of his famous Pillar Edicts: “I have enforced the law against killing certain animals..The greatest progress of Righteousness among men comes from the exhortation in favor of non-injury to life and abstention from killing living beings.”

The Dalai Lama has said, “I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat.”

Mahayana Buddhism supports the vegetarian way of life. According to the Mahaparinirvana Sutra: “The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of great compassion.”

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The Lankavatara Sutra says:

“For the sake of love of purity, the bodhisattva should refrain from eating flesh, which is born from semen, blood, etc. For fear of causing terror to living beings let the bodhisattva, who is disciplining himself to attain compassion, refrain from eating flesh…It is not true that meat is proper food and permissible when the animal was not killed by himself, when he did not order others to kill it, when it was not specifically meant for him…Again, there may be some people in the future who…being under the influence of the taste for meat will string together in various ways many sophisticated arguments to defend meat-eating…But…meat-eating in any form, in any manner, and in any place is unconditionally and once and for all prohibited…Meat-eating I have not permitted to anyone, I do not permit, I will not permit…”

The Surangama Sutra says:

“The reason for practicing dhyana and seeking to attain samadhi is to escape from the suffering of life. But in seeking to escape from suffering ourselves, why should we inflict it upon others? Unless you can control your minds that even the thought of brutal unkindness and killing is abhorrent, you will never be able to escape from the bondage of the world’s life…After my parinirvana in the final kalpa different kinds of ghosts will be encountered everywhere deceiving people and teaching them that they can eat meat and still attain enlightenment…How can a bhikshu, who hopes to become a deliverer of others, himself be living on the flesh of other sentient beings?”

Contemporary Hindu spiritual masters have taught us that if one wishes to eat cow’s flesh (or the flesh of any other animal for that matter), one should wait until the animal dies of natural causes, rather than take the life of a fellow creature. This indicates that we are vegetarian first and foremost out of nonviolence toward and compassion for animals, rather than because we follow “dietary laws.”

Avoidance of onions and garlic is not limited to Hindus in India; there is a tradition of avoiding these foods in China, antedating the arrival of Buddhism. ‘Enjoy’ Vegetarian Restaurant in San Francisco, CA is run by Chinese Buddhists, and they do not serve onions or garlic in any of their preparations. However, they do serve mushrooms!

In Theravada Buddhist countries (Burma, Ceylon, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Tibet, Malaya), although the monks are forbidden to kill animals, they beg for food and are expected to eat whatever is offered them. Contrasting the Mahayana Buddhist countries (e.g., China) with the Theravada, in A Vegetarian Sourcebook, author Keith Akers writes:

“In the Mahayana countries, the custom regarding monks is completely different, reflecting a different attitude towards meat consumption. The Mahayana Buddhist monks do not beg for food at all; they prepare their own food, which is either bought, grown, or collected as rent. The Mahayana monks in China were strictly vegetarian in ancient times and remain so today.

“Dietary abstinence from meat was an ancient Chinese tradition that antedated the arrival of Buddhism. In China, all animal foods, onions, and alcohol were either forbidden or customarily avoided. Animal products were avoided in dress as they were in diet. There was a prohibition on the use of silk or leather (not observed in Theravada countries).

“Not only are the Mahayana Buddhist monks vegetarian, but so are many Buddhist lay people in China. Lay people usually receive a lay ordination, in which they must take from one to five vows. Almost everyone takes the first vow, which is not to take the life of any sentient creature.”

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The fate of animals and the fate of man are connected. (Ecclesiastes 3:19) A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada said in 1974:

"We simply request, 'Don't kill. Don't maintain slaughterhouses.' That is very sinful. It brings a very awkward karmic reaction upon society. Stop these slaughterhouses. We don't say, 'Stop eating meat.' You can eat meat, but don't take it from the slaughterhouse, by killing. Simply wait (until the animal dies of natural causes) and you'll get the carcasses.

"You are killing innocent cows and other animals--nature will take revenge. Just wait. As soon as the time is right, nature will gather all these rascals and slaughter them. Finished. They'll fight among themselves--Protestants and Catholics, Russia and America, this one and that one. It is going on. Why? This is nature's law. Tit for tat. 'You have killed. Now you kill yourselves.'

"They are sending animals to the slaughterhouse, and now they'll create their own slaughterhouse. You see? Just take Belfast. The Roman Catholics are killing the Protestants, and the Protestants are killing the Catholics. This is nature's law. It is not necessary that you be sent to the ordinary slaughterhouse. You'll make a slaughterhouse at home. You'll kill your own child--abortion. This is nature's law.

"Who are these children being killed? They are these meat-eaters. They enjoyed themselves when so many animals were killed and now they're being killed by their own mothers. People do not know how nature is working. If you kill you must be killed. If you kill the cow, who is your mother, then in some future lifetime your mother will kill you. Yes. The mother becomes the child, and the child becomes the mother.

"We don't want to stop trade, or the production of grains and vegetables and fruit. But we want to stop these killing houses. It is very, very sinful. That is why all over the world they have so many wars. Every ten or fifteen years there is a big war--a wholesale slaughterhouse for humankind. But these rascals--they do not see it, that by the law of karma, every action must have its reaction."

Similarly, in his purport to the Srimad Bhagavatam 6.10.9, Srila Prabhupada writes: "One cannot continue killing animals and at the same time be a religious man. That is the greatest hypocrisy. Jesus Christ said, 'Do not kill,' but hypocrites nevertheless maintain thousands of slaughterhouses while posing as Christians. Such hypocrisy is condemned..."

And:

"If one kills many thousands of animals in a professional way so that other people can purchase the meat to eat, one must be ready to be killed in a similar way in his next life and in life after life. There are many rascals who violate their own religious principles. According to Judeo-Christian scriptures, it is clearly said, 'Thou shalt not kill.' Nonetheless, giving all kinds of excuses, even the heads of religions indulge in killing animals while trying to pass as saintly persons. This mockery and hypocrisy in human society brings about unlimited calamities; therefore occasionally there are great wars. Masses of such people go out onto battlefields and kill themselves. Presently, they have discovered the atomic bomb, which is simply waiting to be used for wholesale destruction."

(Chaitanya Charitamrita, Madhya 24.251, purport)

Also:

"To be nonviolent to human beings and to be a killer or enemy of the poor animals is Satan's philosophy. In this age there is enmity towards poor animals, and therefore the poor creatures are always anxious. The reaction of the poor animals is being forced on human society, and therefore there is always the strain of cold or hot war between men, individually, collectively or nationally."

(Srimad Bhagavatam 1.10.6, purport)

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If we need a feeling of superiority, we separate out the different foods and ascribe qualities to some and not others. We pretend that plants aren't alive, and therefore are quite content to be pulled up or cut off (killed) and cooked and chewed and shit out, but I doubt this. It's convenient, and not only absolves the holder of this thinking of resposibility and further thought, but contains the delicious quality of criticism and superiority!

If you live in the tropics, you have a shot at a vegetarian diet aside from modern food transportation and storage, although iron and B12 are going to give most of you who don't constantly cheat some pretty strong cravings in 18 months to 3 years. (pay attention to how many vegetarians you know last about that long. Pay even more to how many eat meat, but still call themselves that). Move away from endless summer and you find more meat in the natural diet, get above the arctic circle and you find populations who live mostly on meat.

Someone long ago, wish I remembered who, posted in response to a veggie article something like, "If society collapses, you'll eat squirrel, you'll eat cat, you'll eat dog, you'll eat anything you need to live". This is true.

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many tomato hornworms do you think had to die so that you could have your tomatoes? I have killed over 1000 this year alone on 600 plants outside(now 500) that does not reflect those that I did not see. They sure do cause trouble. I guess now the anti meat crowd cannot eat my produce.. fact is a lot of insects and other animals are killed in vegetable production. think mice and deer and woodchucks and raccoons, and crows are not killed on vegetable farms? not to mention the ever obnoxious chipmunk.....Food all comes with blood... it just does.

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Author Keith Akers, in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), notes that by arguing against the killing of plants, the meat-eater "seeks to reduce vegetarianism to absurdity. If vegetarians object to killing living creatures (it is argued), then logically they should object to killing plants and insects as well as animals. But this is absurd. Therefore, it can’t be wrong to kill animals.

"Fruitarians take the argument concerning plants quite seriously; they do not eat any food which causes injury or death to either animals or plants. This means, in their view, a diet of those fruits, nuts and seeds which can be eaten without the destruction of the plant that produces the food.

"Finding an ethically significant line between plants and animals, though, is not particularly difficult. Plants have no evolutionary need to feel pain, and completely lack a central nervous system. Nature does not create pain gratuitously, but only when it enables the organism to survive. Animals, being mobile, would benefit from having a sense of pain; plants would not."

In determining a boundary between sentient and insentient life, Peter Singer in Animal Liberation suggests that "somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster seems as good a place to draw the line as any, and better than most."

Keith Akers states further, "Even if one does not want to become a fruitarian and believes that plants have feelings (against all evidence to the contrary), it does not follow that vegetarianism is absurd. We ought to destroy as few plants as possible. And by raising and eating an animal for food, many more plants are destroyed indirectly by the animals we eat than if we merely ate the plants directly."

(Meat-eaters indirectly kill ten times more plants than do vegetarians!)

"What about insects?" asks Akers, "While there may be reason to kill insects, there is no reason to kill them for food. One distinguishes between the way meat animals are killed for food and the way insects are killed.

"Insects are killed only when they intrude upon human territory, posing a threat to the comfort, health, or well-being of humans. There is a huge difference between ridding oneself of intruders and going out of one's way to find and kill something which would otherwise be harmless."

According to Akers:

"These questions may have a certain fascination for philosophers, but most vegetarians are not bothered by them. For any vegetarian who is not a biological pacifist, there would not seem to be any particular difficulty in distinguishing ethically between insects and plants on the one hand, and animals and humans on the other."

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I'd like to see a return to organic farming. In 1989, concern over the use of the pesticide Alar on apples caused many Americans to consider organic produce. We produce pesticides at a rate some 13,000 times faster than we did in the 1950s. Our environment is being flooded by pesticide compounds.

Poisons used to kill insects accumulate on crops, in the soil and in greater concentration in the tissues of living creatures higher on the food chain. The EPA's Pesticide Monitoring Journal reports that "Foods of animal origin (are) the major source of pesticide residues in the diet."

In his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, How to Survive in America the Poisoned, pesticide authority Lewis Regenstein writes: "Meat contains approximately 14 times more pesticides than do plant foods...Thus, by eating foods of animal origin, one ingests greatly concentrated amounts of hazardous chemicals."

A 1976 study by the EPA found the breast milk of mothers who consume animal products to be 50 to 100 times more contaminated by pesticide residues than the milk of vegetarian or vegan mothers.

Organic farming and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) are getting more attention today. These utilize natural insect controls, such as predatory insects, weather, crop rotation, pest-resistant varieties, soil tillage, and other environmentally safe practices.

A 1979 Department of Agriculture task force of scientists and economists came to "...positive conclusions on the importance of organic farming and its potential contributions to agriculture and society." Until the end of the Second World War, American farmers produced bountiful harvests without relying on pesticides. There is no reason why America cannot do so again.

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Significant environmental damage comes from eating higher on the food chain.

The pacific sardine lives along the coasts of North America from Alaska to southern California. Sardines, once a major part of the California fishing industry, are now considered to be "commercially extinct." Another species classified as "commercially extinct" is the New England haddock. Ecologists are also concerned about the significant reduction in finfish, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, Lake Erie cisco, and blackfins that inhabit Lakes Huron and Michigan.

Over 200,000 porpoises are killed every year by fishermen seeking tuna in the Pacific. Sea turtles are similarly killed in Caribbean shrimp operations. Some animals are killed because, as carnivores, they compete with the human predator for the right to kill other animals for food, including wild game and domesticated species raised by livestock ranchers. Alaskan hunters are eager to reduce the wolf population in their state because this animal is a predator of moose.

Cougars, coyotes and wolves are considered a menace to the cattle and sheep industries, and livestock ranchers have engaged in a large-scale campaign to exterminate them. Two species of wolves are now endangered, and very few wolves can be found in the United States except in Alaska and northeastern Minnesota. The relatively small number of eagles in the U.S. is largely due to the destruction of this species by livestock ranchers, particularly those in the sheep business.

Herbivorous animals inhabiting rangeland areas are also killed by the livestock industry because they compete with cattle and sheep for food. Large numbers of kangaroos are being exterminated in Australia, while in the United States livestock ranchers seek to destroy wild horses, wild burros, deer, elk, antelope and prairie dogs.

An ever-increasing amount of beef eaten in the United States is imported from Central and South America. To provide pasture for cattle, these countries have been clearing their priceless tropical rainforests. In 1960, Central America was blessed with 130,000 square miles of rainforest. But now, less than 80,000 square miles remain. At this rate, the entire tropical rainforests of Central America will be gone in another forty years.

These tropical rainforests are among the world's most precious natural resources. Amounting to only 30 percent of the world's forests, the rainforests contain 80 percent of the earth's land vegetation, and account for a substantial percentage of the earth's oxygen supplies. These forests are the oldest ecosystems on earth and have developed extreme ecological richness. Half of all species on earth live in the moist tropical rainforests. But these jewels of nature are being rapidly destroyed to provide land on which cattle can be grazed for the American fast-food market.

The rate of species extinction is 1,000 species a year, and most of that is due to the destruction of rainforests and related habitats in the tropics.

Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land into desert. We lose 4 million acres of topsoil each year and 85 percent of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock. To replace the soil we've lost, we're destroying our forests. Since 1967, the rate of deforestation in the U.S. has been 1 acre every 5 seconds. For each acre cleared in urbanization, 7 are cleared for grazing or growing livestock feed.

According to the editors of World Watch, July/August 2004: “The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future—deforestization, topsoil erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease.”

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When I was a kid, my dad decided to raise chickens for food and eggs. Before they matured though, we had to sell out due to his health failing. No one would buy the chickens but would take them if we'd give them away. My brothers and I had to chop the head off a chicken every day for our dinner because he wouldn't. Because I was the obviously unaffected one and the hungriest I guess, I ate 3 chickens a day. (They were pullets so not very big). My brothers had trouble getting through one. To this day my youngest brothers do not like chicken. I still love it and am raising chickens right now in my backyard for the eggs. I am looking at the time when they will be chicken and dumplings because I'm sure they have had plenty of exercise and will be too tough to fry. I love my chickens and will do whatever is necessary to keep them healthy but they are still food. I also know what is in their diet and I can't say that about Tyson.

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The following quotes, facts, figures, and statistics are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007) by Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:

"A reduction in beef and other meat consumption is the most potent single act you can take to halt the destruction of our environment and preserve our natural resources. Our choices do matter: What's healthiest for each of us personally is also healthiest for the life support system of our precious, but wounded planet."

---John Robbins, author, Diet for a New America, and President, EarthSave Foundation

One study puts animal waste in the United States to between 2.4 trillion to 3.9 trillion pounds per year. The United states produces 15,000 pounds of manure per person. This is 130 times the amount of waste produced by the entire human population of the United States.

A 1,000-cow dairy can produce approximately 120,000 pounds of waste per day. This is the functional equivalent of the amount of sanitary waste produced by a city of 20,000 people.

A 20,000-chicken factory produces about 2.4 million pounds of manure a year. Poultry factories are one of the fastest growing industries throughout Asia.

One pig excretes nearly three gallons of waste per day, or 2.5 times the average human's daily total. One hog farm with 50,000 pigs in France produces more waste than the entire city of Los Angeles, and some pig farms are much larger.

Factory farm pollution is the primary source of damage to coastal waters in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Scientists report that over sixty percent of the coastal waters in the United States are moderately to severely degraded from factory farm nutrient pollution. This pollution creates oxygen-depleted dead zones, which are huge areas of ocean devoid of aquatic life.

Meat production causes deforestation, which then contributes to global warming. Trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and the destruction of forests around the globe to make room for grazing cattle furthers the greenhouse effect. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations reports that the annual rate of tropical deforestation has increased from 9 million hectares in 1980 to 16.8 million hectares in 1990, and unfortunately, this destruction has accelerated since then. By 1994, a staggering 200 million hectares of rainforest had been destroyed in South America just for cattle.

"The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and sub-division developments combined."

---Philip Fradkin, in Audubon, National Audubon Society, New York

Agricultural meat production generates air pollution. As manure decomposes, it releases over 400 volatile organic compounds, many of which are extremely harmful to human health. Nitrogen, a major by-product of animal wastes, changes to ammonia as it escapes into the air, and this is a major source of acid rain. Worldwide, livestock produce over 30 million tons of ammonia. Hydrogen sulfide, another chemical released from animal waste, can cause irreversible neurological damage, even at low levels.

The World Conservation Union lists over 1,000 different fish species that are threatened or endangered. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimate, over 60 percent of the world's fish species are either fully exploited or depleted. Commercial fish populations of cod, hake, haddock, and flounder have fallen by as much as 95 percent in the north Atlantic.

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The United States and Europe lose several billion tons of topsoil each year from cropland and grazing land, and 84 percent of this erosion is caused by livestock agriculture. While this soil is theoretically a renewable resource, we are losing soil at a much faster rate than we are able to replace it. It takes 100 to 500 years to produce one inch of topsoil, but due to livestock grazing and feeding, farming areas can lose up to six inches of topsoil a year.

Livestock production affects a startling 70 to 85 percent of the land area of the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union. That includes the public and private rangeland used for grazing, as well as the land used to produce the crops that feed the animals. By comparison, urbanization only affects 3 percent of the United States land area, slightly larger for the European Union and the United Kingdom. Meat production consumes the world's land resources.

Half of all fresh water worldwide is used for thirsty livestock. Producing eight ounces of beef requires an unimaginable 25,000 liters of water, or the water necessary for one pound of steak equals the water consumption of the average household for a year.

The United States government spends $10 million each year to kill an estimated 100,000 wild animals, including coyotes, foxes, bobcats, badgers, bears, and mountain lions just to placate ranchers who don't want these animals killing their livestock. The cost far outweighs the damage to livestock that these predators cause.

The Worldwatch Institute estimates one pound of steak from a steer raised in a feedlot costs: five pounds of grain, a whopping 2,500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and about 34 pounds of topsoil.

33 percent of our nation's raw materials and fossil fuels go into livestock destined for slaughter. In a vegan economy, only 2 percent of our resources will go to the production of food.

"It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the overpopulation of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat."

---Jeremy Rifkin, author, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, and president of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation

Lester Brown of the Overseas Development Council calculates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only 10 percent per year, it would free at least 12 million tons of grain for human consumption--or enough to feed 60 million people.

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"One man's meat is another man/woman/child's hunger."

This slogan is part of the "Enough" campaign, with its aim of reducing meat consumption. The campaign highlights the waste of resources involved in feeding grain to animals:

"Every minute 18 children die from starvation, yet 40% of the world's grain is fed to animals for meat."

Vegetarianism for a trial period is advocated to "help the hungry, improve the environment" and "stop untold animal suffering." Vegetarianism is also recommended on health grounds.

This campaign actually has the support of organized religion.

Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain fed to livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

The realization that meat is an unnecessary luxury, resulting in inequities in the world food supply has prompted religious leaders in different Christian denominations to call on their members to abstain from meat on certain days of the week. Paul Moore, Jr., the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of New York, made such an appeal in a November, 1974 pastoral letter calling for the observance of “meatless Wednesdays.”

A similar appeal had previously been issued by Cardinal Cooke, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York. The Reverend Eugene Carson Blake, former head of the World Council of Churches and founder of Bread for the World, has encouraged everyone in his anti-hunger organization to abstain from eating meat on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

“Is this not the fast I have chosen? To loosen the chains of wickedness, to undo the bonds of oppression, and to let the oppressed go free? Is it not to share thy bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless? Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own.”

—Isaiah 58:6-8

“Honourable men may disagree honourably about some details of human treatment of the non-human,” wrote Stephen Clark in his 1977 book, The Moral Status of Animals, “but vegetarianism is now as necessary a pledge of moral devotion as was the refusal of emperor-worship in the early church.”

According to Clark, eating animal flesh is “gluttony,” and “Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists.”

“Clark’s conclusion has real force and its power has yet to be sufficiently appreciated by fellow Christians,” says the Reverend Andrew Linzey, author of Christianity and the Rights of Animals. “Far from seeing the possibility of widespread vegetarianism as a threat to Old Testament norms, Christians should rather welcome the fact that the Spirit is enabling us to make decisions so that we may more properly conform to the original Genesis picture of living in peace with creation.”

Father Thomas Berry, a Catholic priest, author, and founder of the Riverdale Center of Religious Research in New York, wrote in 1987 that “Vegetarianism is a way of life that we should all move toward for economic survival, physical well-being, and spiritual integrity.”

In 1992, members of Los Angeles’ First Unitarian Church agreed to serve vegetarian meals at the church’s weekly Sunday lunch. Their decision was made as a protest against animal cruelty and the environmental damage caused by the livestock industry.

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I feel awful about what I did. I went to a farm and I ripped the carrot out of the soil, giving it an uncomfortable and violent death. Its appendages or roots came off in that terrible tug. Then I took a knife and scraped off its outer cover. Then I sauteed it and several other carrots.

After five hours, I left the fetal position and wrote this.

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Convert To Apple TV

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Keith Akers writes in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983):

"Livestock agriculture is far less efficient in its use of land resources than plant food agriculture. This is one of the oldest arguments in favor of vegetarianism. It played a role in Plato's Republic. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley invoked the argument in his discussions of 'natural diet.' Mikkel Hindhede used the argument to help persuade Denmark to adopt a lacto-vegetarian diet when Denmark was blockaded by the Allies as a result of World War I. 'If Central Europe had adopted a similar diet,' he said, alluding to the disastrous German agricultural policies which emphasized meat production, 'I doubt that anyone would have starved.'"

In her 1971 bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet, author Frances Moore Lappe pointed out that it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. Most of the arable land in this country is used to grow feed for animals. Mathematics professor Dr. Richard Schwartz, author of Judaism and Vegetarianism, writes about the "insanity" of animal agriculture.

In his book Consuming Passions, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes:

"The case for vegetarianism is at its strongest when we see it as a moral protest against our use of animals as mere things, to be exploited for our convenience in whatever way makes them most cheaply available to us. Only the tiniest fraction of the tens of billions of farm animals slaughtered for food each year--the figure for the United States alone is nine billion--were treated during their lives in ways that respected their interests. Questions about the wrongness of killing in itself are not relevant to the moral issue of eating meat or eggs from factory-farmed animals, as most people in developed countries do.

"Even when animals are roaming freely over large areas, as sheep and cattle do in Australia, operations like hot-iron branding, castration, and dehorning are carried out without any regard for the animals' capacity to suffer. The same is true of handling and transport prior to slaughter. In the light of these facts, the issue to focus on is not whether there are some circumstances in which it could be right to eat meat, but on what we can do to avoid contributing to this immense amount of animal suffering.

"The answer is to boycott all meat and eggs produced by large-scale commercial methods of animal production, and encourage others to do the same. Consideration for the interests of animals alone is enough justification for this response, but the case is further strengthened by the environmental problems that the meat industry causes...

"Environmentalists are increasingly recognizing that the choice of what we eat is an environmental issue. Animals raised in sheds or on feedlots eat grains or soybeans...To convert eight or nine kilos of grain protein into a single kilo of animal protein wastes land, energy, and water. On a crowded planet with a growing human population, that is a luxury that we are becoming increasingly unable to afford.

"Intensive animal production is a heavy user of fossil fuels and a major source of pollution of both air and water. It releases large quantities of methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We are risking unpredictable changes to the climate of our planet...for the sake of more hamburgers. A diet heavy in animal products, catered to by intensive animal production, is a disaster for animals, the environment, and the health of those who eat it."

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During 1986 - 1988, when I had access to USENET, a nationwide computer network linking corporations, military bases, think tanks, universities, etc., I paid close attention to the abortion debate. The subject of animal rights always came up, albeit indirectly.

The mentality of the pro-choicers was that the fetus wasn't human, but rather some kind of lower life form--and that lower life forms couldn't possibly have rights.

When a pro-lifer discussed the potential humanity of the unborn, a pro-choicer replied, "MY CAT has more potential than that!"

One pro-choicer said sarcastically, "Maybe the kid (the fetus) should be raised as a vegetarian. After all, don't cows have the right to life?"

Another pro-choicer, Oleg Kiselev, upon hearing the pro-life argument that brain waves can be detected in the unborn as early as six weeks, pointed out that animals also have brain waves. He then added, "Excuse me, while I eat my veal stew."

In the spring of 1988, Stephen Carrier, a grad student in Mathematics at UC Berkeley, pointed out that chimpanzees share 99 percent of their DNA with humans, and so, to argue that species membership alone makes life worth protecting "is to fetishize DNA."

A pro-lifer responded: "If it'll please you, I will agree to protect anything that is 99 percent human."

To this, Stephen responded: "Okay. How about 50 percent? That would probably bring quite a few species into the net."

Stephen Carrier admitted, "I don't know what makes it acceptable to kill animals for meat. Some people think it's wrong, and I have no logical answer for them. But it's not murder, and I believe abortions are analogous. Yes, it's killing--but it's not murder."

Stephen admitted his argument was "not a mathematical proof, but there is no mathematical proof that will resolve the abortion debate."

In the fall of 1986, pro-life student John Morrow of Rutgers University compared abortion to slavery: Roe v. Wade denied rights to an entire class of humans merely on account of their age and developmental status, just as the Dred Scott decision of 1857 denied rights to an entire class of humans based on the color of their skin.

Dave Butler of Tektronix in Oregon responded: "Abortion and slavery? Not even close. A fetus isn't human. If you believe it's wrong to eat meat, should your morality be imposed upon everyone else?"

"Not even close" has become a popular slogan with pro-choicers. It even appeared on the headlines of most San Francisco Bay Area newspapers in November 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected.

"Not even close" is not a new slogan. Peter Singer writes in Animal Liberation that when Mary Wollstonecraft, a forerunner of today’s feminists, published A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, "her views were widely regarded as absurd."

Thomas Taylor, a distinguished Cambridge philosopher, tried to refute Mary Wollstonecraft by demonstrating that if women could be given liberation, then animals could be given liberation, too. And since this is "absurd" it must be equally "absurd" to give women liberation. Taylor called his parody, "A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes."

"Not even close" is the "A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes" of the late 20th and early 21st century, because it takes for granted the invincible prejudice that other animals couldn't possibly have rights. It is this prejudice which we in the animal rights movement are struggling to overcome.

Again, the mentality of the pro-choicers was that the fetus wasn't human, but some kind of lower life form--and that lower life forms couldn't possibly have rights. This led me to conclude that if there's any group out there which ought to be sympathetic to animal rights, it's pro-lifers.

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Was curious about that.

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I would like to see organized religion take up the struggle for animal rights. Religion has been wrong before. It has been said that on issues such as women's rights and human slavery, religion has impeded social and moral progress. It was a Spanish Catholic priest, Bartolome de las Casas, who first proposed enslaving black Africans in place of the Native Americans who were dying off in great numbers.

The church of the past never considered human slavery to be a moral evil. The Protestant churches of Virginia, South Carolina, and other southern states actually passed resolutions in favor of the human slave traffic.

Human slavery was called "by Divine Appointment," "a Divine institution," "a moral relation," "God's institution," "not immoral," but "founded in right." The slave trade was called "legal," "licit," "in accordance with humane principles" and "the laws of revealed religion."

New Testament verses calling for obedience and subservience on the part of slaves (Titus 2:9-10; Ephesians 6:5-9; Colossians 3:22-25; I Peter 2:18-25) and respect for the master (I Timothy 6:1-2; Ephesians 6:5-9) were often cited in order to justify human slavery. Some of Jesus' parables refer to human slaves. Paul's epistle to Philemon concerns a runaway slave returned to his master.

The Quakers were one of the earliest religious denominations to condemn human slavery. "Paul's outright endorsement of slavery should be an undying embarrassment to Christianity as long as they hold the entire New Testament to be the word of God," says contemporary Quaker physician Dr. Charles P. Vaclavik. "Without a doubt, the American slaveholders quoted Paul again and again to substantiate their right to hold slaves.

"The moralist movement to abolish slavery had to go to non-Biblical sources to demonstrate the immoral nature of slavery. The abolitionists could not turn to Christian sources to condemn slavery, for Christianity had become the bastion of the evil practice through its endorsement by the Apostle Paul. Only the Old Testament gave the abolitionist any Biblical support in his efforts to free the slaves. 'You shall not surrender to his master a slave who has taken refuge with you.' (Deuteronomy 23:15) What a pittance of material opposing slavery from a book supposedly representing the word of God."

In 1852, Josiah Priest wrote Bible Defense of Slavery. Others claimed blacks were subhuman. Buckner H. Payne, calling himself "Ariel," wrote in 1867: "the tempter in the Garden of Eden...was a beast, a talking beast...the negro." Ariel argued that since the negro was not part of Noah's family, he must have been a beast. Eight souls were saved on the ark, therefore, the negro must be a beast, and "consequently, he has no soul to be saved."

The status of animals in contemporary human society is like that of human slaves in centuries past. Quoting Luke 4:18, Colossians 3:11, Galatians 3:28 or any other biblical passages in favor of liberty, equality and an end to human slavery in the 18th or 19th century would have been met with the same kind of response animal rights activists receive today if they quote Bible verses in favor of ethical vegetarianism and compassion towards animals.

Someone once pointed out that while Hitler may have claimed to be a Christian, he imprisoned Christian clergy who opposed the Nazi regime, and even Christian churches were subject to the terror of the Nazis. Thinking along these lines, I realize that while I would like to see organized religion support animal liberation (e.g., as was the case with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American civil rights movement) rather than simply remain an obstacle to social and moral progress (e.g., 19th century southern churches in the U.S. upheld human slavery on biblical grounds), this support must come freely and voluntarily.

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A 1980 United Nations report states that women constitute half the world’s population, perform nearly two-thirds of its work hours, yet receive one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than one-hundredth of the world’s property.

The impact of the women’s movement upon the church is being heralded as a Second Reformation. Women are now being ordained as priests, pastors and ministers, while patriarchal references to the Almighty as "Father" are replaced with the gender-neutral "Parent." Jesus Christ is designated the "Child of God."

The words of Scripture—perhaps, more accurately, the words of the apostle Paul—on this subject are seen today not as a divine revelation, but rather as an embarrassment from centuries past:

"Let the women keep silent in the churches, for they are not allowed to speak. Instead, they must, as the Law says, be in subordination. If they wish to learn something, let them inquire of their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church...let a woman learn quietly with complete submission. I do not allow a woman to teach, neither to domineer over a man; instead she is to keep still. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman, since she was deceived, experienced the transgression. She will, however, be kept safe through the child-bearing, if with self-control she continues in faith and love and consecration." (I Corinthians 14:34-35; I Timothy 2:11-15)

Many churches now claim these instructions were merely temporary frameworks used to build churches in the first century pagan world—they are not to be taken as universal absolutes for all eternity. If churches, Scripture and Christianity can adapt and be redefined or reinterpreted in a changing world to end injustices towards women, they can certainly do the same towards animals.

The International Network for Religion and Animals (INRA) was founded in 1985 by Virginia Bouraquardez. Its educational and religious programs are meant to "bring religious principles to bear upon humanity’s attitude towards the treatment of our animal kin...and, through leadership, materials, and programs, to successfully interact with clergy and laity from many religious traditions."

According to INRA:

"Religion counsels the powerful to be merciful and kind to those weaker than themselves, and most of humankind is at least nominally religious. But there is a ghastly paradox. Far from showing mercy, humanity uses its dominion over other animal species to pen them in cruel close confinement; to trap, club, and harpoon them; to poison, mutilate, and shock them in the name of science; to kill them by the billions; and even to blind them in excruciating pain to test cosmetics.

"Some of these abuses are due to mistaken understandings of religious principles; others, to a failure to apply those principles. Scriptures need to be fully researched concerning the relationship of humans to nonhuman animals, and to the entire ecological structure of Nature. Misinterpretations of scripture taken out of context, or based upon questionable theological assumptions need to be re-examined."

A growing number of Christian theologians, clergy and activists are beginning to take a stand in favor of animal rights. In a pamphlet entitled Christian Considerations on Laboratory Animals, Reverend Marc Wessels notes that in laboratories animals cease to be persons and become "tools of research." He cites William French of Loyola University as having made the same observation at a gathering of Christian ethicists at Duke University—a conference entitled "Good News for Animals?"

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Half the water consumed in the U.S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce 20 times as much excrement as does the entire human population, creating sewage which is 10 to several hundred times as concentrated as raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause 10 times as much water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes 3 times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.

Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contribute to half the water pollution in the United States. The water that goes into a 1,000 lb. steer could float a destroyer. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons to produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American taxpayers, the cheapest hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!

The burden of subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water. Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers over 7 dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business income. 17 western states have enough water supplies to support economies and populations twice as large as the present.

Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land into desert. We lose 4 million acres of topsoil each year and 85 percent of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock. To replace the soil we've lost, we're destroying our forests. Since 1967, the rate of deforestation in the U.S. has been 1 acre every 5 seconds. For each acre cleared in urbanization, 7 are cleared for grazing or growing livestock feed.

1/3rd of all raw materials in the U.S. are consumed by the livestock industry and it takes 3 times as much fossil fuel energy to produce meat than it does to produce plant foods. A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."

Nor can fish provide any help here. There are signs that the fishing industry (which is quite energy-intensive) has already overfished the oceans in several areas. And fish could never play a major role in the worlds diet anyway: the entire global fish catch of the world, if divided among all the world's inhabitants would amount to only a few ounces of fish per person per week.

The American Dietetic Association reports that throughout history, humans have lived on "vegetarian or near vegetarian diets,"; meat has traditionally been a luxury. Nathan Pritikin, author of The Pritikin Plan, recommended not more than 3 ounces of animal protein per day; 3 ounces per week for his patients who had already suffered a heart attack.

Providing the entire world with a meat-centered diet is absurd. But what about providing only the affluent with a meat-centered diet? If the world population triples in the next 100 years, and meat consumption continues, then meat production would have to triple as well. Instead of 3.7 billion acres of cropland and 7.5 billion acres of grazing land, we would require 11.1 billion acres of cropland and 22.5 billion acres of grazing land.

But this is slightly larger than the total land area of the six inhabited continents! We are desperately short of forests, water and energy already. Even if we resort to extreme methods of population control: abortion, infanticide, genocide, etc...modest increases in the world population would make it impossible to maintain current levels of meat consumption. On a vegetarian diet, however, the world could easily support a population several times its present size. The world's cattle alone consume enough to feed 8.7 billion humans.

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"ethical", please, grow some beans for that "balanced" meal, I know it takes a little more work but at least your not supporting intentional violence against another being against their will. That's much more "ethical". Those chickens did not ask you to feed, water, raise them, they were forced to be in that situation against their will, that's a very sad rationale for violence against them and the premature ending of their life long before nature intended. Chelsea Green once again trying to numb us in regard to intentional violence against other species.

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this is a good article. for those new to killing a chicken-
catch the bird, and hold it's wings and legs firmly in one hand- the bird will be calm, you can take a sharp blade of an axe, and chop it's head off, in one move, hold it upside down, for a couple minutes, and let the blood drain. then, dip it in boiling water pluck the feathers, and then gut it. there will be no flopping about, w/ the head cut off, if you follow this method.
i was a vegetarian, until i became comfortable taking the life of the animals that i wanted to eat.
i agree w/an associated post, that eating pastured animals isn't what is causing global warming- it is feeding corn and soybeans to cattle, in feedlots. bad for the animals, bad for us, bad for the planet.

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I live and work on a farm in central Vermont, and there's always family around. That means a lot of emotional turmoil (and joy, ehem), a lot of secretly chugging whiskey in the closet (not really, but really), and best of all--extra hands. No one visits without pitching in. And now фото птиц все о птицах relay interface circuit parallel port relay interface four channel rf remote control rf remote control seropol5 that it's late August, the farm work is at its peak. Harvesting, preserving food for winter, and chicken killing.

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