Good points and discussion. I am not vegan, but I am not a big fan of meat products. In the past 5 years or so my desire to eat meat have been diminishing. That is, if I have a choice of foods, I usually go for breads, salads, pasta, and a multitude of other stuff out there, instead of red meat or chicken...
I am always hungry for seafood though. I don’t know if it has to do with specific needs of my body or just my taste preferences.
And I like some milk products. Cheese, butter. But I know they are also created through processes that are very inhuman (unless it’s milk and butter from a local small-scale farmer family who treat their goats like a part of their family)
As for eggs... I don’t know. Large-scale Chicken farms are horror. Small farmers are ok, I remember being a kid and renting a room by the sea at one lady’s house. She had s backyard with hens and we could go and get our own eggs in the morning for breakfast... They were just there, you could pick one or two up, and they weren’t fertile eggs. But for large-scale egg trade such conditions are impossible. The only way I see to make it humane is if everyone has 1-2 hens if their own as backyard pets. But who wants to deal with that and take care of them, let alone the question of how many people can afford having a house with s backyard...
I know if I have to survive in the forest or something, I will hunt and kill anything I can to feed myself or my kid... but I also know that in order to survive in the city, I can get my proteins and vitamins from many other sources that don’t involve that much violence
The whole vegan/meat eater debate is very heated indeed... I’ve read those articles on how meat farming hurts the environment... but then they say the same things about vegetable farming.
You are right in this
If there is a choice of so many foods rich in nutrients
Why stick to meat?
One day I was tempted to pick up a dead deer on the roadside. My family eats meat, and I thought - why not? Someone’s car just killed it, it was still warm, it would be eaten by animals or rot there anyway... so I offered my parents to put it in the trunk and carry it to the cabin we stayed in. Guess what. No one wanted to deal with skinning it and cutting it up)) Fresh clean meat “product” right there... But no one wanted to do the work of making it look like store bought meat ready for barbecue
And I thought to myself - if we didn’t have stores and if we actually had to hunt for every piece of meat, look that animal in the eye, and deal with cutting it and preserving it... the number of people eating meat every week would drastically diminish )) because then it would be challenging and hard work. They made it so easy for us - go to the store and grab your steak. If meat was accessible only through people’s own hunting or killing farm animals they raise, then most carnivorous people would become much more restricted in their eating habits.
Thanks for acknowledging the points I made and for appreciating the discussion and also for sharing some of your thoughts as well!
As an ethical vegan I think it's great to hear that you have been eating less animal products.
And yeah I dunno about the seafood thing either though in my case personally I've been allergic to seafood since I was young, and by allergic I mean that I can't eat it without throwing up. Even the smell of it bothers me and makes me want to vomit. However, recently some vegan companies have created fish substitutes so I'm really curious to try them and see if it was a taste thing? Or if I can eat them now that they are in plant form? I dunno what's going on with me there but I think it would be interesting if I could eat the vegan substitutes and not the actual real fish. I wonder why that happened to me as well if it was some kind of genetic thing? Or... Is it in my mind? I remember one time when I was a young child on the beach of Mexico and there was like hundreds if not thousands of dead fish washed up on the beach and it probably smelled really bad.. Maybe that experience when I was really young stuck with me in a psychological manner? I'm not sure..
And yeah I used to really like dairy as well! I went vegetarian when younger a couple times and cheese was difficult to quit. The vegan substitutes helped me there though and not I have vegan cheese and vegan milk with my meals sometimes and don't miss it at all since I get the same taste without the cruelty to animals involved.
Also.. Small farms to tend to be nicer to the animals but in the end they are still enslaving them against their will and often raping and murdering them and even pets in my opinion are kept against their will. I know that's not a popular thing to say even among vegans as many vegans are pet owners, but I personally think animals should be free to live their own lives. And virtually all contagious diseases humans get are caused by animals so I think nature is telling us something there.. It's saying stop living with the animals or you're going to keep getting sick and dying.
If I had to hunt in a survival situation to live I would also, though fortunately I'm not in that situation and I'm able to get all the food I need without directly paying for animals to be exploited.
When you mention people claiming vegetable farming is bad for the environment I would suggest that we feed animals more than twice as many plants as humans eat.. So that would be a lot less if we weren't feeding livestock so many plants, and then second I would say most of those arguments I've seen are about transport and shipping plants around the world, which is a problem though animal agriculture is worse than all transportation combined and there are ways to grow and buy food locally at farmers markets or even grow your own garden and food and you can bypass the need to ship food around the world.
Good question. Each person must answer it for themselves, but I think that's a good place to start.
Also that was a very interesting story about the deer roadkill you found.. And yeah I think if people had to hunt and kill their own food the picture would look a lot different for sure!!
Many times when I debate this issue animal product defenders will claim they don't kill the animals so they aren't doing anything wrong, but.. They are paying for that to happen like a hitman and if you pay for someone to be killed you become an accomplice in the court of law. Furthermore, the slaughterhouse workers often develop a psychological disease called PITS from killing sentient beings so much and crime rates go up with slaughterhouses go in, so the killing of animals leads to more psychological disease and crime in human communities as well.
Also I have to wonder.. How easily could we be led to war in other Nations by crooked politicians if we were so firm in our beliefs that we wouldn't even swat a fly for annoying us or killing an animal for taste pleasure? I think and I'm not alone in this that the way we treat animals leads to us treating other humans worse as well.. Some famous people have quoted in the past that there would be no wars among humans if we didn't treat the animals so poorly. Whether true or not, it's something to think about I think..