I saw an ad on the subway once with a cute cow and a cute dog that said “you wouldn’t eat one, so why eat the other?” I ended up having a constructive discussion with a vegan on the train cause I was like “well, we don’t eat dogs because they’re our pets, but it it came to it, we would”. Throughout history, when shit hits the fan, famine, sieges, etc. The dogs are the first to go and be made food.
We’ve just kind of agreed to kill this one group of animals as opposed to killing all of them. It’s horrible but you’re never gonna stop humans from eating meat. We just gotta encourage a more humane way to get meat. I’m a vegetarian now, but I know humans are just meat eaters and we can’t change that.
You’re right. When times got hard, the dog became dinner.
I raised all my own food for a few years and fully understand the horror of having to kill to eat. It’s never pretty, despite all the arguments I can make about health of the herd, culling only the weak, and giving them the best lives they could hope for.
I find the vegan arguments weak, though too. Every day we are discovering new levels of feelings and intelligence in life and that goes down to plants, too. It’s a harsh reality that in order to exist, you must make something else not exist… and unless we change something dramatically it’s never going away.
All this is why I’m cautiously optimistic about lab grown meat. It could turn this whole thing on its head.
Bring plant-based seems to result in much less overall pain. How so?
About 10% net energy goes between stages of the food ladder, so 90% of the energy in the entire cow’s diet was lost as heat. This applies to all animals.
If your goal is overall reduction in pain of others for your own survival, then eating a cow includes that cow’s death, plus the much larger amount of greenery it had to eat versus how much greenery you’d eat to comfortably live as the much smaller beings that we are.
Skipping the cow means less overall death by that logic.
I saw an ad on the subway once with a cute cow and a cute dog that said “you wouldn’t eat one, so why eat the other?” I ended up having a constructive discussion with a vegan on the train cause I was like “well, we don’t eat dogs because they’re our pets, but it it came to it, we would”. Throughout history, when shit hits the fan, famine, sieges, etc. The dogs are the first to go and be made food.
We’ve just kind of agreed to kill this one group of animals as opposed to killing all of them. It’s horrible but you’re never gonna stop humans from eating meat. We just gotta encourage a more humane way to get meat. I’m a vegetarian now, but I know humans are just meat eaters and we can’t change that.
…We also sometimes eat other people when shit hits the fan. 🙁.
You’re right. When times got hard, the dog became dinner.
I raised all my own food for a few years and fully understand the horror of having to kill to eat. It’s never pretty, despite all the arguments I can make about health of the herd, culling only the weak, and giving them the best lives they could hope for.
I find the vegan arguments weak, though too. Every day we are discovering new levels of feelings and intelligence in life and that goes down to plants, too. It’s a harsh reality that in order to exist, you must make something else not exist… and unless we change something dramatically it’s never going away.
All this is why I’m cautiously optimistic about lab grown meat. It could turn this whole thing on its head.
Bring plant-based seems to result in much less overall pain. How so?
About 10% net energy goes between stages of the food ladder, so 90% of the energy in the entire cow’s diet was lost as heat. This applies to all animals.
If your goal is overall reduction in pain of others for your own survival, then eating a cow includes that cow’s death, plus the much larger amount of greenery it had to eat versus how much greenery you’d eat to comfortably live as the much smaller beings that we are.
Skipping the cow means less overall death by that logic.
You don’t know what strong arguments look like
Depends on the dog. There are lots of little mammals that survive in those situations and something like a Jack Russell might be worth keeping