A rejoinder to the ethical argument for being a vegetarian

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:is your reason for not eating beef simply that you are unfamiliar with the taste and find it unpleasant? as someone raised as a brahmin and/or perhaps as a result of your own personal value system arrived at by knowing yourself better, do you not have ethical questions about killing animals for food? i am trying to better understand your position.

I have never been particularly fond of meat; the killing of animals for food was something repulsive to me. My views hardened after i read a quote of my favorite Emperor in Book 3 of Abul Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari: "it is not right to make your stomach the grave of animals." (Akbar had become a vegetarian for the most part as he grew older.) With respect to the cow there is a mental block because of mental conditioning in childhood. I cannot also eat goat meat ordinarily because of a peculiar reason: i once drove past or walked past a butcher's shop when i was a child and the sight of hanging goat's heads have stayed with me to this day.

As of today i avoid red meat because of two reasons: first i don't have to deal with the guilt of eating animals who were killed to be my food and second because red meat is high in fat and cholesterol.

I eat fatty fish for health reasons. I have Vitamin D deficiency and fatty fish have Vitamin D and they also have certain oils (like the Omega 3 acids) which have heart protecting properties. I also eat chicken and eggs because i need protein  and it would just take too much effort to do research on how to get all the essential amino acids from vegetables. I like eggs; i specialize in making omelettes. I eat eggs every day or at least on alternate days. (Typically i have 3-4 egg whites with one egg yolk.) I can eat chicken occasionally for the protein but not every day because the ethical factor kicks in.

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the way i rationalize eating chicken is that the chicken i am eating would not have lived at all if it was not bred in a poultry farm for human consumption. with respect to fatty fish, i think of the food as medicine and that kills all the guilt conscience. Other than fatty fish, Vitamin D is not present in any other food item except egg yolk and sunlight. Other than fatty fish, the Omega 3 fats are only present in flax seeds and walnuts to the best of my knowledge. All this aside, i have developed a taste for salmon. I started eating it as a kind of medicine, but i now enjoy eating it although i cannot eat it every day.

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i have heard the argument from non-vegetarians that even vegetables have life and so why should humans who care about not killing life for food eat vegetables? Let them live on things like water and sunlight. The vegetarians answer that animals have a nervous system and plants do not; so plants feel no pain. But, as JC Bose and others have shown, the vegetarians are wrong: http://www.viewzone.com/plants.html

So vegetarians who feel very strongly about not killing any form of life for food should subsist on things like water, sunlight, etc.

how then can you support the 'beef festival'?

you don't need a dead moghal emperor's writings to come to these conclusions. just visit any industrialized American cattle or poultry farm and you'll see the deplorable way these animals are treated.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:how then can you support the 'beef festival'?

you don't need a dead moghal emperor's writings to come to these conclusions.  just visit any industrialized American cattle or poultry farm and you'll see the deplorable way these animals are treated.

what exactly is happening in a beef festival? Consumption of cow meat? But this meat is available in five star hotels all over India. So what's your problem? Additionally, why should humans be killed for suspicion of consuming cow meat? And why should cow meat be treated differently than goat meat?

there were some lengthy debates on this topic on SUCH. let me see if i can find those threads.

i have nothing new to say on this. i have no problems with anyone eating whatever animal they want. it doesn't repulse me or bother me in any way.

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Top 10 Reasons Not to Eat Meat
Since there's never been a better time to go vegetarian, we thought we'd let you in on our Top 10 Reasons Not to Eat Meat. They speak for themselves, so without further ado, here they are.

1. Help the Poor
While there is ample reason for indignation at the 100 million tons of grain used for biofuels, more than seven times as much grain (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. 

2. Stop Cruelty to Animals
On today's factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests or do anything that is natural and important to them.

3. Save the Environment
A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global". The report finds that eating meat causes almost 40 per cent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, ships and planes in the world combined.

4. Avoid Bird Flu
The World Health Organisation says that if the avian flu virus mutates, it could be caught simply by eating undercooked chicken flesh or eggs, eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or eggs, or even touching eggshells contaminated with the virus.

5. Prolong Your Life
Vegetarians live six to 10 years longer on average than meat-eaters do. Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases and the three biggest killers – heart disease, cancer and strokes.
6. Avoid the World's Number One Killer
The risk of developing heart disease among meat-eaters is 50 per cent higher than it is among vegetarians. Drs Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn have used a vegan diet to prevent and reverse heart disease. Dr Esselstyn's book documents their 100 per cent success with unclogging people's arteries and reversing heart disease.
7. Reduce Your Risk of Cancer
According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, "Vegetarians are about 40 percent less likely to get cancer than non-vegetarians, regardless of other risks such as smoking, body size, and socioeconomic status".

8. Fit Into a Bikini
Vegetarianism is the ultimate weight-loss diet. About 31 per cent of urban Indians are either overweight or obese, but only 2 per cent of vegans are obese. A vegetarian diet is the only diet that has passed peer review and taken weight off and kept it off.

9. Create Global Peace
Leo Tolstoy claimed that "vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism". His point? If we want to sow the seeds of peace, we need to eat a peaceful diet. Eating meat supports killing animals just to satisfy humans' acquired taste for flesh.

10. Discover the Joy of Veggies
Vegetarians report that when they adopt a vegetarian diet, their range of foods explodes from a limited selection of centre-of-the-plate meat items to a wide range of grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables that they didn't even know existed.

Sir Paul McCartney sums it all up, "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just 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".

No matter what reason you choose, you can start the exciting journey towards a vegetarian lifestyle simply by taking the "Pledge to Be Veg" today!

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/meat-makes-the-planet-thirsty.html?_r=0
Meat Makes the Planet Thirsty
But for those truly interested in lowering their water footprint, those numbers pale next to the water required to fatten livestock. A 2012 studyin the journal Ecosystems by Mesfin M. Mekonnen and Arjen Y. Hoekstra, both at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, tells an important story. Beef turns out to have an overall water footprint of roughly four million gallons per ton produced. By contrast, the water footprint for “sugar crops” like sugar beets is about 52,000 gallons per ton; for vegetables it’s 85,000 gallons per ton; and for starchy roots it’s about 102,200 gallons per ton.

Factor in the kind of water required to produce these foods, and the water situation looks even worse for the future of animal agriculture in drought-stricken regions that use what’s known as “blue water,” or water stored in lakes, rivers and aquifers, which California and much of the West depend on.

Vegetables use about 11,300 gallons per ton of blue water; starchy roots, about 4,200 gallons per ton; and fruit, about 38,800 gallons per ton. By comparison, pork consumes 121,000 gallons of blue water per ton of meat produced; beef, about 145,000 gallons per ton; and butter, some 122,800 gallons per ton. There’s a reason other than the drought that Folsom Lake has dropped as precipitously as it has. Don’t look at kale as the culprit. (Although some nuts, namely almonds, consume considerable blue water, even more than beef.) That said, a single plant is leading California’s water consumption.

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i have heard the argument from non-vegetarians that even vegetables have life and so why should humans who care about not killing life for food eat vegetables? Let them live on things like water and sunlight. The vegetarians answer that animals have a nervous system and plants do not; so plants feel no pain. But, as JC Bose and others have shown, the vegetarians are wrong: http://www.viewzone.com/plants.html.

So vegetarians who feel very strongly about not killing any form of life for food should subsist on things like water, sunlight, etc.

The best arguments for vegetarianism in are eating lower on the food chain and it is healthier in the long run, since you are not exposed to preservatives used in the mass production of meat. The counter-arguments are meat being a strong source of protein and meat eating is no different than plant-eating as plants have lives too. 

It really comes down to cultural conditioning as to what we eat and what we avoid. I limit myself now to beef and chicken and occasionally fish. Other than personal taste, there is no particular reason for this. My meat consumption has gone down quite a bit in the past 15 years, but I don't see  myself giving it up completely. As to what others eat, I don't really much interest. What we are seeing unfolding in India is to fire up emotions on the basis of this religious short-hand. Let's hope it doesn't turn into a downward spiral.

People are geographically, historically and culturally bound in their food habits. Vegetarianism doesn't bode well for the Eskimos or the Lapps.

goodcitizn wrote:People are geographically, historically and culturally bound in their food habits. Vegetarianism doesn't bode well for the Eskimos or the Lapps.

a vegetarian activist would respond by saying that meat eating should be avoided unless you have to eat it for survival. Since sufficient quantities of vegetarian food is not available in the habitat of the Eskimos they have no choice but to eat meat and fish.