[Grifter]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eastbay', '
')But back to the excellent topic of this thread... eating farm harvested animals is as wasteful as commuting solo in a Hummer. I find it peculiar, maybe even hypocritical, when many of those calling for rational energy use consume factory animals, which is a horribly wasteful use of energy, particularly as humanity enters the peak oil era.

[aldente]

There will be no need to eat human meat 'Grifter' for two reasons:
PO will hit really hard and much faster as the Hubbert curve indicates and secondly, it will hit faster than expected (duuuh)

Oh, sorry it was about animal dung and animal meat (not Soilent Green). G.I. Gurdjieff once noted that Big Nature will eat us up just as we eat up farmed animals.

[untothislast]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Grifter', 'W')ell I don't know if its already been mentioned, I came to the thread a bit late but animal dung improves the fertility of land extremely efficiently. That should surely be factored into the cost equation.

I agree we should eat less meat. We will still need to domesticate animals to some extent, we may as well eat the meat at the end of their (useful) life.

Eventually I expect humans wont eat meat but that day is far away.

[aldente]

you are repeating yourself unthosislast (could you choose a screen name easier to quote next time please).
[img]

[untothislast]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('albente', 'y')ou are repeating yourself unthosislast (could you choose a screen name easier to quote next time please).

[TheTurtle]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('albente', 'y')ou are repeating yourself unthosislast

[Grifter]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('untothislast', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Grifter', 'W')ell I don't know if its already been mentioned, I came to the thread a bit late but animal dung improves the fertility of land extremely efficiently. That should surely be factored into the cost equation.

I agree we should eat less meat. We will still need to domesticate animals to some extent, we may as well eat the meat at the end of their (useful) life.

Eventually I expect humans wont eat meat but that day is far away.

[aldente]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TheTurtle', 'N')ow, for those of us who our getting a bit denser in our senior years, would you mind explaining the point of the photo you posted, albente?

[gg3]

Untothislast, thanks for copping to an error, and sorry if I sounded harsh back there.

Raod kill: eat at your own risk. Some people get away with it. Some people get away with not wearing seatbelts or not washing their hands after they poop, and in some parts of the world, people routinely eat animal brains (just say Prions!).

Animals: I'll go further than the chimp example.

I happen to think that most of our food-animals are conscious and have emotional states that we would recognize as being similar to our own. The rationale for this is well-understood neurophysiology plus a rather complicated bit of psychophysics which would be a digression to do in detail here (look up Hameroff & Penrose and start reading and thinking about it).

So, chickens, pigs, sheep, cows, and also rabbits and so on, have feelings and are self-aware. For all we know, fish also have feelings and, above a certain size brain mass, are self-aware to some degree. And yet for most humans, there is some form of meat in the diet, and it's not going to disappear entirely.

In the state of nature we're hunter/gatherers. The hunter part kills animals and eats them. On average (with exceptions such as the Innuit) meat makes up a relatively small percentage of the diet but it is still there. Biologically, we've evolved that way. We do not know enough about nutrition to know that we can take all meat out of the diet without any loss of vital nutrients (that is, we do not know everything there is to know about the nutrients in our diets). There is probably individual variance here, along a normal curve from some people needing no meat at all, to some needing a large amount. (I've found that I can get by with two servings of beef per week, but below that I get run-down and tend to get sick, even when following the best available information re. vegetarian food combining.)

Ideally we will find a way to grow meat in vats: if we can grow organs, we can grow "meat" that is indistinguishable from "the real thing." This would remove entirely the issue of cruelty to animals.

In the meantime, it is incumbent upon us to find ways to slaughter animals that are painless or as nearly so as possible (and by pain I also include the stress of awareness of impending doom). I have a citation somewhere in my files about an academic in Colorado who has looked into this in some detail and developed a "best practices" standard that appears to fulfill this need.

As a practical matter, I can tell you what the discussion in our community-planning group has been in this area. There is a degree of consensus on hunting as a source of meat, particularly in the event of disruption in the conventional meat supply. There has also been discussion of the issue of shooting animals that intrude into agricultural plots (gardens etc.). The latter is an outgrowth of the necessity to protect a food supply from predation by wild critters, for example deer. Clearly it's in a hunter's interest to kill an animal quickly, which is to say, more humanely than otherwise: the better to recover the carcass quickly for processing.

In any case, the cruelty issue isn't relevant to dairy and eggs (nor to wool as a source of fiber for clothing, blankets, etc.). This of course requires that cows and chickens (and sheep) are being kept under humane conditions, which can be reasonably assured in a local production scenario.

[smallpoxgirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'R')aod kill: eat at your own risk. Some people get away with it.

[eastbay]

pstarr,

Oh man, I agree with you 100%. It's getting more and more difficult to buy quality fruit and vegetables. It only serves to further motivate us to increase the size and diversity of our home gardening.

But eating industrially harvested meat won't happen for so many reasons, but one not mentioned here yet is that it's just downright creepy, I tell ya.

[untothislast]

I think it would be a mistake to insist on the possible/actual 'self awareness' of animals as the criterion for our ranking of their relative importance. Mainly, because in insisting on points of similarity to ourselves, we're imposing an anthropocentric world view which is both distorted and unhealthy.

As I've said before (ad nauseam), we exercise a tyranny over more vulnerable species based purely on our ability to do so - and because we find it convenient to waive aside any moral or ethical objections. In addition, allowing this exploitative barbarism to fester away at the root of our society, provides a cultural basis for all those injustices and inequalities we impose on our own fellow human beings.

Just as the (supposed) abolition of the twin horrors of child-labour and racist slavery, allowed humankind to develop a more empathic and sympathetic approach to social relations - so the eventual phasing out of animal exploitation may help us rise above those baser governing instincts which inevitably lead to oppression and war.

Now that's what I'd really call 'self-awareness'.

[Doly]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('untothislast', '
')Just as the (supposed) abolition of the twin horrors of child-labour and racist slavery, allowed humankind to develop a more empathic and sympathetic approach to social relations - so the eventual phasing out of animal exploitation may help us rise above those baser governing instincts which inevitably lead to oppression and war.

[untothislast]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Doly', 'W')ell, it didn't happen in India (where vegetarianism and respect for animals is very common), so I'm not expecting it to happen in the rest of the world.

[HamRadioRocks]

Another thing I get dinged for in the carbon/ecological footprint surveys is eating meat. What am I supposed to do, go on the Nicole Richie Diet?

Meat is such a major food group that I'm not about to give it up. There were times when none of the meat served in the college dorm was edible. Not eating meat caused me to get this hollow feeling in my heart and go to bed hungry. I had to order pizza or go out to eat in order to avoid starvation.

Even seeing the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and its prequel could only kill my appetite for meat for a few days. Even reading _Fast Food Nation_ couldn't kill my appetite for meat for more than a short time.

At 6 feet tall, a weight of 143 pounds, a reasonably low blood cholesterol, and a tiny 30-inch waist, I don't feel a great need to lose weight and drive down my blood cholesterol. Why should I be the one to give up meat? Make the people with those gargantuan 40-inch waistlines give up meat. OK, OK, make everyone with more than a 32-inch waistline give up meat. Make the steakhouses in Amarillo, Texas stop serving those 72-ounce steaks.

But the rest of us should be allowed to eat all the meat we want without feeling like we're endangering the human race. Besides, I'd like to see someone tell Nicole Richie to go meatless.

[Jack]

Gracious! Why would you wish to give up meat at this point in time?

It seems time to mention Jevon's paradox - i.e., if one group conserves a resource, the price will decline. This will stimulate demand, resulting in no net savings.

Now, in future, when transportation and refrigeration may be problematic, the price structure may compel you to modify your diet. Just as it does now. Unless you dine constantly on Kobe beef flown in fresh from Japan each morning?

[ohanian]

Sure Tiger!

[Micki]

If things get really bad we will have to eat what we can.
Hope you haven't missed to discussion we had on Jelly fish becoming THE seafood in the near future.
Little bit further down we may see man flesh back on the menu.

Darn, I got caught up in all this. I'm not even a doomer.