About vegans

[bennyboy]

I guess we can go in circles all day talking about how our actions and diet impact animals of varying intelligence. . It's hard to feed people without damaging it, I suppose. But 39 million cows, 115 million pigs, and 9 billion chickens die every year for US meat consumption. General factory farming practices, in addition to the level of sentience and feeling these animals enjoy, dwarfs my concerns about those ground animals. Especially considering there is a big difference, mentally, between eating vegetables or grain where animals might've been killed in the process VS actually eating meat from the animal itself. 

I also recall reading somewhere that grass-fed cattle in the Amazonian region is the number one cause of deforestation.

Oh, no doubt. As I said, I'm vegetarian, and have been for well over half of my life.

Industrial cattle are disgusting for very many reasons-- the overuse of hormones and antibiotics, refeeding of dead cattle (not sure if they do this any more), and the truly abysmal and abusive conditions in which the animals live. Not only that, they're fed grain, so they have all those other problems I mentioned with deaths of ground animals, pesticides and so on.

[Minimalist]

[Jade-Green Stone]

I once did a paper on the vegan lifestyle of it's positive as well as negative affects. It was an even 50-50 on both sides.

Argument for Vegan Meat can cause heart problems.
Argument for Meat Eater: Well dietary pills can cause kidney problems.

Vegan: Factory Farming is horrible
Meat: There isn't enough land in the world to feed the entire world.

All these arguments are some truth and some lies to them. Factory Farming is horrible, but did you know also their is only a good 10% of the worlds land is arable for farming?
Too much of one thing can be bad, on both sides. But I find if it's your life it's your choice. People can tell you how to live, but it's up to you whether you listen or not.

[bennyboy]

I'm sorry, but I think your arguments are a little too simplistic, and may be factually wrong.

One is the idea that vegans need dietary pills. I don't know any vegans who use dietary pills, because other than a couple key ones (like Omega-3 fatty acids), vegetables are quite good at providing nutrients.

Another is that there isn't enough land in the world to feed all the people. That doesn't make sense for a few reasons. First is that food animals are fed grain-- which is grown on arable land.

On the meat-eater's side, I think all would agree that factory farming is horrible-- but there are millions of deer who are quite the ecological disaster, and they could be killed without any factory farm, while reducing their impact. With reduced consumption per person, we could probably give everyone meat without having to resort to factory farming-- not as much as they wanted for their 10 Big Macs each day, but probably enough to satisfy dietary requirements.

Welcome to this discussion, but maybe we can take a few posts to catch up on the facts.

[no one]

Life is brutal. That's how it goes. Something has to die in order for me to live. Human beings were not meant to be vegans. They would be extinct, if they were not meat meat eaters.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I will contribute to the omnivore lifestyle when I die. My last words will be "EAT ME!"

[The Grand Nudger]

Not certifying Jades "not enough land" (not sure that jade was, either, really)...but...the notion that livestock are fed grain that could be fed to humans, or that this grain is grown on land that could be used to grow things to feed humans...both wrong for a variety of reasons.

You're not going to see a mixed veg operation get plowed under for feed grain, or a cattle ranch turn into a strawberry farm.

It is true that if we wanted to grow more veggies to replace livestock that we'd need to develop more land, the land we grow the livestock and the grain for the livestock on isn't up to the task as is. We need to do that anyway, really. We'd also need yet more oil and yet more water, as vegetables simply aren't going to be produced in an arid patch of dust, intermittently rainfed. All of this excludes more novel ways of increasing our production (and novel ways of spurring alternative development and production), just a comment on conventional ag.

[Yonadav]

You need about 6 pounds of feed for a live cow to put on one pound of weight. The feed to edible beef conversion rate is around 10 to 11 pounds of feed for each pound of edible beef.

[The Grand Nudger]

Yeah, it would be really great if we went back to grassfed...but I don't think we ever will.

[Yonadav]

I grew up on grassfed. I never had grainfed until I was an adult. Honestly, grainfed is so much better. I'm the same way with salmon. I have probably eaten thousands of pounds of wild salmon. Then I discovered that farmed salmon is better. People argue with me about this. I think they are fooling themselves. They want to believe that the grassfed cattle and wild salmon are tastier, but it's just not so.