From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Wed Jun 13 2001 - 01:26:06 MDT
Barbara Lamar wrote:
> I can speak with first-hand knowledge about the cattle industry in Texas.
> The cattle raised on my ranch are born in early spring and grazed on VERY
> marginal dryland for a year. They consume native grasses such as Little
> Bluestem and well adapted exotics such as Coastal Bermuda. There's no way
> anyone would even THINK of growing grains or any other kind of plant crop on
> this land on a commercial scale. After a year, some of the cattle are sold,
> while some of the cows are kept as breeding stock.
>
Thanks to you and others for all the good information. Clearly
there is more to it than the rather one sided view I imbibed in
my vegetarian days.
> Rabbits, too, prefer yaupon holly and
> other weeds over grass.
Is it a soft holly? I used to raise rabbits (as pets and some
to be sold as pets) myself. I never knew they liked holly.
> All of these grow readily here with no fertilizer or
> pesticides. The chickens eat various kinds of insects and turn them into
> meat and eggs. Theoretically, I could eat the insects directly, but aside
> from the fact that I was raised to regard insects as unpalatable, the
> chickens are far more effective at harvesting them and love nothing better
> than to spend all day scratching for them.
>
Fried grasshoppers aren't bad. Honest. But I take your point.
> On the morality of eating animals, it seems as though the division of
> species into edible and non-edible, sacred or whatever, is always going to
> be arbitrary (with the exception of cases where certain species are clearly
> inedible because they're toxic).
It has nothing to do with "sacred' or not. It has more to do
with what kinds of foods best feed us health-wise, cost-wise and
with the least complications, what producing various types of
food entails and whether that is morally palatable or not and so
on.
The line is not so arbitrary if you develop a taste for
consuming sentients, especially humans.
> Vegetarians may not be aware that the
> production of dairy products depends on killing most of the male calves or
> kids or lambs or whatever. Dairy herds consist of females which must produce
> babies at least once a year in order to make milk. Since about half the
> offspring are males, only a very few of which will be kept for breeding
> purposes, you end up with a surplus of males which must be dealt with. The
> usual way of dealing with them is to eat them.
>
I am aware of it and it is one of the reasons that I gave up
dairy when I was into vegetarianism. In the factory farms at
least keeping cows perpetually pregnant for high milk production
shortens their lives drastically. I've lived on regular farms.
I know about the cycle of life and death and eating animals,
even ones you've come to love. But I can't see treating a cow
the way they are treated in the factory farms.
Another thing drove me in the direction of being vegetarian was
simply that I noticed I felt better, calmer and a lot less jumpy
when I ate less meat. So I started experimenting. Other
reasons (that seemed reasonable at the time) came along later.
I did notice my digestion was a lot better than that of most of
my meat and dairy consuming friends of the same age.
> When eggs are incubated for the egg industry, about half the chicks are
> males. These are sorted out as soon as they hatch. I eat my surplus
> cockerels, but commercial breeders dump them since meat and egg producers
> are generally separate breeds. The way I've seen it done is like this: the
> cockerels were thrown into boxes, the lower chicks being smothered by the
> upper ones as more are thrown onto the pile. At the end of the day, the
> whole box is tossed into a dumpster.
>
That is gross. Sorry but I love animals too much to see this
any other way.
> Even vegans are responsible for the deaths of animals. Where grain is
> stored, there's always plenty of poison around to kill mice. Often squirrels
> and grain eating birds also get hold of poisoned grain. Poison is usually
> sprayed on crops such as broccoli and lettuce to kill animals such as
> butterfly and moth larvae (or the GM stuff has built-in killers).
>
Protecting food from insects and other poachers on it is not the
same thing as killing animals directly for food in an
unnecessarily barbaric manner.
Of course all of this becomes moot when you can create food from
raw materials directly a bit down the line and even less
relevant when we no longer need to consume food to live.
- samantha
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