Japanese School Outing

You know, I could have sworn you said: "find a similarity" and not "see a difference."

well ill chime in on this one as a kid growing up in farm country I have had to slaughter our own meat. cows, chickens, pigs, turkey, and I ahve been a hunter..deer, phesant and such. Killing is not glorius or great but it does the job of feeding us. I undertand the food chain. and at this time we are at the top and eat other animals. I do not want to see any animal become exticnt, or be tortured or anything like that but food is just that food. I may not agree with every one on some ideas of what food is...ie bugs and such but then you are still eating an animal. these days I prefer not to be arround killing of any kind not that I wont eat the meat form it...just seen enough of it.
I hope that every one who takes a life of an animal to sustain thier own life appreciates


sorry for spelling errors!!

Fair enough.

I was asking you to find a similarity in having the heart to look an animal in the eye before you take it's life to fill your belly or digging up a root crop. There really isn't one.

I think SVCBadass hit the nail on the head, at least from my perspective, think about what you're eating, think about what had to happen so that you could. Don't just buy something faceless and nameless.

So, apart from the fish you catch, you're a vegetarian m15hun?

Yep. Haven't always been but I feel better this way.

I do eat the odd chicken when we're up in the cuds visiting relatives, but they're their chickens.

I was for around 18 months around 15 years ago as the girl I lived with was. It seemed easier that way. She's not any more and neither am I but I have been heading back that way for a while I think. Not because I disagree with killing animals because I don't but because our bodies aren't meant to take that much meat all the time I think. Way back when, meat was a treat that we got once in a while and more than likely 80% of our diet was gleaned from the bush, berries, roots, pulses, fungi etc. Nowadays we don't eat enough of that kind of shit and we expend less energy looking for it so we get fat on meat. I don't eat beef. Usually I buy chicken, lamb or fish. I catch fish too. I love moose and am going to get my FAC this fall. A friend who shoots birds gives me duck and goose in the autumn. I have no problem eating stuff that is 'sentient' but I don't like the factory farming approach. Nor do I like the commercial abattoir or feedlot side of the livestock industry. When profit is the sole arbiter of the welfare of something then you just know morals are going straight down the shitter.
What I can't reconcile, m15hun, is that although you don't like killing animals to eat you are cool with killing people for your own reasons? You come across as being a bit of a right-wing nutcase on occasion(no offense meant).

Animals don't have a capacity for evil doing. I think Einstein said it right: "It’s become appallingly clear that our Technology has surpassed our Humanity". I wouldn't have a problem with people going out and hunting what they needed to live but they don't. Thousands upon thousands of animals are pushed along a conveyor belt where they're not sufficiently stunned and then either their throats are cut by a blunt, automatic machine or some chap without a concept for physiology bangs them with a bolt-gun, sometimes taking 4 or 5 attempts to get the job done. The way some animals are treated in preparation for slaughter is a different matter altogether, and is often more barbaric. And all this so that people who want the enjoyment of eating meat can do it without opening their eyes and appreciating what is involved!

If one were to draw a comparison: I would have and do have a problem with genocide and the torture and murder of innocent people, I don't have a problem with execution as a punishment.

This post has been edited by m15hun: Jul 4 2008, 06:35 AM

It strikes me that the natural fate of wild prey animals (like the precursors of cows & sheep) is usually to be chased down by a predator, and be bitten to death, and the natural fate of wild predators is to starve to death. An abbatoir almost seems a kindness compared with that.

Is a wild prey animal "happy", or does it live in mortal fear of predation most of the time?

I thought I'd chuck those observations into the mix - though it hardly applies to whales, of course.

That's because evil is a human concept, not because of some noble natural trait that humanity has lost. I Watched a documentary on chimps in the Congo just yesterday afternoon where they showed how adolescent males break off from the main group and form gangs that prowl the jungle looking for mischief. In the demonstrated example, the group attacked a family of monkeys just so they could kill the babies.

There was no rhyme or reason for it, it was just adolescent aggressive mob mentality... much like our own society, where it is teenage boys (in groups) that commit the largest percentage of violent assaults on strangers.


What's wrong with not wanting to get involved in animal husbandry or slaughter, but still wanting to eat meat?

Do you think you're some big hard tough guy because you've killed animals for food before? Do you think your actions have earned you the right to eat meat whilst other "lesser" people shouldn't be allowed to unless they smear sheep shit on their face and go out into the sticks with a spear or something?

We live in the 21st century, and buying pre-slaughtered and butchered animals for food is how we do things.... and no matter how much you'd like to think otherwise, you're no more a hunter gather than any other person in here is.


Exactly... In the abattoirs I've been in, the animal is zapped unconscious in a second and then dispatched with a sharp knife whilst they're unconscious. The whole process lasts seconds and is totally painless. There's no distressing chase beforehand, there's no being dragged to the ground exhausted by a set of razor sharp claws, and there's no bite on the trachea causing death by suffocation (often whilst the rest of the pack/pride etc begins to tear away at the exposed tender parts).

Anyone who says UK abattoirs are, by comparison, crueler, is talking out of their hat.

If you'd read my post properly you'd note that my main issue is that people want to eat a faceless product, they want to enjoy the product without worrying and feeling guilty. It's nothing to do with being a hunter-gatherer, it's to do with accepting that what you are eating is the flesh of another creature.

It's nothing to do with being a tough-guy, it's nothing to do with 'smearing sheep shit' about etc. etc. (I would quote all your ridiculous little comments but quite frankly I got bored after those two) It's to do with acceptance. If you can eat meat that has been allowed to graze, treated right and then respectfully slaughtered by a humane slaughterman, and accept that an animal has died to give you that right all power to you. The problem with that scenario is that it just doesn't happen! Animals are raised in cramped, shit filled sheds. They're dosed full of anti-biotics and other crap to stop them getting infections from the crap conditions, then they're taken in cramped little containers to a place where they're painfully murdered so that people like you can fill your gut without feeling guilty.

It's pathetic.

And why is that a bad thing? I want to eat fries with my steak, but I don't wanna "get to know" the spuds or look them in the eye (geddit?) before I peel 'em, chop 'em and bung 'em in the fryer.

You are adding an unnecessary layer of complexity purely for the sake of your argument. It is utterly irrelevant to me (and the bulk of other meat eaters) whether or not the cow/lamb/pig etc that goes to makes my food was needlessly coddled by the farmer or played soothing music on the way to the slaughterhouse.

Providing they are slaughtered humanely and treated properly, I don't give a flying arse how faceless they are by the time they end up between my bread bun.


Naaaaaah.... I'm raised a country lad and still live in a rural market town... most of what you just said is utter shite. Animals are often transported more humanely than humans.... have a look at the regs that govern space per beast, rest/grazing stops etc, they'd put many of the train and flight journeys for humans (that we willingly take everyday) to shame. Sheep/lambs are NEVER factory farmed in the UK, pen farming of other livestock (particularly veal and pigs) is almost unheard of these days and battery farms are going to be illegal in the EU very shortly.

Slaughtering these animals IS, by and large, painless (despite what you say)... even if it wasn't, it's still no more an act of murder or cruelty than you hoicking a fish out of the stream with a barbed hook through it's flesh and beating it to death with a club... is it?

What you're doing is repeating the uninformed mantra of the cabbage munchers... nothing more

These beasts are our food. They've been specifically reared to be our food, and once dead are no different than the spuds and cabbage that they share the shelves with in Tescos. For those that feel guilty there is the utterly unsustainable and expensive alternative such as organic.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recently utterly failed to do precisely what you're doing here, by guilting people into not buying chickens from farms using modern farming techniques. He took the residents to a local intensive chicken farm, but the bulk were completely unimpressed with his posturing. That particular campaign failed BTW, not because people aren't interested in paying three times the amount for half the guilt, but because even when shown the conditions, most people still don't feel the guilt that you and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall seem to think we should.

This post has been edited by yourmercifulgod: Jul 4 2008, 05:41 PM

Come on, m15hun, another 'people like you' ad hominem jab? Surely you can do better. You have no idea what people like him are. You sound like the worst kind of posturing vegan. You'll be equating meat-eaters with nazis next.

You can see what I mean though, arrgh surely?

All YMG has done is equate animals with feeling and a will of their own with a lifeless, tuberous root crop or vegetable. It is people like him that have utterly no consideration for the animals he shovels into his gob because 'he's a human being, king of all the world and everything in it is his food'!

@YMG you can play the 'I'm a country boy and I know you're talking rot' card all you like, and I'll flat out tell you you're talking out of your arse. I have spent a large portion of my life living in a rural community, In my youth myself and my cousins worked various jobs at factories and farms that you say don't exist.

But it's okay, you go on thinking that you're the most important thing in the world and that everything subordinate is fair game to be sliced up to go in your belly. I only live in hope that one day you come across a bear or a tiger and they make it a nice, slow, painful affair when they fill up on their 'food'.

This post has been edited by m15hun: Jul 5 2008, 06:00 AM

But that's actually true (partially, at least)... My family and I ARE the most important things in the world to me. Do you not feel the same about you and yours?

If some cow (which has been specifically reared for the purpose) has got to be taken from its pasture and sliced into meat for us to consume, then so be it, I'm not bothered even a little bit! If we were not meant to eat them, why do they taste like steak or burgers?


Not particularly likely in the Yorkshire Dales, but thanks for the sentiment, anyway

This post has been edited by yourmercifulgod: Jul 5 2008, 09:59 AM