I thought about waiting to write this follow-up on the off chance that I’d get another comment or two on the first post, but since I know this blog has no traffic the odds of another comment coming in are slim. So I’m posting this now.
I received an interesting, and entirely civil, comment from Stan regarding my earlier post on arguments for being a Vegan and animal cruelty. He says:
…it isn’t the slaughter that is the problem, it is their condition of living prior to slaughter. Also, I don’t believe that we are biologically designed to eat them (http://www.vegsource.com/articles2/hunter_gatherer.htm), so we are really just doing it for “fun” which is pretty cruel, and that sort of thing is virtually non-existant in nature. Much plant life, on the other hand, requires consumption by animals in order to propogate.
I won’t get into the health issues or environmental aspects of animal agriculture, which you seem to be aware of, and yes all agriculture has its problems, but we could reduce grain farming by somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% if it weren’t required for animal consumption (more 70% of all grains are grown for animal agriculture, which is very inefficient BTW).
I agree with the second half and disagree with the first.
The article linked to in the comment is very interesting, but it only discusses our evolutionary heritage up to, at the latest, 60,000 years ago. The point of the article is that man was not a hunter, as most theories peg us as, but instead we were gatherers, essentially a slightly more bipedal and intelligent version of the apes we’d descended from. Which I don’t necessarily disagree with. The kicker is that we are not Australopithecus afarensis, which is the species the research focues solely on. We’re Home sapiens, descended from Homo erectus, and the biological and fossil and anthropological evidence is convincing that we did indeed evolve, for a multitude of reasons, into hunters and gatherers. And it really doesn’t matter that we were unable to systematically consume animal protein until fire and tools became prevalent, the fact is that we did. We are able to consume, and process, cooked meat and raw meat (at least in some forms) and we have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. And we did it to supplement our consumption of plants, which we’ d been consuming for far longer.
Which, basically is my point. We’re a predator, whether its on plants or animals, we’re an apex predator that has codified to the exterme the methods by which we attack and consume our prey. And we’ve been doing this for thousands of years. So while I think one can choose to believe that Australopithecus afarensis was a vegetarian, which I think it was, and that that means we aren’t meant to consume meat, you’d be mistaken to do so. The bottom line is that we evolved into ominvores that hunted systematically and consumed animal prey on our way to becoming Home sapiens for a whole host of evolutionary reasons, not the least of which is that animals provided a reservoir of nutrition for man in regions where agriculture was either seasonal or very difficult.
I think Stan’s point, and the point of the animal cruelty argument in general, is as he says the living conditions “…prior to the slaughter.” As I stated in the my earlier post, factory farming is a nasty business. Obviously animals do not “thrive” in a factory farming situation (hence the use of antibiotics and other medicines/chemicals necessary to keep them healthy), I’m not arguing that. What I’m arguing is that there are plenty of alternatives where the cow you’re about to consume is as happy as, well, a cow can be, thinking life is grand as it chews its cud in an open field, and then “wham” it’s dead. Which is much the same as the gazelle, chewing on some grass when “wham” a lioness explodes from the weeds and crushes its windpipe. It’s the natural state of things. It’s still the same predator/prey relationship that has been exercised since one single-celled bacterium slurped up another way back “in the day.” Being against factory farming does not need to make anyone a vegetarian let alone a vegan because there’s plenty of alternative methods of gaining access to animal protein.
As for the plant life needing to be consumed in order to propogate, some plant life needs certain parts of the plant to be consumed in order to propagate, not the entire plant. That’s how fruit evolved. The fruit was meant to be consumed and then the seeds dropped somewhere away from the parent plant by the animal that consumed it. The plant that bore the fruit wasn’t consumed, i.e. killed, in order for it to propogate. That would be a very risky means of propogation for a plant and I’m not sure I know of one where the entire plant needed to be consumed in order for its offspring to live on somewhere else, but if there’s an example out there I’d love to see it. So while we do consume parts of plants that are menat to be consumed, like fruit, there’s also far more plants that we either consume the roots of the plants, or the parts of the plant that the plant needs to survive. We’re killing a highly evolved organism that differs from animals essentially only by the fact that they aren’t motile, they reproduce differently and we can’t teach them to fetch the paper. If the first thing you learned about a new plant was that it could warn its neighbor plants that it was not only under attack by something, but also what it was attacking it, and that its neighbors responded in such a fashion that when what was attacking the first plant could no longer attack its neighbors, you’d probably surmise that it was intelligent. (And while I’m not arguing that the plant is intelligent, or conscious, I’m simply saying that on the surface one could certainly anthropomorphosize that it was “acting” intelligently.) Would you still consume it if it was edible? Sure you would. And there’s a number of plants that chemically communicate in just that fashion but we either cut them down to make a house, or burn them to keep warm (or cook our recently killed animal prey) or consume them for food. And no one says a word about the cruelty of it all. It’s a double standard, and I’m not trying to be facitious. I just don’t think it’s fair to cry foul about killing and eating animals when we don’t cry foul for the plants. Both end up just as dead.
We don’t cry foul though because as humans, we choose what traits and what organisms we anthropomorphosize and it’s far easier to do that with a sad-eyed cow, or a reasonably smart pig than it is for a corn stalk growing out in the middle of Nebraska (right Jill?). If we’d have done that back when we had to bring the mammoth down or see our family or clan starve in the heart of winter, Stan and I wouldn’t be having this debate today. Or maybe we would, we’d just all be living where there’s lots of trees and it’s warm year round. Which, come to think of it, wouldn’t all that bad, except for the 6 - 10% of us that would fall prey to the predators of the region like Australopithecus afarensis did.
Lastly, I agree completely with the second half of Stan’s comment. The grain farming, even the amount of methane gas produced, would be reduced if we reduced the amount that was consumed by the animals we feed it to on the large scale farms. There’s plenty to dislike about the way we do agriculture, but I’m not sure, nor have I done much in the way of researching the alternative methods that we could use to feed the population of the planet. If we replace grains used to feed prey animals isn’t that then replaced by mono-cultured crops of things like rice and soy? Is that necessarily a good thing?
My only point, I guess, in all of this rambling is that you can try and persuade me to be a Vegan on a number of grounds, but being cruel to animals isn’t one of them. You can argue all you want against factory farming, but that doesn’t necessarily have to drive you to Veganism (again, is that even a word?). We’ve developed evolutionarily to be omnivores and there’s lots of ways one can be an omnivore and still be respectul of animals.
And thanks to Stan for the reasonable, intelligent reply. It’s not entirely fair that I get to blather on at length about this while he’s more or less constrained to the comment box. If he or anyone else care to carry-on the conversation via email, I can be reached at orca989ATyahooDOTcom (replace the ‘at’ and ‘dot’ with their respective symbols).
Now I’m goint to go eat a burger — with a whole grain bun, tomatoes, lettuce, onion, and a side of potato fries. An omnivore’s delight.