The gang has settled down for dinner at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. [Ford] sat down.
The waiter approached.
"Would you like to see the menu?" he said, "or would you like meet the Dish of the Day?"
"Huh?" said Ford.
"Huh?" said Arthur.
"Huh?" said Trillian.
"That's cool," said Zaphod, "we'll meet the meat."
...
A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.
"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts of my body?"
It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters in to a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.
Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.
"Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "braised in a white wine sauce?"
"Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper.
"But naturally my shoulder, sir," mooed the animal contentedly, "nobody else's is mine to offer."
Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively.
"Or the rump is very good," murmured the animal. "I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there."
It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.
"Or a casserole of me perhaps?" it added.
"You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?" whispered Trillian to Ford.
"Me?" said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, "I don't mean anything."
"That's absolutely horrible," exclaimed Arthur, "the most revolting thing I've ever heard."
"What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.
"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing there inviting me to," said Arthur, "It's heartless."
"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.
"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just... er [...] I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.
"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."
"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.
"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.
"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"
"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."
It managed a very slight bow.
"Glass of water please," said Arthur.
"Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare stakes please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years."
The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle. "A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said, "I'll just nip off and shoot myself."
He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur. "Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane."
It waddled unhurriedly off to the kitchen. [From The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Chapter 17.]
L Kap
·
Oct 4, 2019
·
Boulder, CO
· Joined Apr 2014
· Points: 224
Marc801 C wrote: No, of course not. But not eating honey or milk because it is produced by animals *is* extreme for most people.
Sure, but we don't do that. The animal is slaughtered first.
Let me know if I'm off the mark, but these comments to me indicate a lack of knowledge about the brutality of the meat and dairy industries. You didn't mention eggs, but egg production is one of the most cruel industries that exist. Most people are opposed to torture, but most people don't actually know what goes on behind closed doors in the ag industry. Happy animals on a cute little farm is a lie for 99+% of the animals consumed in this country.
Whether the animal is alive or dead when it is flayed is not the only relevant point, but actually with the speed and mechanization of slaughter lines in industrial agriculture, many more animals than you might suspect have the skinning / plucking / dissection start while they are still alive and conscious. All male baby layer chicks (which don't lay eggs and are therefore useless to the egg industry) are thrown into grinders while fully conscious, or just thrown out in trash bags to suffocate. There is no attempt to anesthetize or humanely slaughter male chicks. I could go on, but there are resources to learn about these things if you are open to learning.
FWIW, I'm not opposed to honey personally, and neither are a lot of vegans I know. I don't want to get into an intra-vegan argument about it. Just please know that honey and dairy are wildly different in terms of cruelty and environmental impact, which are the main motivators for most long-term vegans.
Katia M wrote: Yup, but good luck convincing people not to A. keeping having kids willy-nilly and B. keep trying to make medical strides that make sure people never die no matter what.
I guess the quote feature didn't pick up the quote about Google saying the population is going to double in 63 years--the perils of extrapolating a current rate/trend, in this case not really so current. Population growth is actually slowing (of course, we start from a big base) and most of the studies I've seen have us topping out around ''60 at 9 billion and then starting to decline. What is this solution to population growth? Prosperity. Many developed nations are already below replacement birth rate, the primary reason US population continues to grow is due to immigration. The big demographic time bomb is that this means the population in places like the Italy, Spain, Japan, Russia (where the population is expected to decline significantly in this century, perhaps down to 100M) , and yes, even China, are aging such that there will be fewer workers supplying benefits for more old people. Turns out when people don't need children as productive assets and are reasonably confident that the ones they have will survive, so that they don't have to pile them up to make up for attrition, they have better things to do with their time. At this point poor countries are the primary drivers of population growth. Our urge to get rid of economic energy sources and go back to pre-Industrial life styles are what is more likely to accelerate population growth.
I made a couple of predictions back in the late '70s that have been pretty prescient. One that is still out there that I believe in more than ever is that the next great genocide will be done in the name of the 'environment'. Riffling through this thread you can see the impetus that will make that so.
L Kap
·
Oct 4, 2019
·
Boulder, CO
· Joined Apr 2014
· Points: 224
Marc801 C wrote:
Because we raise them expressly for that purpose. Theoretically we don't torture, brutalize, and maim in the process - part of the reason we have USDA regulations.
I don't care what purpose we raise them for, and neither should you. We could also raise humans expressly to exploit them. Thankfully that is illegal now everywhere in the world (which is not to say it never happens.)
It's comforting to believe that "theoretically we don't brutalize, torture, and maim" food animals, but unfortunately it isn't true.There are many, many things that are 100% legal to do to food animals that would get you prosecuted for animal brutality if you did it to a pet. Again, there are resources for education if you're open. This quick pamphlet is a decent start. https://veganoutreach.org/why-vegan/
Let me know if I'm off the mark, but these comments to me indicate a lack of knowledge about the brutality of the meat and dairy industries. You didn't mention eggs, but egg production is one of the most cruel industries that exist. Most people are opposed to torture, but most people don't actually know what goes on behind closed doors in the ag industry. Happy animals on a cute little farm is a lie for 99+% of the animals consumed in this country.
Of course - I'd love to see that change for the better.
Whether the animal is alive or dead when it is flayed is not the only relevant point, but actually with the speed and mechanization of slaughter lines in industrial agriculture, many more animals than you might suspect have the skinning / plucking / dissection start while they are still alive and conscious. All male baby layer chicks (which don't lay eggs and are therefore useless to the egg industry) are thrown into grinders while fully conscious, or just thrown out in trash bags to suffocate. There is no attempt to anesthetize or humanely slaughter male chicks. I could go on, but there are resources to learn about these things if you are open to learning.
...although it's really hard to get upset about chickens.
FWIW, I'm not opposed to honey personally, and neither are a lot of vegans I know. I don't want to get into an inter-vegan argument about it. Just please know that honey and dairy are wildly different in terms of cruelty and environmental impact, which are the main motivators for most long-term vegans.
But that 's not what we're talking about. The conversation is about getting people to become vegan, well, at least eat less meat. Since veganism technically does prohibit honey etc, that immediately turns off the people you're trying to convince.
Saying that you're vegan but not opposed to honey is like the trendy California vegetarians of the 80's that regularly visited In-'n-out. Say you're vegetarian, not vegan.
Pretty dweeby to get hung up on a technicality that someone is not vegan because they eat honey.
I was once chastised by a vegan friend that vegans don't eat honey, so hardly me getting hung up on technicalities. Personally, I don't care if you're vegan, vegetarian, meatatarian, or anything else. Just don't get all righteous about it.
How do you know someone is vegan? They'll tell you, repeatedly.
And yet our teeth are designed to shred.....animal flesh, like any good omnivore.
Actually they are not. Our canines are flat and spade shaped and our incisors are short and dull so that we can grind plant leaves, seeds and grains. A carnivore’s incisors and canines are very sharp, in order to... tear animal flesh.
Other differences:
Humans have small mouths that don’t open wide. Carnivores have mouths that open very wide so that they can control their prey.
The human jaw has a lot of lateral motion to help us grind plant materials. A carnivore’s jaw basically just moves up and down as all they need to do is chop and slice flesh.
Humans have short, flat nails. Carnivores have claws.
Humans have long, complex digestive systems. Carnivores typically have short, simple digestive systems.
Well, it has some logic behind it, although I disagree with vegans here.
Turns out the human/bee relationship is very symbiotic and that bees flourish when cultivated by human beings.
The real problem though is that ALL foods use some form of animal usage in order to be food. Flowers need to be pollinated in order to grow into fruits. Any vegetable farm is really just a worm farm with the worms doing all the real hard work of keep soils in good condition to grow foods.
Veganism is nothing more than a line currently drawn at one mostly extreme point on a spectrum.
Personally, I think eating sentient creatures is a bit vulgar and rude, so that is where my arbitrary line is drawn.
Today.
Will likely shift again as new info comes in.
Everything anything ever eats was once (or is) alive!
I have multiple hives on the property. Mostly for pollination purposes but I do enjoy some honey on occasion.
The almond industry would not exist without bees. Every year bees are moved around the country by truck to pollinate crops. The bees are rented to the crop grower. This is due to a lack of wild bees and has been done this way for decades. The same hive that pollinated your almonds in CA probably pollinated your oranges in FL as well. Nothing that comes out of a bee for food is any different than what the plant you are eating already gave up. Last I checked wholesale commercial and brutal slaughter of bees for food just does not happen. Arbitrary line indeed.
Same queen, just different workers as they only live about 6 weeks.
From an extreme point in a spectrum I suppose there is some logic. Deriving logic from an extreme dietary stance doesn't strike me as very logical.
The Raven wrote: Not eating honey because it comes from bees is honestly one of the dumbest things I have ever heard.
I think you are grossly oversimplifying the problem. Most Americans get their honey/meat/dairy from mass-produced factory settings whether they like it or not. The extreme mistreatment and enslavement of animals in these settings is what I personally oppose. I love honey but I understand why some would be ethically opposed to it. Honey is actually bee vomit btw...
From PETA site:
Unfortunately, like factory farmers, many beekeepers take inhumane steps to ensure personal safety and reach production quotas. It’s not unusual for larger honey producers to cut off the queen bee’s wings so that she can’t leave the colony or to have her artificially inseminated on a bee-sized version of the factory farm “rape rack.” When the keeper wants to move a queen to a new colony, she is carried with “bodyguard” bees, all of whom—if they survive transport—will be killed by bees in the new colony. Large commercial operations may also take all the honey instead of leaving the 60 pounds or so that bees need to get through the winter. They replace the rich honey with a cheap sugar substitute that is not as fortifying. In colder areas, if the keepers consider it too costly to keep the bees alive through the winter, they destroy the hives using cyanide gas. Also, bees are often killed or have their wings and legs torn off by haphazard handling. According to the Cook-DuPage Beekeepers Association, humans have been using honey since about 15,000 B.C., but it wasn’t until the 20th century that people turned bees into factory-farmed animals.
I know what honey is. I don't believe I am oversimplifying anything. And I never said vegans were wrong for their beliefs. To each their own. Still one of the dumbest things I have heard. Must be me. In my world PETA stands for People Eating Tasty Animals.
Some of us have been vegan for decades. It's not a fad and our numbers are only growing over time. One day our ancestors will look back at our industrial animal agriculture in horror the way we look back on the abuses of centuries ago.
Climbing = a selfish useless activity (now a fad) where people pretend they are saving the planet by traveling around the world with a bunch of gear. All this is done while preaching sustainability and leave no trace.
Veganism = a weird idea that killing animals when a alternative food source is available. Actually would lower the worlds corn/soy need, save water and lower everyone’s carbon footprint.
everyone wants to save the environment at all cost.... well until you have to learn to cook plant based or sacrifice a taste (but who’s really the selfish bunch).
L Kap
·
Oct 4, 2019
·
Boulder, CO
· Joined Apr 2014
· Points: 224
Cpn Dunsel wrote:
Well, it has some logic behind it, although I disagree with vegans here.
Turns out the human/bee relationship is very symbiotic and that bees flourish when cultivated by human beings.
The real problem though is that ALL foods use some form of animal usage in order to be food. Flowers need to be pollinated in order to grow into fruits. Any vegetable farm is really just a worm farm with the worms doing all the real hard work of keep soils in good condition to grow foods.
Veganism is nothing more than a line currently drawn at one mostly extreme point on a spectrum.
Personally, I think eating sentient creatures is a bit vulgar and rude, so that is where my arbitrary line is drawn.
Today.
Will likely shift again as new info comes in.
Everything anything ever eats was once (or is) alive!
There is no such thing as purity. All life lives at the expense of other life. When I drive on I-80 to Vedauwoo, there is a massacre of bugs on my windshield. If there's a mosquito in my bedroom, I kill it. I personally draw my line at losing sleep over insects, even though they are sentient (definition: able to perceive or feel). I will relocate moths, bees, wasps etc. from my house rather than kill them if I can.
Veganism is a philosophy of doing as little harm as you feasibly can to other thinking, feeling beings. Anyone who is obsessed with 100% purity on this score has probably not been vegan for very long.
L Kap
·
Oct 4, 2019
·
Boulder, CO
· Joined Apr 2014
· Points: 224
Marc801 C wrote: Of course - I'd love to see that change for the better.
Great! I encourage that caring in you.
...although it's really hard to get upset about chickens.
Why? They feel pain. They have emotions. They create friendships. If you saw someone throw a terrified chicken into a wood chipper, you would find it hard to get upset?
But that 's not what we're talking about. The conversation is about getting people to become vegan, well, at least eat less meat. Since veganism technically does prohibit honey etc, that immediately turns off the people you're trying to convince.
People who use honey as a reason to keep eating meat, dairy, and eggs are looking for reasons to look the other way.
Saying that you're vegan but not opposed to honey is like the trendy California vegetarians of the 80's that regularly visited In-'n-out. Say you're vegetarian, not vegan.
No, it's the most accurate way to describe what I am. Saying I'm vegetarian would be misleading because it would imply I eat dairy and eggs. In another comment, you say you were taken to task by a vegan friend about vegans not eating honey. Some vegans take that position, but we're not all the same. Veganism is a philosophy of compassion and minimizing exploitation of other species, and taking that seriously in your life choices. We all implement as best we can. We're not all the same, just as not all environmentalists are exactly the same, not all Buddhists are exactly the same, not all Orthodox Jews are exactly the same, etc. You still understand what those words mean.
L Kap
·
Oct 4, 2019
·
Boulder, CO
· Joined Apr 2014
· Points: 224
Cpn Dunsel wrote:
The dentition clearly shows that tearing some flesh is part of the diet and it is a mistake to claim that the teeth do not support carnivorous eating.
It’s entirely possible that without an early diet that included generous amounts of animal protein, we wouldn’t even have become human—at least not the modern, verbal, intelligent humans we are.
It was about 2.6 million years ago that meat first became a significant part of the pre-human diet. Being an herbivore was easy—fruits and vegetables don’t run away, after all. But they’re also not terribly calorie-dense.
This might be true, and yes we are biologically capable of being omnivores, but all of that is irrelevant to present day ethical considerations. Pre-historic humans and pre-humans probably did lots of things - like genocide of competitors - that modern humans would find unacceptable today. Evolution is moral as well as physical.
Fwiw: I am very pro-vegan but am not a vegan myself. Too many good healthy calories from dense protein foods that are not vegan but are vegetarian for me to ever make the jump.
Why are you pro-vegan? If it's because you don't support animal cruelty, unfortunately the egg and dairy industries are quite cruel and are feeders to the meat industry. They're just a temporary way station for a subset of animals that end up on plates in the end after spending a period of years being devastatingly exploited for the products of their reproduction. It's actually worse from the perspective of suffering to be an egg hen than a broiler hen, or to be a dairy cow vs. a beef cow. There are so many good healthy calories, and all the same proteins, that you can get from plant foods.
L Kap
·
Oct 4, 2019
·
Boulder, CO
· Joined Apr 2014
· Points: 224
The Raven wrote: From an extreme point in a spectrum I suppose there is some logic. Deriving logic from an extreme dietary stance doesn't strike me as very logical.
I don't think anyone is reverse engineering logic out of a dietary stance. It's better thought of as deriving a dietary practice from a moral principle of not exploiting other species. Some people are extending that principle (that we have no right to exploit other species simply because they are non-human) to include insect species.
You may have heard this one before, but I think it's the best way to understand. Imagine an alien species that is superior to humans in every way comes to earth. They are exponentially smarter, stronger, have better technology, more advanced communication, etc. To them, we are not much different than mooing cattle. Does that give them the right to kill and eat us? To control and/or breed every member of our entire species from birth to death? To imprison female humans, impregnate us on "rape racks" as often as our bodies can bear, steal our babies, and literally milk us for their own appetites, then slaughter us without a second thought when "production" drops off? Of course they CAN. Of course it would be the natural order of survival of the fittest. But is it right?
do not forgot, you eat your foul meat and cheese, beside supporting carnival of torture, abuse and environmental devastation, your vasculature it has atherosclerosis rising, your once proud and mighty wang will limpen and no longer it is working by age 40s or 50s most likely, half-erection at most you are hoping
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