You are what you eat; and such tender treatment of these beasts is much to be admired, for as one wise man said: where animals are abused the conditions of humans is little better... In what sense is our condition better??? Are we so kind to each other??? Do we offer to humans more hope than we see offered to animals??? Most of us only exist to serve others... Few of us are allowed to enjoy the bounty we produce.... No one can count on entitlements even in a wealthy commonwealth... When we can no longer work we are expected to kindly die, and we should, having wished our lives away nearly from birth...Slaughter is too good for animals... It should be reserved for humans because if it were offered to the fully grown in the face of the futility of life, many would accept death no matter how painful... We do this to animals, and we do it to ourselves... Until people learn to reverence all life we shall all endure the same miserable treatment, not different in kind, but different by degrees...

People could justify all they want, it's all too common. It's very difficult to come into terms that we are wrong.

Oh well. I pray for you.

It's time to do good philosophy.

Good philosophy should result in a good life, and part of our natural disregard for all life, which has no support in the Bible which says we will be judged on the matter flows into the mistreatment of human beings... Now you can see it where people are poor and oppressed that their treatment of animals amounts to abuse, but the way people are abused in this land of plenty is little better... Until just recently they where mixing the ground up corpses of sick animals with the feed for animals fated to be our food... They don't care for those animals, and they don't care for the people who eat them... And I will tell you; that I have hunted and killed deer... It is not bad to raise animals for slaugher; but the inevitable drive for profit which runs a whole industry into madness and cruelty is a curse...We don't need industrial beef eating grain they can hardly digest to produce a meat too fat to eat, and a methane cloud as big as new jersey... We do not need factory chicken which endangers all our well being, and threatens us with disease... We do not need pork that with poultry is a breeding ground for pandemics... We need some common sense applied to our food... Consider, that if one uses hormones, they all must, and then we have to eat it and suffer breasts on our boys and cancer in our girls... This stuff is not good for the animals, and is not good for us...If the aim of philosophy as with any human art is Good; how can we allow this to continue???... Go Pita... They might hate me, but they have the courage to act on their convictions which gets us that much closer to a solution... Kill if you must, but do not torture a single one...We don't have to rock these animals to sleep at night with a blanky... All we have to do is recognize our responsibility for their humane treatment from which follows our own human treatment... Are we not animals too???

I would imagine we(people) eat meant because it is a very easy source of high potency (or quality however you learned it) protein. Meat provides all essential amino acids, while a vegetarian would have to look for a few alternatives to find the same levels of concentration. Phosphorus is more readily absorbable than anything you could find in wheat and cereals. Additionally, you get iron from meat (especially from liver). However, there is the chance of developing hemochromatosis if you have too much iron in the body. Give and take I suppose. You also get an ample supply of B-complex from meat as well.

I would think if anything, it is a matter of efficiency why we eat meat (as well as necessity). I would think over the course of so many thousands and thousands of years of evolution, the body developed an affinity for a more stable, compact food source. And this is not considering the fact that in the course of evolution, humans have developed away from a dependence on cellulose towards complex protein digestion (consider the vestigial vermiform appendix for example).

As far as eating meat because it tastes good and our parents eat meat, so we think it is normal, that's actually not entirely wrong. When you cut away the subjectivity of that statement, you get to the crux of the issue which is that they do eat meat because they eat meat and thus they survive. They benefit from the complex proteins, the iron, etc. and they have a better chance of survival. I think as far as vegetarians are concerned, because alternatives to meat are so readily available now, it really doesn't make that much of a difference whether you eat meat or not, because you can sustain yourself with supplements and a few other sufficient alternatives (i.e. tofu, etc.). It's funny this comes up because I just read that the FDA in the United States is taking an active approach in cutting down sodium intake. While this seems all well and good superficially, the interesting thing is is that regular table salt is where most people get their required iodine for the day. I eat sea salt, which does not have iodine in it, so I calculate what i need in one of my multivitamins. Cutting back on one general staple reveals subtle and potentially problematic issues.

Same goes with people that don't have meat. A big danger with vegetarians who don't really understand the balance that they need is that they don't balance at all. Just eating vegetables and fruits without considering which supplies a certain vitamin or protein is really dangerous. And it can actually be somewhat bad for your health in some circumstances. Some for example intake more carbohydrates than they need (not life threatening mind you but health wise not really beneficial).

In my own case, I could live without red meat, but I would be very uncomfortable if I didn't have fish (or at least omega 3 fatty acid supplements). Definitely not bad to be a vegetarian, only that you have to consider a balanced diet (which honestly I don't think many people consider).

As to the video, you may also like this documentary called Food, Inc. Very good documentary on the conventional/organic food differences, especially as far as farm raised animals.

In my mind, choosing to be vegetarian or carnivore makes no difference if they do not eat a high quality version of a given food. For instance, the regular milk you could buy at your local grocery store or walmart is just milk right? Wrong. Conventional milk has high concentrations of hormones and a feed by-product that buildup in your body fat. Organic milk on the other hand is sourced from cows who graze on grass, and in turn pass on the benefits of the compound isomer conjugated linoleic acid. This greatly help you metabolize fats, etc.

And I really recommend Food, Inc. because it shows the dangers in food quality (regardless of the omission of meat etc.). One very troubling part of the documentary showed how the primary soy supplier , Monsanto, who actually maintains a monopoly on soy seeds (so if you are anti0industrialist, prepare for heavy irony), completely saturates the seed in two dozen chemicals which over the course of a lifetime greatly degrade a persons health. Now imagine how a person who thinks they are living healthier by eating soy ends up causing more harm to their body because they eat food contaminated with pesticides.

It is also a "necessity" and "efficiency" and "high potency" from your argument for human slavery - because it is a natural tendency for huge and over population for these phenomenon to happen. It's just normal and evolution too.

Actually if you looked at slave statistics, we have the most slavery today - shocking isn't it? We are obviously oblivious to it because it's not happening right in front of us, we are safeguarded from this wide world by a thing called the web/computer screen.

Anyway, not trying to argue, but eating meat, I believe, is another example of how humans are liable to flaws and the inability to critically think for themselves, myself included. We are all shaped and affected by our environment from an early age, and unfortunately it's so damn hard to change.

It's just a fact, and the fact that you cringe and roll your eyes, and disagree with me in the blink of an eye just shows how hard it is to accept this, i.e. our inherent inability to think critically.

How I wish I could quote like you. It's so tiring to copy and paste everything you said in different sections. Or you know a shortcut... :/

Just as a side-note: how about cannibalism? Is it actually healthy to eat another human being? There is overpopulation after all.

My way is probably the same way you multiquote. I copy and paste the entirety of what I want to quote to word, then space out the sections I want to address individually, copy the primary quote tag and paste it at the head of each section I want and then copy and paste the end quote tag. Takes half a minute to do, but it works out very well for me.

Just as a side-note: how about cannibalism? Is it actually healthy to eat another human being? There is overpopulation after all.

Just as a side-note: how about cannibalism? Is it actually healthy to eat another human being? There is overpopulation after all.

Just as a side-note: how about cannibalism? Is it actually healthy to eat another human being? There is overpopulation after all.

For thousands of years we have eaten food from creatures NOT brought up in this sick manner, and even more sickly presented, onesided and ignorent. Only people who are naive and easily swayed by some propaganda will jump on such bandwagon of whiners. Humans are often idiots, and resort to denial of meat, instead of bettering the condition for the poor creatures which is utter idiocy.

Unfortunaly these people are allowed by the power of democracy and capitalism to live out their sick ideas, because they have wealth to choose other alternatives than meat, often in their zeal they forget to enlighten others and themselfs how to maintain a healthy vegetarian diet, and therefore get malnurised.

Even worse they will spread their faulty to other countries that look up to us ritch people, but only gets half the story.

Revolutions are often bad, because it disturbs a very finetuned balance, often with good intend, but with devestating result, because the foolish humans can't think very far or broad.

It's very simple, laughing sickness ..bad ..very bad!

We eat meat because it is the quickest food source that makes us strong.
platorepublic I wonder if you were shown that meat consumption would improve your concentration and virility and over all strength and could contribute to higher test scores on your exams whether you might consider eating it again??
I eat meat because I weight train and honestly because it is nice to taste.
All I would say is for meat eater to be less culpable of an injustice is to buy organic or at least know where and what your meat goes through to be the honour of a addition to your strength.
When I am not training I eat considerably less meat, funny enough not because I make the choice but because my body is not asking for it, I know my body pretty well, or my body knows me well.
Free meat tastes of something, something good, I would say those who eat meat that is not free don't know what meat is and why they eat it as I can honestly say that meat substitutes have exactly the same reaction as crap meat.
Know where you meat come from and has gone through to become part of you, this goes for your eggs as well, you have not tasted an egg until you have tasted a free range one.

Well. People are intrinsically naive. Naive enough to believe that eating farmed animals (organic or otherwise) is normal and good for them.

Wealth to choose other alternatives to meat? God, if everyone is that helpless and reliant on money, then we'd be doing all sorts of nasty things.

Only gets half the story? That's better than getting no story.