[One Degree]

Not true, you just need to eat a variety of food and take a B vitamin supplement. Also whatever extra effort you spend on nutrition is more than made up for by the improvement in your health.

It is easy to agree with many of your comments if we choose to see ourselves as above the natural order of predator and prey. Only tools made this possible and the result is our justifying our own overpopulation which is destroying the natural environment. Eating meat is not the problem, too many of us eating meat is. All 'animals' are meant to keep each other in balance.
Edit: something to think about, why does eating wild meat reduce our need for vegetation, but domesticated meat does not. We are not a 'superior' species if we refuse to control our own numbers. We are an infestation. We will be 'superior' when we acknowledge this.

[Ter]

What about eggs, fish, dairy ?

Some people do and other people don't eat those.

Life is more complicated when not eating meat.

[Potemkin]

All 'animals' are meant to keep each other in balance.

No, they're not. Nature has no purpose and intends nothing. The only reason why the natural order seems miraculously 'balanced' to us is because only situations in equilibrium persist over long periods of time. If there were no balance between predators and prey (as frequently happens in nature), then either the prey or the predators (and most likely both) will die and disappear. Over the billions of years of evolution, stable equilibria have developed, and these equilibrium conditions, by definition, have persisted over long periods of time and are therefore readily apparent to us. However, there is no guarantee that these equilibrium conditions will continue into the indefinite future and there is no evidence that nature 'intends' any such balance.

[anasawad]

Natural balance between different animals is already long gone.
Humans happened.


Regarding the topic in hand, I eat pretty much anything that tastes good.

[AFAIK]

All 'animals' are meant to keep each other in balance.

Are you suggesting that more people should be mauled to death by tigers and rampaging elephants? Human beings used to be in the middle of the food chain before we developed technology that elevated us to apex predator status.

[One Degree]

No, they're not. Nature has no purpose and intends nothing. The only reason why the natural order seems miraculously 'balanced' to us is because only situations in equilibrium persist over long periods of time. If there were no balance between predators and prey (as frequently happens in nature), then either the prey or the predators (and most likely both) will die and disappear. Over the billions of years of evolution, stable equilibria have developed, and these equilibrium conditions, by definition, have persisted over long periods of time and are therefore readily apparent to us. However, there is no guarantee that these equilibrium conditions will continue into the indefinite future and there is no evidence that nature 'intends' any such balance.

Your premise is a point of ongoing disagreement, however I acknowledge species would disappear with or without humans. This is not in contradiction to my premise that our sheer numbers are destroying the chances of success for all life. We are not acting as a superior species, but as a predator intent upon eating everything the earth has to offer. A truly superior species would limit their numbers to insure future survival. Balance of the natural environment is to our benefit whether or not nature has a purpose. Grrr, iPads are not optimal for debate.

[One Degree]

Are you suggesting that more people should be mauled to death by tigers and rampaging elephants? Human beings used to be in the middle of the food chain before we developed technology that elevated us to apex predator status.

No, just suggesting we should not consider ourselves superior until we choose to do what we prevent the tigers from doing that would be to our mutual benefit.

[anarchist23]

Paul Flatman lives a few miles from us. We have been to one of his slaughterhouses a few times to buy and rescue factory farmed laying chickens that are to be killed. Laying chickens produce maximum eggs in their first year of life and are killed after a year or so and the male chicks are killed when they are a few days old.
Flatman is responsible for the death of nearly 25,000 chickens in terrible circumstances and yet he isn't incarcerated.

A farmer has been banned from involvement in poultry businesses for five years following the death of more than 6,000 birds at one of his broiler farms.

Paul Flatman, 65, who trades from Packards Lane, Wormingford, Essex, was also fined £12,500, ordered to complete 180 hours of unpaid work and handed a suspended jail sentence.

Earlier this year, Mr Flatman admitted six charges under the Animal Welfare Act.

Essex Trading Standards brought the prosecution after a vet visited Hawksmill Farm, Great Leighs, on 20 August 2012 following an anonymous tip-off.

An earlier hearing was told that she arrived to find a digger moving dead birds and described a horrendous smell.

She estimated about 6,600 birds had perished, but determining an exact number was difficult because of the “scale of putrefaction”.

Dead birds were piled up at the farm, with surviving animals suffering from exhaustion.

The vet also said broilers had been allowed to grow too heavy, were too densely stocked and ventilation was inadequate. Poor-quality litter compounded the problems.

Trading Standards said advice offered following the death of 18,000 birds in 2011, also from heatstroke, had not been heeded.

Deborah Alexander, the investigating veterinary officer from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA), said: “This tragic event resulted in many thousands of birds dying due to heat stress and could have been avoided.”

Cllr Roger Walters, Essex County Council lead member for Trading Standards, added: “This case shows that we will not tolerate livestock being kept in these kinds of conditions.”

Mr Flatman’s ban, under section 34 of the Animal Welfare Act, prevents him from being involved in the poultry trade for five years.

http://www.fwi.co.uk/poultry/farmer-ban ... y-case.htm

[One Degree]

Why does he not sell them for meat rather than destroying them?

[anarchist23]

Why does he not sell them for meat rather than destroying them? :?:

Normally the chickens are killed and processed and the meat sold on. You are talking about hundreds of thousands of chickens that are killed and processed in his slaughter houses every year. It's on an industrial scale.

In the U.K. alone over a billion chickens are slaughtered for human consumption every year.

https://www.viva.org.uk/what-we-do/slau ... animals-uk

[mikema63]

Chickens are evil creatures that deserve what they get.

[skinster]

[anarchist23]

An ad stating that "Humane milk is a myth" has been cleared by the regulator following complaints from members of the dairy industry that it was inaccurate and misleading.
The national newspaper ad for Go Vegan World, a vegan campaign group, in February featured a photo of a cow behind a piece of barbed wire and the headline "Humane milk is a myth. Don't buy it."
Smaller text stated: "I went vegan the day I visited a dairy. The mothers, still bloody from birth, searched and called frantically for their babies.
"Their daughters, fresh from their mothers' wombs but separated from them, trembled and cried piteously, drinking milk from rubber teats on the wall instead of their mothers' nurturing bodies. All because humans take their milk."
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said seven complainants, some of whom had experience of working in the dairy industry, and who believed that the ad did not accurately describe the way that dairy cattle were generally treated in the UK, challenged whether the ads' claims were misleading and could be substantiated.
Go Vegan World said the ad did not state or imply that calves were separated from their mothers prior to the 12 to 24 hours recommended by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
But in any case, they believed the exact timing of the separation was irrelevant to the ad, which commented on the injustice of separating cow and calf, claiming later separation actually caused more distress.
They believed most people would consider separation at 25 hours as unjust as separation at 24 hours.
Clearing the ad, the ASA said it understood the complainants were concerned the ad implied a significant number of dairy farms did not comply with animal welfare standards in place in the UK, and milk production was therefore "inhumane" in that sense.
But it concluded: "We understood that Defra recommended that calves should be kept with their mothers for at least 12 and preferably 24 hours after birth.
"Although the language used to express the claims was emotional and hard-hitting, we understood it was the case that calves were generally separated from their mothers very soon after birth, and we therefore concluded that the ad was unlikely to materially mislead readers."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho ... 60271.html

[mikema63]

@skinster my family had chickens. They'd peck their babies to death and attack you. They are evil and merely luring that boy into a false sense of security. They cannot be trusted.

[Decky]

If a chicken had the chance it would consume you and your family; the mass farming of chickens is merely self defence.

[Zagadka]

They are basically mini Tyrannosaurs.

We had a chicken. In the middle of LA. For some reason we still aren't sure of. She had chicks, who all died from random suburban things. Then she attacked my mother with her talons. Didn't last long after that.

[Potemkin]

They are basically mini Tyrannosaurs.

Precisely. Not all the dinosaurs were wiped out by that asteroid. Some of them survived. And they bided their time....

[colliric]

They are basically mini Tyrannosaurs.

We had a chicken. In the middle of LA. For some reason we still aren't sure of. She had chicks, who all died from random suburban things. Then she attacked my mother with her talons. Didn't last long after that.

Chicks are very fragile when young. Alot of them die from hypothermia and hyperthermia... As they die suddenly in unexpected places(really dynling because of the cold or heat) people often don't realize it was the weather that killed them.

Your Chicken might have had problems coping with the loss of her chicks.

It could be she was psychotic too and killed the chicks then attacked your mum. But most likely they were killed by nature and their own fragility, and maybe their mother was angry about that loss.

[LV-GUCCI-PRADA-FLEX]

It is easy to agree with many of your comments if we choose to see ourselves as above the natural order of predator and prey. Only tools made this possible and the result is our justifying our own overpopulation which is destroying the natural environment. Eating meat is not the problem, too many of us eating meat is. All 'animals' are meant to keep each other in balance.

I agree, our high population and general isolation from or manipulation of nature causes us to be completely disconnected from any type of food web ecosystem. Instead of being a part of a biome, we create a production line to fulfill our need for energy (food). This requires a constant stream of animals to be produced and killed so that we can eat. Furthermore, the nature of our culture dictates that we stimulate consumption, which further promotes the belief of food as pleasure because that is more profitable for the most amount people.

So to recap, we don't live in the natural world and we live in a place that has to kill billions of animals a year in order for a select few to make a lot of money. Yet this is a system that people will continue to trap themselves in because they don't see that if everybody made a bit of a sacrifice we would have enough resources for everybody without costing ourselves the planet either.

The meat industry is at a historical dead end.

[mikema63]

Your Chicken might have had problems coping with the loss of her chicks.

The psychology of any species that produces large numbers of offspring rapidly is incredibly unlikely to be invested in the survival of their offspring.