Posted on 10/23/2011 6:42:18 AM PDT by IbJensen
Veganism dates back to 1944, when British Vegan Society co-founder Donald Watson coined the term to mean “non-dairy vegetarian.” The Society expanded the definition in 1951 to state that “man should live without exploiting animals.” Vegans eschew animal products in food, clothing, household products, or for any other reason.
There are a variety of reasons why people “go vegan.” Some simply don’t like the taste of meat. Some claim veganism is “green,” and that a vegan lifestyle minimizes impact on the environment.
In 1997, a survey revealed three percent of the people in the U.S. claimed that they had not used animals for any purpose in the previous two years. Rutgers School of Law professor Gary Francione argued in 2010 that “all sentient beings should have at least one right — the right not to be treated as property.”
Do ethical vegans live up to this stated standard? Do their actions live up to their own stated ethical principle, that animals have the right not to be treated as property? Do their actions really result in zero animal use? The parallel in human terms would be slavery, which no rational person thinks is ethically acceptable. Slaves are the property of masters; they live and die at their owner’s sufferance.
Unfortunately for the ethical vegan, the production of their food alone reduces their claim to impossibility. Animals are killed in untold millions, in the course of plant agriculture. Some are killed accidentally in the course of mechanized farming; some are killed deliberately in the course of pest control. Animals are killed, every day. Every potato, every stick of celery, every cup of rice, and every carrot has a blood trail leading from field to plate.
In 1999, while researching and writing Misplaced Compassion, I ran into a rice farmer who posted the following first-hand account on a Usenet forum:
[A] conservative annualized estimate of vertebrate deaths in organic rice farming is ~20 pound. … [T]his works out a bit less than two vertebrate deaths per square foot, and, again, is conservative. For conventionally grown rice, the gross body-count is at least several times that figure. … [W]hen cutting the rice, there is a (visual) green waterfall of frogs and anoles moving in front of the combine. Sometimes the “waterfall” is just a gentle trickle (± 10,000 frogs per acre) crossing the header, total for both cuttings, other times it is a deluge (+50,000 acre).
My own family was involved in corn and soybean farming; our numbers were not that high, but they were not inconsiderable. Pheasants and rabbits are routinely killed in planting and harvesting, and rodents are killed by the thousands using traps and pesticides at every step: production, storage, and transportation.
Rational people know this and don’t worry about it. It’s an inevitable consequence of modern, high-production agriculture. The ethical vegan, when confronted with these undeniable facts, collapses. Their reaction, in almost every case, is to do a rhetorical lateral arabesque into a new claim, that their vegan diet somehow causes “less death and suffering” than a non-vegan diet, a ridiculous and unsupportable argument. A pound of wild venison (net cost in animal death: about 1/120th of one animal) almost certainly causes less “death and suffering” than a pound of rice (net cost in animal death: including rodents, insect, reptiles and amphibians, number of deaths may range into the hundreds). Continued on Next Page -> Page 1 of 2 Next -> View as Single Page Email Print Decrease Font Size Increase Font Size
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1. jd
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the Bohemean fellow who became Chancelor of Germany in the ’30s adhere to a Vegetarian Diet? October 23, 2011 - 2:44 am Link to this Comment | Reply eon
Yes, and he had a serious problem with the Fat Guy Who Used To Be A Flying Ace who ran his Luftwaffe. (He was very fond of suckling pig.)
Other “ethical vegans” whose behavior toward humanity wasn’t so ethical included Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Himmler, Trotsky, Lavrenti Beria, Feliks Dzerzhinsky (yes, old “Iron Feliks” himself), and the recently-deceased Man Of Many Spellings Of His Name, Moammar al-Qadafi. (This is by no means an exhaustive list, either.)
To return to the main subject, ome of the “ethical vegan” crew hold that only “organic farming” is truly ethical, and demand that not only do we all become vegans, but that we must only eat foods raised organically.
To which I say, fine. Considering the low proportional yield of an acre farmed organically compared to an acre farmed by modern methods (been there, done that), that would mean that you would be expecting humanity to get by on (at best) about one-fourth the yield it does now. Meaning, everybody would be farming, and eating, as they do today in Sub-Saharan Africa. That is, inadequately.
Facts are stubborn things, as somebody-or-other said. And they tend to hit the assumed ethical superiority of “vegans” right in the mush.
cheers
***Newsweek magazine says, if you want to live healtheist....”Live like a Seventh day Adventist.”***
I live in a heavy SDA area and they die just like everyone else. Some of them are the most UNhealthy and self righteous people I have ever known.
My favorite story is the one who worked at a local hospital and made a scene every time the cafeteria served pork.
One day someone opened a door to a bedding closet and there, hidden, was the SDA observer, chowing down on a pork chop.
Then how did the dove Noah released from the window bring back an olive leaf in her beak? (Gen. 8:11)
***still believing in all ten commandments, (Not just 9) nor do they belive in them as a method of salvation, but instead as a standard to live by.****
I still remember the bald headed SDA preacher on AMAZING FACTS stating, “You are saved by grace, IF you keep the sabbath!”
That makes sabbath keeping more important than the Blood of Christ for salvation by GRACE.
These attitudes are cultural too. A lot of Indian programmers I come across are vegans or vegetarians because that is their upbringing and they do not have the attitude you mention. They stick to it for themselves and are never found pontificating about it to others. They are happy as long as lunches or dinners have something for them. The other interesting thing I find about them is that almost all of them oppose socialism from an ideological viewpoint.
It is the liberals who have a problem. In their case, I always associate vegans with 45-year old naked women in PETA advertisements.
The great problem with Seventh Day Adventism is that it is a false, man-made religion. It dates back only to the 19th century, puts the ridiculous ramblings of Ellen G. White on a par with scripture and practice deceptive tactics: http://millennium.fortunecity.com/lincoln/666/clearwordbible/clear-word.htm
How long they live is irrelevant.
My daughter is a vegetarian, not a vegan, and she eats fish which makes her something else that I can’t remember right now.
She never mentions it to anybody, just quietly does her own thing.
I think the thing that annoys us about vegetarians and vegans is their self-righteousness.
Thanks for the post. I know now whenever I see anything posted by you, I can safely ignore it. No meat before Noah’s flood...hmmm? Ridiculous ramblings.
Just think of the billions of microorganisms vegans kill daily in eating their still organic food, when they brush their teeth, or by washing their faces and hands.... It´s disgusting, and they should commit suicide as penance.
It seems that the road to the West’s destruction always leads back to the UK.
Time to nuke them from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Genesis 9:3 can certainly be understood as permitting that which was previously not permitted: “Every moving thing that lives shall be yours to eat; like the green vegetation, I have given you everything.”
Save the vegetables!!!!
A few years ago I read about a group in Switzerland that is trying to champion the rights of vegetables because supposedly they feel pain.
Earl Pitts says it best. “Save the vegetables, stop these juice thirsty health nuts before they kill again” I’m a vegetable rights activist!....
My great great great grandson Methuselah, keeps telling me I should become a vegan so I can live longer.
I keep telling him your time is short anyway so why not enjoy it.
“In my personal experiences with vegans I have gotten the impression that they are mostly self-righteous, self-obsessed hypocrites. Veganism seems to be a fake morality that allows narcissists the ability to buy meaningless moral ‘credits’ that they can spend elsewhere in the form of lying, selfishness, or plain meanness...”
When did you meet my husband? He isn’t a liberal but he is a greenie who is so demented he actually believes hunting animals is on par with abortion. That man needs to eat an angus burger stat!
The hardest part about eating vegetables is swallowing the wheelchair. /s
Maybe they are better than me. I’ll take a quality steak over that quality morals anyday.
Where do vegans get their B vitamins?
I do believe cancer is fairly new. But I believe it comes from additives in foods and other chemicals introduced into our lives. For example, consuming milk from cows treated with a synthetic, genetically engineered growth hormone called rBGH - banned in Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and in the 27 countries of the European Union because of its dangers to human health - unfortunately is in about one third of the dairy cows in America. Eating grass fed, no hormone or chemically processed meats is far healthier than a vegan diet.
Vegans eat bugs, which are life forms, which are animals in their own right. Small bugs are on everything, so this idea that they feel morally superior to those that do not eat large animals like chickens and cows is pure ignorant hogwash.
By definition then, the vegans you know are not vegans. If you wear or use leather, you aren't a vegan. I think perhaps the vegetarians you know like their leather. Vegan and vegetarian are not interchangeable.
Those aren’t vegan women. They’re vegetarians. FReepers seem to be having trouble with is one today.
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