tofujesus:

davevdb:

tofujesus:

davevdb:

sortalikebeingpumped:

supervegan:

davevdb:

supervegan:

davevdb:

supervegan:

push-button-receive-bacon:

seanbarnes:

samburgundy:

quietecstasy:

There are a ton of cool points in this. My main question is, how can you seriously say that you don’t support animal cruelty but eat meat? Killing an animal is cruel right?

I don’t think that modern methods of slaughtering livestock are cruel. 

without proper education your thoughts on any issue are irrelevant and should be left out of discussions entirely, for your sake, as you lack grounds to back them up with.

We raise animals for food, just like we grow plants for food. 

implying that growing insentient plants for food, justifies raising and killing sentient animals for food.

As far as animals serving us, domestic animals have been purposely bred for food production, the original wild versions of cattle are completely different than the breed of beef and dairy animals today, in fact the last wild ancestor of modern cattle is extinct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

implying a drastically shortened life suffering in total slavery under the lingering, and literal, axe is better than no life, no suffering, at all. further implying that purposely breeding any form of sentient life for the sake of the breeder is A-OK and turns said life into the property of the breeder.

you, sir, are a walking bag of flawed rethoric and logical fallacies, which begs the question why anyone would even listen to you in the first place.

Dissmissing my entire view on a issue because it conflicts with your own?  Congratulations arm-chair general!  You win!

your view is dismissable because it is inherently anthropocentric and fallacious, not because it conflicts with mine. funny you should accuse me of that when you’ve continually proven to dismiss everything that conflicts with your views as “pseudo-science” like a devout christian in denial of the fossil record.

“implying a drastically shortened life suffering in total slavery…”

Drastically shortened life? 

a dairy cow for example will be killed after 3-7 years. as soon as their production decreases they’re sent to slaughter. when left the fuck alone they live 18-25 years. what about other farm animals?

• feeder cattle are killed after 1-2 years, their natural lifespan is 25-30 years
• sheep are killed after 3-10 months, their natural lifespan is 15 years
• pigs are killed after 3-6 months, their natural lifespan is 15 years
• chickens are killed after 6 weeks, their natural lifespan is 10 years
• egg laying hens are killed after 18 months, their natural lifespan is 10 years
• turkeys are killed after 12-26 weeks, their natural lifespan is 25-30 years

those are drastically and brutally shortened lives, indeed. ignoring the obvious issue of nonhuman slavery, will not make it go away.

I’m sure cattle would have a wonderful time starving to death in the Canadian winter, not to mention having their young picked off by wolves and other predators. This is where my point about them being purposly bred comes from, these are not wild animals anymore.  They would not be able to survive in the wild in the vast majority of the climates in the world.  Even their original ancestors were limited to a small part of Europe. 

this is anthropocentric in at least two ways. first you imply that their dependence on human care, which is a direct result of the violent domestication we have forced upon them, justifies denying them freedom.

second you imply that humans killing nonhumans on demand (for other reasons than self preservation or self defense) are somehow more just, than what may or may not happen in nature.

both of which is everything from laughable to sad.

I’d like to know what ideal answer would be to complete stopping humanities use of animal products would be?  Would you like all the farmers in the entire world to set the cows free today? I think that would be the definition of cruelty. 

whether or not i’m going to answer this, or i’m able to, has nothing to do with the case at hand. it’s a red herring. human greed is what brought us and the animals to where we are, it’s our fault, not theirs. so just because you don’t see an ideal solution to the problem, does not mean we should just continue our maltreatment of the voiceless.

the movement for the abolition of human slavery had to deal with similiar questions by the way.

what i would worry about is the number of then unemployed, psychopath butchers who have spent their lives torturing, killing, dismembering and eating sentient animals when they weren’t busy abusing their spouses. these “people”, if that is what one wishes to call them, will be very angry we took away the purpose of their existence and may as well be looking for other sources to impose their dominance on. but that is also something we have brought onto ourselves.

if society is training killers, it must deal with them as well.

In the case of dairy farming, the notion that the cattle are “suffering” is completely ridiculous.  Anyone who knows anything about dairy farming knows that a happy cow is a producing cow. If a cow is a abused, neglected, uncomforatble, stressed, etc they will not give as much milk as a cow that is content.  So your assumptions that most farmers are doing any of the above to their animals is completely ridiculous as they would be shooting themselves in the foot financially, especially in a smaller operation.

except, as mentioned before, your “hands-on experience” doesn’t relate to global animal agriculture. in factory farming, which is by far the standard, suffering is inherent  and does not reduce profits as long as it is kept under pharmaceutical control with the massive abuse of antibiotics, bovine growth hormones and the like. also in order to keep a dairy cow productive (pay attention as the following applies to your happy farm fairytales) she has to be kept pregnant which means she will have to endure continuous artificial insemination procedures, in other words she will be raped continually until her productive value is too low to be profitable, which means she will be sent to slaughter. as a result of pregnancy she will continually produce calves which will be taken from her, so that you can drink her milk instead of the calf. causing immense psychological stress for both of them. male calves are then sold as veal, female calves will become the next generation of dairymachines.

your so called dairy cows suffer the most of them all. they are exploited for their femininity and their flesh. factory farmed or not.

90% of them will end up as your hamburger meat when they are spent.

also there are loads of undercover videos proving that animal abuse incidents on “mom and pop farms” are all but isolated cases. but go on, post some more pictures of your dad smiling as he cleans the udders of his slaves or puts baseball hats on them, it’s not gonna make him look like less of a scumbag.

“… under the lingering, and literal, axe “

Farm animals may be sentient, but intelligence is a entirely different thing.  A cow, pig, chicken, etc has no idea that they are going to be killed and eaten.  Also, I can speak from personal experience that a axe is very quick and painless way to slaughter a chicken.  I’ve done it myself hundreds of times over the years.

you make it sound like beheading a live chicken with an axe and watching its torso going into spasms, sputtering warm blood is as easy and ethical as picking vegetables.

that is really interesting.

tell me more about how you’ve personally experienced that this method of being killed is painless. how did you actually do this, did you magically transform into a chicken being killed in this matter just so you could give me first hand impressions of how it feels?

you assume it’s painless, but that does not make it so.

according to your logic it would be perfectly fine to slaughter and eat a human infant, as it possesses little to no actual intelligence, definetly a lot less than pigs for example, it has no idea that it is going to be killed and eaten.

what about comatose, senile or otherwise mentally disabled people? would it be ok for us to kill them or otherwise make them suffer because they don’t conform to some arbitrary standard of intelligence? is it different to you because they are human?

if those members of society do have direct moral status, animals do have a direct moral status, too, since there is no known morally relevant ability that those marginal-case humans have that animals lack.

“farm animals” are intelligent, there is an evergrowing pile of evidence you simply cannot ignore without exposing your own lack of intelligence and ignorance. rene descartes is dead, stop groping his corpse.

chicken intelligence, pig intelligence, bovine intelligence

scientists are still arguing about the details, and as long as the issue of “animal intelligence” is one the industry profits from they will continue to argue. but the position you claim is on shaky, disintegrating grounds at best.

if you’re looking at philosophy, jeremy bentham said it best:

The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?

cows and pigs know very well when they are going to be killed, they can smell the blood of their brothers and sisters as they are beaten and kicked on their way through the chutes leading to the killing floor. they can hear them scream as they are killed and react with terror and stress.

throughout human history we’ve had too many, mainly white and upper class, people (the ones in power if you will) denying the rationality and intelligence of other humans in order to strip them of their entitlement to freedom, equality and to open the floodgates of easily justifiable brutality upon them, leading us too many cases of trivialized genocide and slavery.

today we have the same assholes arguing against animals.

and of course they would argue against everything that threatens their implements of male dominance and profits.

Victimizers and oppressors always deny that victims suffer, feel pain or are intelligent. This allows enslavement and murder to happen nonchalantly and guilt-free. The victimizers’ mind-set goes like this: “You don’t count because you’re stupid. You don’t matter because you’re dumb. I laugh at your suffering. I’ll kill you when I want to. I’ll sell you and your family. You’re worthless. You don’t think the way I do. Prove to me why I should be kind to you. Prove to me that you deserve to be free.”

- gary yourofsky

stating that you have murdered hundreds of chicken over the years only serves to fuel my disgust with you as it shows how you much you revel in the fact that you happen to live in a time where your murders will not be persecuted by law simply because you were lucky enough to win the birth lottery.

you’re basically spitting in the faces of your victims.

I’m sorry that my hands on experience with the actual animals in question doesn’t corroborate what you read on the internet.

after all it seems you value the “hands on experience” on your dads farm a bit too much. so much in fact that it makes you ignore the glaring issues and impact of global animal agriculture as well as the ethical issues of animal exploitation completely.

it’s as if you think all farms are like yours, factory farming doesn’t even exist on a worldwide scale and every nonhuman was made to serve you.

It’s become quite obvious to me that these sort of arguements will go nowhere because our values when it comes to animal welfare are fundamentally different. You are not going “disprove” or convince me otherwise when it comes to what I econsider “humane” or “cruel” anymore than I could the same to you.

allthough i’m going to point out that this attitude of stubbornly sticking to what you think you know even when presented with arguments and evidence is as irrational, as religious, as it gets, i’m not in this to persuade you.

i’m here to show that your concept of welfare is really just a heap of easily contestable justifcations for oppression, slavery and exploitation, in other words business as usual under the guise of “humane treatment”.

My original arguement was not against your Vegan values themselves, but simply against Supervegan’s use of junk science sources to try tell everyone else that they are wrong in eating meat or otherwise using animal products. 

enslaving, killing and consuming nonhumans when you have access to a plant based diet is speciesist, i.e. wrong, and absolutely disgusting. supervegan was right all along.

You have every right to not cosume animal products because you think that animal agriculture is cruel and that the very fact that something dies for you to live is cruel.

Personally, I do not support large scale factory farms (as I do believe their methods can be cruel) and try to only consume dairy and meat that has been produced locally. 

factory farming is cruel and so are family farms. slavery is slavery, rape is rape and murder is murder

- no matter how much you and your dad pillow it with cuddles and smiles.