Where do vegetarians draw the line?!
Where do vegetarians draw the line?
Why are some vegetarians against the death of animals but not plants? Aren't plant's living as well? and they have "flesh" and "blood"? Do they have to have a certain level of anatomy to be a significant enough life form? or exempt from killing or eating?
Additional Details4 weeks ago
Still, there are some plants which have systems very similar to nervous systems and which react visibly to their environment... and what I mean by flesh and blood is that plants have tissue and internal fluids like animals, and if I was an alien looking at this world for the first time, then animals and plants would look similar in that respect: that they both have internal fluids carried by arteries and veins and xylem and phloem and they both have living tissues. If it bothers some vegetarians to eat animal tissue which was once living, shouldn't it pertain to plants as well?
Answers:
4 weeks ago
Still, there are some plants which have systems very similar to nervous systems and which react visibly to their environment... and what I mean by flesh and blood is that plants have tissue and internal fluids like animals, and if I was an alien looking at this world for the first time, then animals and plants would look similar in that respect: that they both have internal fluids carried by arteries and veins and xylem and phloem and they both have living tissues. If it bothers some vegetarians to eat animal tissue which was once living, shouldn't it pertain to plants as well?
If you pull a cat by its tail, it will react (either by attacking you back or running away).
If any animal senses danger (= possibility of being in pain and possibly die), it runs / flies / swims away.
Have you ever seen a plant running away?
Do you truly believe that plants would be designed to be rooted to the same spot and feel an immense amount of pain at the same time?
I don't.
The big bad factory farms treat animals as plants. They keep the animals confined to small cages and crates, and treat them as if they feel no pain.
But animals feel more than pain. They feel loneliness, anxiety, jealousy, happiness, love. Some animal species mate for life (like some humans do). Most species take care for their young until they can survive on their own. They are social beings. They think. They remember. They express how they feel through their body language, by making sounds, even facial expressions. They cuddle.
Do you see how different animals are from plants?
This is where I draw the line. NO animals. Not on my plate, not in my cup, not on my feet or around my shoulders. No animals tested for my shampoo, shower gel or make-up.
What about medicines, you might ask. Well, I don't know. Since I became vegan, I haven't needed to take any.
This being said, I have to emphasise I do respect plants, too. I use them as much as I have to to survive, but I try not to hurt any plants for no good reason.
Let me finish that by quoting our good old Leo:
"As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap the joy of love."
Leonardo da Vinci
Millions of animals are killed every year from the harvesting of crops, so no food, unless you grow it yourself, prevents the killing of animals. Enjoy that ground up gopher in your soy burger!
i asked a friend (but then again this may be pertained to only hindus i don't know) but he says that if it can make noises by itself than its one of us and shouldn't be eating
why does it not bother you that you eat the muscle of a previously living animal? plants and animals are not the same. they are from different kingdoms. plants have no central nervous systems (i know they dont, you know they dont, dont say they do). and what blood and skin are you taking about? i'd love to know. if we were meant to eat meat we could eat it raw.
plants are natural, they dont have flesh and blood, they HAVE to eat something,some people dont eat animals for many reason not just because their aginst the killing of it,seeing an animal killed hurts others or atleast something close to that,some vegs,do it for religion...its better to eat fruits and vegs anyways
In most cases, the difference is the presence of a central nervous system. Also, by not eating meat, but eating directly from plant material, vegetarians PREVENT the deaths of the hundreds of plants it takes to produce meat in animals. It takes 17 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef.
You're confusing vegetarians with vegans but I wouldn't expect you to know the difference.
Eating plants uses less of the planet's resources vs. feeding lots of plants to an animal and then eating the animal. Environmentally it's pretty ethical to eat plants. Plants can't run away and they don't scream audibly when you kill them. I am not yogic enough to live on just air yet and thus I draw the line at killing plants to eat (I also kill bugs that come into my house uninvited, but not to eat- it's just cold hearted murder).
-Half of the water used in the U.S. is used for animal agriculture.
-Every year in the US an area the size of Connecticut is lost to topsoil erosion--85% of this erosion is associated with livestock production.
-Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.
-Every kilogram of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water.
-Approximately 1.3 billion cattle populate the earth at any one time. They exist artificially in these vast numbers to satisfy the excessive human demand for the meat and by-products they provide. Their combined weight exceeds that of the entire human population. By sheer numbers, their consequent appetite for the world's resources, have made them a primary cause for the destruction of the environment.
-In the US, feedlot cattle yield one pound of meat for every 16 pounds of feed. It takes an average of 2,500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of meat. According to Newsweek, "The water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer could float a destroyer." In contrast, it takes only 25 gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat. Feeding the average meat-eating American requires 3-1/4 acres of land per year.
-Feeding a person who eats no food derived from animals requires only 1/6 acre per year.. - Studies by North Carolina State University estimate that half of the some 2,500 open hog manure cesspools (euphemistically termed "lagoons"), now needed as part of hog productions there, are leaking contaminants such as nitrate--a chemical linked to blue-baby syndrome--into the ground water.
-Worldwide demand for fish, along with advances in fishing methods--sonar, driftnets, floating refrigerated fish packing factories--is bringing ocean species, one after another, to the brink of extinction. In the Nov., '95 edition of Scientific American, Carl Safina writes, "For the past two decades, the fishing industry has had increasingly to face the result of extracting [fish] faster than fish populations [can] reproduce." Research reveals that the intended cure--aquaculture (fish farming)--actually hastens the trend toward fish extinction, while disrupting delicate coastal ecosystems at the same time.
-A scientist, reporting in the industry publication Confinement, calculated in 1976 that the planet's entire petroleum reserves would be exhausted in 13 years if the whole world were to take on the diet and technological methods of farming used in the US.
-If tomorrow people in the US made a radical change away from their meat-centered diets, an area of land the size of all of Texas and most of Oklahoma could be returned to forest.
-It is estimated that livestock production accounts for twice the amount of pollution in the US as that produced by industrial sources.
-Livestock in the US produce 130 times the excrement of the entire US population. Since farm animals today spend much or all of their lives in factory sheds or feedlots, their waste no longer serves to fertilize pastures a little at a time. One poultry researcher, according to United Poultry Concerns literature, explains: "A one-million-hen complex will produce 125 tons of wet manure a day." To responsibly store, disperse, or degrade this amount of animal waste is simply not possible. Much of the waste inevitably is flushed into rivers and streams.
-Methane is one of the four greenhouse gasses that contributes to the environmental trend known as global warming. The 1.3 billion cattle in the world produce one fifth of all the methane emitted into the atmosphere.
-.Agricultural engineers have compared the energy costs of producing poultry, pork and other meats with the energy costs of producing a number of plant foods. It was found that even the least efficient plant food was nearly 10 times as efficient in returning food energy as the most energy efficient animal food.
-Since so much fossil fuel is needed to produce it, beef could be considered a petroleum product. With factory housing, irrigation, trucking, and refrigeration, as well as petrochemical fertilizer production requiring vast amounts of energy, approximately one gallon of gasoline goes into every pound of grain-fed beef.
-The direct and hidden costs of soil erosion and runoff in the US, mostly attributable to cattle and feed crop production, is estimated at $44 billion a year.
- Each pound of feedlot beef can be equated with 35 pounds of eroded topsoil.
-A nationwide switch to a pure vegetarian diet would allow us to cut our oil imports by 60%.
-Compared to a vegan diet, three days of a typical American diet requires as much water as you use for showering all year (assuming you shower every day).An acre of land can produce 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but only 165 pounds of beef.
-In the U.S., 260 million acres of forest have been destroyed for use as agricultural land to support our meat diet (over 1 acre per person).
-Since 1967, the rate of deforestation has been one acre every five seconds.
-Trees are being cut down at an alarming rate in the US, as well as around the world, for meat production. For every one acre cleared for urban development, seven acres are cleared to graze animals or grow feed for them.
I draw the line at anything with parents and a face.