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If death was an issue, they vegetarians would advocate not eating plants. It's suffering that's the issue, and the suffering caused by improper farming practices isn't something that's natural or necessary for survival in many cases, which is why most of us support a constant improvement of welfare of the animals involved. But vegetarianism or meat-eating isn't the issue really. A vegetarian that eats battery farmed eggs is contributing more to animal suffering than someone who shoots a wild animal and eats it, or eats an animal raised on a farm where the standards are very high.
I completely understand where the vege posters in this thread are coming from.
I constantly get the vege jokes at work, and why do I do it.. and then just like Kermit did, I get the "why do you want to eat something that looks and tastes like meat, whats the point of quorn, blah blah blah"
Well, it's because I DONT WANT TO FUCKING EAT ANIMALS. SO WHAT? My mother is a vegetarian, and that's how I've been raised.. and yes, it is because they are cute and fucking fluffy. God, I don't even kill spiders/flies/ants etc, infact, I would go out of my way to save one. I don't know why, I just don't like things dying if they don't have too. Will I kill something if I have too, I.e. red ants in my kids garden? Yes, for safety reasons, and not just because "its there".
I also get the piss taken a lot because I'm quite a loud, out-going, bodybuilder.. which apparantley makes it doubly "impossible" for me to be a vege. People actually generally refuse to believe me... I just don't get it! But hey... whatever!
Which if you look back over the thread is what the majority of meat eaters have been saying. The vegetarians such as crying angel have stated outright that ANY killing of an animal is tantamount to animal abuse, which in my opinion is rather absurd.
I too believe that death is not the issue and that's why I don't find anything morally wrong with killing animals for food. The issue I'm concerned about is how they lived. You can be concerned about animal welfare AND eat meat.
Well they do. Such is life. It's just a matter of how and when. As I said earlier when I go out shootin birds and rabbits or go fishing, the death my quarry recieve is probably preferable to any other death they'd otherwise have.
Evolution is adaptation.
We do have teeth for eating meat, forward facing eyes etc We have quite a few biological adaptations that have aided us as hunter and meat eater.
We're omnivores, much like Chimps whose diet consists of meat and insects. Nwither pure hunter or pure vegetarian - were opertunist feeders.
We have too much meat in our diet now, we eat more than we need to or that is healthy for us, a healthy diet should consist of a much high percentage of vegtable matter than meat. But our bodies CAN survive on a diet which consists of almost pure meat - that's no accident. We wouldn't have made it so far North otherwise - just look at the Innuit - they survive in the hardest of climates on earth on a diet of almost enitirely meat.
Re the point about animal welfare and eating meat, I agree, you can do my both, my father does... and it's a point a lot of people miss
It's not actually. Well not exactly. But then neither are a great deal of raw plants either. As a species, we've been preparing food to make it easier to digest for so long that our digestive system struggles to handle a lot of raw food. A person living entirely on raw food would have many nutritional deficiencies, even if the raw food was actually from a domestic source, which are inevitably more nutritious than the wild equivalent. Preparation and cooking means that the ratio between the nutrition the food gives you, and the energy needed for your body to digest it massively swings things in our favour. But it means we would struggle to live off raw food, even if it is technically edible.
There:
Chimps have them too:
As do Gorillas:
In exactly the same place, with exactly the same number (and type) of teeth in between.
Although Gorillas in particular certainly live off a high volume, low energy diet, which is the opposite of us now. We did all evolve from something that probably had a similar diet to Gorillas today. AFAIK, our canines are left over from even before then, but I've just posted a question about this on a forum with proper scientists on, rather than someone who's just watched a few documentaries.
But we have evolved since then. We couldn't eat a gorillas diet. It is possible for a modern human to be healthy eating only vegetables and fruit, but that's only because we've modified vegetables and fruit so much that they have unnatural nutritional value. Our digestive system couldn't handle wild plants or raw meat any more.
What would those be ?
- Calcium
- Iron
- B12
- Protein
- Calories
Although obviously, this is based on people eating a raw food diet consisting of heavily modified domesticated produce, which is high in nutritional value. If we're talking living off wild food, there would most likely be even more problems. But good luck finding someone who does that.
What do you mean by unnatural nutritional value ?
Why would raw food be deficient of those ?
I mean you'd never find a Granny Smith apple growing in the wild, or a cow that produces enough milk to feed a family of 4. They've all been selectively bred over centuries for our needs, and that means things like higher nutritional value and better taste.
Wild banana:
Banana after humans have been fiddling with it for centuries:
The food itself isn't deficiant, its just that our digestive system has adapted to digest prepared and cooked food, and so would struggle to extract all of the nutrients from raw food. Like I said, not a massive issue when you're talking about domesticated produce, because it already has a massive nutritional value in comparison to its wild equivalent.
I would have said the opposite is true. From all the research I am aware of, raw food is easier to digest and consumes less energy. Furthermore the cooking destroys important nutrients especially enzymes.
So my point still stands that a human cannot have an entirely raw food diet without losing out on something somewhere. And in evolutionary terms, we're no longer suited to eating large quantities of food with low nutritional value in the same way as gorillas.
Raw fish is easy to digest.
Raw meat is perfectly edible. Large fat molecules are hard to break down but that's partially what bile is for and our gall bladders havn't quite gone the way of the appendix yet.
I agree a lot of plants aren't edible raw but I didnt mention plants.
The image of our teeth are called 'canines' because of their location in the mouth. They are not 'canines' in the sense of meat eating animals (I shouldn't have assumed that you would guessed that I meant 'canine fangs' as opposed to the medical term 'canines' so I'm sorry about that).
I know chimpanzees eat meat from time to time but its very rare. David Attenbrough did scoop that famous film of them catching and eating a monkey but that was very unusual - and may have had more to do with dominating the local food sources from competitors. Chimps have plenty of opportunity to eat small animals in their day-to-day lives but they don't. Yes, they eat maggots but then maggots are supposed to have a sweet taste. So here's a question, why have their canine fangs not disappeared at the same rate as humans then, once they evolved from meat-eating to vegetable matter diets? If you say it's because it's part of the animal's defence, then why would it not also be applicable to humans? Even our ancestors of over 4 million years ago had very little evidence of canine fangs but I am sure that canine fangs would have been a fantastic addition to our physical 'armoury'.
So canine fangs do not necessarily mean 'meat-eaters'.
The clue is inside us. An ape’s teeth, like ours, is made up mostly of flat surfaces for crushing and grinding. Our jaws are also designed to move from side to side to help this process. Both these characteristics are the signs of a mouth designed to cope with tough, vegetable foods full of fibre.
The inside of a carnivore’s stomach is a bubbling mass of acid that would take the paint off a car. It’s designed to break the meat down quickly so the poisons released by the meat as it decays don’t hang around too long. Its intestines are short, about three times the length of its body when stretched out in one line, and are designed to get the waste out of the body as quick as possible. It wouldn’t take long before it began to rot and produce poisonous toxins. This process can also happen inside the body which is why animals which are meant to eat meat get rid of waste as quickly as possible. Human digestion is much slower because our intestines are about 12 times the length of our bodies. This is thought to be one reason why colon cancer is much higher in meat eaters than in vegetarians.
Obviously humans did start eating meat at some time in history, but for the majority of people in the world right up into this century, meat was a comparatively rare food and most people ate it only three or four times a year, usually at big religious festivals. It’s only really since the Second World War that people started eating meat in such huge amounts – which may explain why heart disease and cancers have suddenly become the biggest killers of all known diseases.
I don't agree. Adaptation is caused by evolution. Evolution is a process of gradual change, which makes animals more suited to survive in their surroundings. As they change, new species are formed. Evolution works through natural selection. An animal's young are always slightly different from one another, and some are more suited to their environment than the others. The survivors have a certain advantage over the others (such as a longer beak that can reach deeper into a flower), which they pass on to their own young. Gradually, over many generations, all individuals have it. A new species has formed – with a new adaptation.
Ah! But they do not WASTE food like we do. They eat the WHOLE animal, including the intestines, just as lions do, for instance. They get the sustenance of vegetable matter and other life-giving vitamins and minerals, by proxy, through eating the parts that we usually discard.
Thanks for the science lesson.
Evolution is the constant adaptation by natural selection to the surrounding enviroment. Evolution is adaptation.
As you say a physical and behavioural adaptations are the result of evolution. How does your statement that we 'adapted rather than evolved' to eat meat fit into that then?
Really? Seeing as caribou only eat lichen that's not a lot of vegetable matter. The diet is predominately red meat, they eat more of it than us and they eat less greens. Still they survive, infact the high fat diet is key to their survival. It's no accident that we can survive only a diet of meat, how many herbivores can you name that can do the same? We are omnivores designed to eat a predominately vegetable diet, but quite happy to handle meat aswell.
And when it comes to animal products we do not waste as much as you think - I eat plenty of offal, heart, liver, kidneys. make proper stock out of bones and offal.
Rather pointless on things as big as Veggie-ism and other such things.
It's true that we don't have the insides that carnivores have, but we certainly don't have the insides of herbivores either. No herbivore has a stomach that produces hydrochloric acid. Herbivores don't have a pancreas that produces the variety of enzymes (to digest the variety of food) that we do. We don't chew cud. And while our digestive system is more complex than strict carnivores, it's certainly nothing compared to the complex system of a cow or even a gorilla. Our appendix no longer exists, suggesting we no longer have a need for it.
The question is how far back are we supposed to be going to get what humans are "supposed" to eat. Humans have been eating meat for at least 2.5 million years (i.e. since before we were strictly humans). Neanderthals, which are far more closely related to us than the great apes of today existed almost entirely on a carnivorous diet. If you go back far enough, you'll find a creature that was strictly vegetarian, but that would bear little resemblance to us today, so what would be the point? The idea that we've evolved to eat meat therefore it's morally acceptable is clearly ridiculous. But there seems to be this other tactic on a few vegetarian websites out there of denying that we have even evolved to eat meat in the first place, which is ridiculous too. Nobody is arguing we are carnivores, so comparing us to carnivores would be stupid. They're arguing that we have evolved to eat a mixed diet which includes meat, which our physiology would suggest is the case.
Equally, pointing out issues with digesting particular foods, or eating too much of a particular food only shows that evolution doesn't provide perfect adaptions, just adaptions that are good enough most of the time. The massive supply of easily available meat in the west is clearly a problem for our health that evolution hasn't had time to catch up with (if I had to guess, I would say that Eskimos that have lived on primeraly meat-based diets for far longer than most other cultures have lower levels of the problems associated with eating meat - but it's only a guess), but you could say the same thing about sugar, or plenty of other food stuffs that we've evolved a craving for that is supposed to compensate for its scarcity.
It does. But it performs no function and we no longer need it.
I'm not weighing in on either side of the debate here, just pointing out that no amount of discussion of evolutionary facts is going to settle the moral question.
True
Speculation.
I didn't realise my posts were unfriendly towards you. You and I are not the only people reading this topic on this BB. I had to write a few obvious points to try and to put Evolution into context versus Adaptation and I am afraid, it seems to me, you are still wrong. Adaptation is NOT Evolution and my research seems to take great pains not to confuse the two.
Do Inuit ONLY eat caribou? I apologise. I thought they also ate seals, walrus, whale, fish, ducks, geese and a variety of plants, roots, and berries according to the season. My mistake. But I am glad to see that sarcasm comes so easy to me too!
But that's just YOU!
IWS :
but particularly
IWS, gorilla intestines are very similar to humans intestines but tend to be larger because of the bloating caused by a high fibrous diet. A cow intestine is not even worth mentioning because neither humans or gorillas have anything similar. It's a moot point.
Anyway, I won't post any more on this because my research has convinced me on my standpoint. For every feasible argument for us being natural meat eaters, there seems to be half a dozen feasible arguments against.
So I'll let it rest.
Apart from applauding :
:thumb: