Meat? Should we eat it? Can we get away with it?
Do you consider yourself a fair, rational human being? We are all culprits of the way we were brought up, and our environment shaped our basic beliefs. But we can do better right? Essentially, what I mean is: when you involve yourself in a discussion in which you discover that all the evidence is stacked against you, and you are effectively ethically bankrupt on the subject, do you actually change your ways?
The reasons for switching to a vegetarian diet are many so I am going to try to outline a few of them. I will try to title the different types of reason, as people generally prioritise certain factors over others. To give you an example, some people care about treating animals with the respect that they believe sentient creatures deserve. Others view the environmental factors as being the most convincing, and yet more believe that the health factors for humans should take precedence. For ease of reading, I will separate the arguments and number them:
Why do we refrain from harming each other’s interests, even when there is no chance of repercussions? Singer’s argument here revolves around a claim that we do not necessarily believe that our interests outweigh those of others. This is clear when you or I decide not to put our feet up on seats, when you decide to let someone who is clearly impeded pass through a door first, or when pedestrians move out of the way for cars even when they have right of way.
The reason is that we do have interests that can be observed, and we do not like causing pain to others regardless of type, be it physical, or mental. The case then for vegetarianism, is do non-human animals have interests that are in some way equivalent to human beings? The simplest way to view this is through pain. I feel pain when burnt. I cannot know that other people feel the same pain as me, but from observing the actions of others I have come to the conclusion that they feel at least a similar amount of pain. The most basic interest that we have is the avoidance of pain. As such, I should refrain from burning them. If a cat gets burnt it will move away, first in a reflexive way, the way we would, and then in a more animated way. Anyone who has ever accidentally sat on a cat’s tail knows this. So the only question that remains, is what is it about being human that makes your interests more important than that of non-human animals?
I have no answer to this question, as I don’t believe there is valid response except a prejudice known as being “speciesist”. Not very catchy I know. But brutally true. I try to avoid being irrationally prejudice in everything I do. I frequently fail, but I am getting better every day, thanks in part to you all in the debating society. I have exactly no reason to believe that my form of sentient cellular organism has interests that are multiplied greater than any other, and so the enjoyment I get from a rabbit stew does in no way compensate all the happiness that the rabbit could have had, and more importantly, the pain that went into the production and then murder of said rabbit.
(2) The “animals as middlemen” argument. (See Mark Rowlands’ “What goes around comes around” which is where many of these statistics will from.)
There is a food crisis going on around the world. Anyone who is vaguely interested in world affairs knows this. Food prices are going up. This is partly attributed to the rising price of oil. I hope here I can show you how bad it really is, and why changing away from a meat-based diet is the very best thing an individual can do to reduce his or her impact.
Let me give you some statistics on how meat is made and the ratios of required vegetable protein to create animal protein:
– It takes 21 pounds of vegetable protein to produce 1 pound of meat protein from cattle.
– An acre of land can be used for A: 3 to 5 hundred pounds of high protein vegetables (eg lentils or beans) or B: 40-55 pounds of bull meat.
– For pigs, the ratio is about 8-1, although they can eat a smaller variety of proteins which cattle can use to ‘recycle’ as it were.
– In general across the most commonly eaten animals, (cattle, pigs, chicken & sheep), we have a ratio of about 10:1.
That is land use. Let’s talk about energy.
In the US, where energy prices are lower than here, but farming is similarly mechanised here are some statistics:
– Each calorie of fossil fuel energy that is invested creates approximately 2.5 calories of corn.
– Feedlot cattle (not ranged cattle that is reasonably common in the US due to space, but almost non-existent here due to a lack thereof), the kind that we have in the EU, uses 33 calories of fossil fuel energy to make 1 calorie of meat.
There is no question then as to why meat is considered so expensive. If anything, it is surprisingly cheap.
Finally, water:
– 1 pound of beef produced by feedlot requires TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED gallons of water by adding the water that the animal ingested on top of the water required to grow its food.
Due to these factors, OVER HALF of the rainforests of South America have been cut down in order to produce steak and burgers for us Westerners. People calls these the lungs of the planet, because they are the most effective converters of co2 to oxygen in the world. Destroying them is going to be the single greatest cause of climate change of all. Ordering a steak or bolognaise from a restaurant amounts to encouraging those farmers to keep cutting down the trees.
(3) What are we doing to ourselves? (Both of the previous sources have huge amounts of information on this)
I would like to preface this argument by saying that I have only limited experience of this line of argument as opposed to the two previous ones, so take what you read with a pinch of salt. Thank you
We are what we eat. ‘Fraid so. Luckily for us, we live in the European Union, as such ,a lot of the damage that would be done to our bodies if we lived in, for example, North America, is reduced, but nowhere near enough.
It is very important that the image of the Suffolk/Devon country farmer that you have is destroyed. This farmer is not where you get most of your food. Especially not in super markets. Sorry. Farming is done predominantly in what are little more than factories for producing meat by large food companies.
For these businesses, it is very important to bring food up to MARKET WEIGHT AS QUICKLY AND CHEAPLY AS POSSIBLE. To this end, substantial movements made by the animal are a waste of energy and weight. This is the reason that caged hens are as they are. Unfortunately this means they do very little exercise, which in turn means most of the meat on them is fat instead of muscle. This type of fat is a cited as a major cause of atherosclerosis, which is the most common form of heart disease in our society.
The meat to fat ratio is only the least of our problems however. Society is starting to learn the problems caused by overuse of antibiotics, but the culprit isn’t people wasting medicines, so much as the meat that we eat. The poor diet that animals are fed (in the case of cows it is oftentimes a partially cannibalistic diet which led to Mad Cow disease) combined with a ‘desirable’ lack of exercise makes for very unhealthy creatures. As such the producers are forced to add quantities of growth hormone additives and antibiotics to the feed to keep them alive and ‘healthy’ long enough to reach the slaughter house.
The waste from the animals is then turned to fertiliser, which is then put into the soil. This means without ever reaching us, many strains of bacteria are becoming immune to antibiotics at a rate that is astronomical. This is terrible for us, as new forms of antibiotics are discovered at an ever slowing rate.
I’m afraid that when you eat meat, you are not only killing the animal in question, you are destroying the forest, poisoning the land and the water, increasing the prices and effectiveness of antibiotics, and also forcing traditional farmers out of business, because they cannot possibly compete with this form of factory farming. As time goes on, these problems are only getting worse, as more and more people in the developing world are starting to eat meat based diets. It is very easy for you or I to be vegetarian. Not so easy for someone in Indonesia who’s only form of protein comes from meat. I have no excuses to give you.
thinkingthoughtfully 