To be vegan. Or not to be vegan? That is the question, inspired by a Poem...
EDIT: 30/07/2013 Poetry inspires thought. This thread shows it. If you would like to add to the debate please do.
As a side debate we need to convince @Cheesebelly , that the Easy Cheesy diet is not the way forward, and he needs to eat other foods other than cheese before he becomes more blocked than a concrete block in a blocked pipe found in a block of flats...
Anyway... It all started with a poem...
Wrote this with the kids showing off what can be done with rhyming couplets and 8 syllables a line.
Oink Oink Pink Pig
You must have heard about Black Sheep,
A rhyme to put children asleep,
But have you listened to Pink Pig,
He wore a funny orange wig…
“I’ll have yer bacon!” said the Master,
(You know it’ll end in disaster…)
Pig squealed “No! No! No! This means war!”
And ran him over in the tract-or
The maid was angry and upset,
“I’ll turn you into rashers yet!”
“Oh no you wont!” cried Pig to Maid,
And blew her up with a grenade.
The Pig was happy with his lot,
But guess who he had quite forgot,
That little boy who is a pain,
That lives, as you know, down the lane,
The boy was mad and in a rage,
“Today sausages will be made!”
He grabbed a rifle and a bun,
(To put the sausages upon)
He took a shot at Piggies head,
To kill him quick and leave him dead,
Piggy ducked, ran from the boy,
(This was one person not to annoy!)
A disguise be what Pig would need,
To avoid being the boys next feed,
A big black woolly cardigan,
On his back pink, he put upon,
Then Pig started to Baa and Bleat,
To make his cunning disguise complete,
The boy said “Darn! Where is my ham!”
“Glad I’m partial to a bit a LAMB!”
Boy took his rifle, fired it thrice,
And served pig up as Lamb and rice!
As a side debate we need to convince @Cheesebelly , that the Easy Cheesy diet is not the way forward, and he needs to eat other foods other than cheese before he becomes more blocked than a concrete block in a blocked pipe found in a block of flats...
Anyway... It all started with a poem...
Wrote this with the kids showing off what can be done with rhyming couplets and 8 syllables a line.
Oink Oink Pink Pig
You must have heard about Black Sheep,
A rhyme to put children asleep,
But have you listened to Pink Pig,
He wore a funny orange wig…
“I’ll have yer bacon!” said the Master,
(You know it’ll end in disaster…)
Pig squealed “No! No! No! This means war!”
And ran him over in the tract-or
The maid was angry and upset,
“I’ll turn you into rashers yet!”
“Oh no you wont!” cried Pig to Maid,
And blew her up with a grenade.
The Pig was happy with his lot,
But guess who he had quite forgot,
That little boy who is a pain,
That lives, as you know, down the lane,
The boy was mad and in a rage,
“Today sausages will be made!”
He grabbed a rifle and a bun,
(To put the sausages upon)
He took a shot at Piggies head,
To kill him quick and leave him dead,
Piggy ducked, ran from the boy,
(This was one person not to annoy!)
A disguise be what Pig would need,
To avoid being the boys next feed,
A big black woolly cardigan,
On his back pink, he put upon,
Then Pig started to Baa and Bleat,
To make his cunning disguise complete,
The boy said “Darn! Where is my ham!”
“Glad I’m partial to a bit a LAMB!”
Boy took his rifle, fired it thrice,
And served pig up as Lamb and rice!
Post edited by Anduin on
11
Comments
But the fact that even silly things are so permeated of speciesism makes me sad, that's all.
(Edit: of course it's my turn of being silly here, I know what omnivore means, i.e. that we're able to eat anything; although I do resent people thinking it means we need to eat a bit of everything. I also resent the idea of "humanely" slaughtering someone, for that matter...)
The acts of violence in nature - which, albeit they may appear merciless and cruel indeed, are not happening out of "evilness"; rather they're usually performed just in order to survive, or at most because of hunting instincts, and that in the end is the same thing - are profoundly different from the systematic carnage that we, as a species, are inflicting day after day upon billions of innocent sentient beings. Alas, we usually do, and in the most heinous ways possible. From actual episodes of sadism all the way to "simply" refusing to make the connection between the limbs wrapped in foil on a supermarket's shelves and the individual they originally were attached to. I can agree with this sentence (I've even been in the position of having to make this tough kind of choice, and injection it's been).
But it doesn't apply when humans are the reason those animals are going through exhaustion and degradation in the first place (i.e. in any modern breeding farm, slaughterhouse, leather/fur production line, vivisection lab, circus, zoo and so on).
@Anduin, from your posts it sounds like you're a teacher, what year(s) do you teach?
Poem about mummies is now whirring round my head. It is based on a style made famous by Roald Dahl... Who come to think about it wrote between Orwell and Terry Pratchet. :-D
@Alnair I have no idea why... But I have ended up trying to let herbivores be herbivores and carnivores be carnivores on this forum at least 5 times now... (Not sure why as Baldur's Gate has lots of violence and murder in it... )
Your an ape (take this scientifically please!)
Like all apes your teeth give you away. All apes are omnivorous. They eat mostly fruit, bark, leaves but the bolster up their diet with protein from eggs taken from nests, insects and meat (whatever they can find, usually smaller monkeys)
Anyway the point is... Their diet is exactly what ours should be...
Balanced.
. .. And I will link you to some other threads if you want because I'm losing the will to live...
Thinking back to those halcyon days, I don't think the primary school class I was in could have come up with that in a million years.
Kids wrote some really good stuff independently.
Humpty Dumpty fell off a cliff...
He ended up another stiff...
A Hickory Dickory Dock
Giraffe got stuck in the clock...
Jack went to see Uncle Bill was also an epic inspired by Kill Bill... Had to sort that one out...
The hard part was rhyming couplets but there are lots of internet sites such as rhymingzone com that takes the hard work away and frees the children to worry about the direction and flow and less about vocab (a skill you really pick up over time however many spelling tests you chuck at them!)
I surely didn't want anyone to lose their will to live, nor I wanted to act as the "vegetarian inquisition". And I agree that there's not much reason to discuss such things on a forum about a game (by the way, I'm perfectly fine with violence and murder as long as they're in fiction...)
But, before signing off, I just wanted to point out that I don't care about "diets", at all. I'm not that much into healthy eating (as a programmer, I fall straight into the pizza-based alimentation cliché) and I don't really think about the micronutrients I get with each meal.
I'm a vegan for ethical reasons, and I would be even if it were slightly inconvenient for my body (of course I'm happy that's not the case, though -- surely beats eating bark, insects and corpses)... I just think everyone should care for other beings' lives and welfare, instead of mindlessly adhere to the speciesist way-of-life, that's all.
[I miss old Usenet's "Followup-to: poster" for threads derailing off-topic... if anyone cares to continue this conversation in private, feel free to mail me at alnair@rewild.it - cheers]
I did eliminated red meat from my diet. (partly for health - partly because I have met a pig or two I realy like). However, I like chicken and fish too much to give it up and I have found neither endearing enough to warrant my empathy.
Just out of hypothetical curiosity...If one day they found that plant life was sentient with a measurable consciousness....where would we be then?
Looking for the paper...
EDIT: I like this report as it reads more 'ok... So that's how... And less about trees having feelings... Which is just weird... Unless it's an ent...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2318495/Gasping-drink-Ultrasonic-popping-sound-trees-thirsty-heard-time.html
Process where trees draw in water in a dry environment produces an inaudible sound.
Daily mail: Trees gasping with thirst!
- picking fruit doesn't harm the trees (on the contrary, it's their way to get their offspring spread around);
- cereals are harvested when the plants are already dead or about to die;
- most plants with green leaves (e.g. lettuce) can be cut leaving the roots intact and they will grow again.
Yeah, I guess we could survive without harming plants, if we found out they were sentient.I guess that's all the more an argument to stop eating/killing/torturing the beings we already know for sure are sentient, isn't it? Like, you know, cows pigs sheep lambs chickens fish and so on...
(Also... eating plants directly, instead of giving HUGE quantities of them to farm animals for as long as it takes for them to be big/fat enough to be slaughtered, would definitely be better from the "create less suffering" utilitarian point of view. Not to mention nobody would have to starve anymore in order to feed cattle...)
Populations of animals in the wild, on the other hand, have always had regulating factors that never needed human interference... on the contrary, the latter is what usually wreaks havoc in them. To keep to your example, I don't know how it works in the Netherlands, but here in Italy populations of boars have actually been artificially increased by hunters (in order to have more game to kill) with the introduction of non-indigenous species that over-reproduced.
"I like to do it" isn't a good enough reason to justify one's actions if they affect somebody else's life, welfare, freedom or rights.
(After all, many would have thought the same about -I'll go with the classical examples- the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage or gay marriage...) All of which can be found elsewhere, avoiding the health issues caused by meat.
Not to mention the environmental impact, which even the United Nations are dreading. [Sorry, bit of a non-sequitur, but you were talking about "people who like to eat meat" and then mentioned "useful nutrients", so it seemed fair
I'm not advocating "treating cows like humans", I'm advocating not breeding them in order to torture/slaughter them.