people that are vegetarian

[Phoenix1010]

Ok I see what you mean. I agree that anyone who thinks he's fighting the industry by not eating meat is delusional. There are much more proactive ways to make your personal difference. However, passive non-support is the first step. It's hard to morally denounce something that you're still actively supporting every day. It's why you won't see the head of PETA eating a burger. There are levels of hyporcrisy, this one is up there. Anyway, I doubt your friend is being a vegan to try to fight the Man. The fact that he's sweating the details probably means that he is that he is more concerned with his own making sure his own actions coincide with his sense of morals.

My Mom will ask me every time I see her (after 15+ years) so what do you eat again and why?

[UseThePeenEnd]

I like cooked dead flesh. Particularly when I saw it walking in the woods the previous day.

Venison is lean, the fat in it is more the 'good' fat than animals raised for slaughter. Pecan-crusted grill-smoked dove. Blackened bear steaks rule. Oyster and cornbread stuffed quail wrapped in bacon and broiled rules empires.

[SL__72]

Can't say I've had dove but the rest of those are good. My personal favorite is Bison though.

[Marlow]

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My Mom will ask me every time I see her (after 15+ years) so what do you eat again and why?

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I took this for a while, but now I get kinda pissed off when people are this obtuse. This, to me, is extremely disrespectful. How you navigate this with your Mom is quite dependant on your relationship. I got my Dad to stop by saying things like "strictly human tongues" or "the entrails of my fallen enemies" or "um... veggies, Dad. Vegetarians eat vegetables." This pissed him off but it worked pretty quickly.

Marlow

[Ray Zee]

unless its organic meat or dairy you get antibotics that were given the cows, steroids and growth hormones from their feed. the feed which gives mad cow disese has been banned from cattle food. but not from chicken or farmed fish. so far no one has gotten mad cow from those things. yet.
the meat is not inspected well and contains lots of bacteria that you may or may not kill on cooking. you dont on rare meat.
meat eaters have a lot higher rate of heart problems and cancer. as you get older you will have lots of friends with triple bypasses and getting cancer treatments. may or may not have been from the food they ate but a good chance of it. i have lots of friends in the ground that only lasted till 60. have a nice burger.

[colgin]

Since I am at work I will give you the short answer and, to the extent anyone is interested, try to supplement it later over the weekend. In light of the question you asked, "if you are one tell me why," I will tell you my story as to why I became a vegetarian as opposed to maing the argumentative case (that I believe can be made) for why people should be vegetarian.

I became a vegetarian about 5 years ago. First I gave up meat and poultry and then fish followed several months thereafter.

I had probably become uncomfortable eating animals for severla years, and that grew as a few of my friends became vegetarians for ethical/moral reasons during or after law school. As a general matter, when very smart people who I respect take a strong position on something I usually think I owe it to myself to decide whether they might be correct. But with vegetarianism, probably like a lot of other people, I avoided the issue for a long time. Let's admit it. Not many of us want to think too much about where meat comes from. Moreover, what if my friends were right. If I agreed with their choices would I really be up to changing the way I eat. Hell for years I had tried to lose a lot of weight(which would have had very immediate benefits to me) and had failed pretty regularly. So, best not to think too much about this.

Like I said I became increasingly uncomfortable with meat eating. Then beginning in 1999 I found myself having much more contactwith animals. It became quite clear that qute apart from the bigger issue of how great is animal intelligence (and I would submit that it is higher than most people give credit, but agin thatis another thread), that animals quite clearly were capable of degrees of happiness and pain and were clearly susceptible to fear, pain and suffering. In light of that I felt I had a duty to examine the nature of factory farming in America to see if the practices that supplied meat to the table were ones I condoned. So at least initially I avoided the question of whether it was per se wrong to ea animals and focused on whether I could condone (through my eating decisions) the practices that provide 99+% of the meat in this country.

Suffice it to say that the intensive agricultural farming conditions with respect to animals is horrendous. Even people who haven't researched this probably suspect it isn't pretty. But unless you have really researched this (and there is plenty of material available none of which is pleasant) you have no [censored] idea how terrible the treatment of animals is. Again, a full litany isbeyond the scope of this scope of this post but here you can get a sense of what is typical. The following description is from Matthew Scully, a pro-life conservative who was speech writer for George W. Bush during his first term:

"At the Smithfield mass-confinement hog farms I toured in North Carolina, the visitor is greeted by a bedlam of squealing, chain rattling, and horrible roaring. To maximize the use of space and minimize the need for care, the creatures are encased row after row, 400 to 500 pound mammals trapped without relief inside iron crates seven feet long and 22 inches wide. They chew maniacally on bars and chains, as foraging animals will do when denied straw, or engage in stereotypical nest-building with the straw that isn’t there, or else just lie there like broken beings. The spirit of the place would be familiar to police who raided that Tennessee puppy-mill run by Stanley and Judy Johnson, only instead of 350 tortured animals, millions—and the law prohibits none of it.

Efforts to outlaw the gestation crate have been dismissed by various conservative critics as “silly,” “comical,” “ridiculous.” It doesn’t seem that way up close. The smallest scraps of human charity—a bit of maternal care, room to roam outdoors, straw to lie on—have long since been taken away as costly luxuries, and so the pigs know the feel only of concrete and metal. They lie covered in their own urine and excrement, with broken legs from trying to escape or just to turn, covered with festering sores, tumors, ulcers, lesions, or what my guide shrugged off as the routine “pus pockets.”"

In light of this type of information, I decidedI could not condone or be a part of the pain inflicted upon these billions of animals per year. Over time I came to the belief that animals do in fact have fundamental rights and that being used as a resource solely for humans own ends regardless of how unnecessary those ends are is wrong. However, those arguments again are more complicated. I would just say that quite apart from whether this "animal rights" position is correct I would still not eat animals as my sense of mercy would dictate not toparticipate in what I think is a competely inhuman system.

On that note, for those of you who don't believe in animal rights, I would suggest thatyou at least read the aforementioned Matthew Scully's book "Dominion". Scully is not really in the animal rights camp but takes up the mercy argument as eloquently as I think is capable of being done.

Finally, I hear a lot that we ethical vegetarians are being too sentimental over cute animals. But then people will say, oh I could never give up my juicy hamburger, my stuffed chicken, etc, anyway. Well, who is being sentimental now. I guess if I have to be a sentamentalist I will do so on the side of life - that is, giving these sentient creatures the opportunity to enjoy their small pleasures and live in the absence of confinement and ghastly pain rather than gving myself some "tasty" thing that I don't realy need.

[Patrick del Poker Grande]

This is the short answer?

[colgin]

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This is the short answer?

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NH. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

off to get some poker in
have a good weekend