When vegetarianism hurts animals

Nuge? Is that you?

Dude.

Your making a lot of assumptions here. For one, a vegetarian/vegan isn't always a vegetarian/vegan because of animal rights, some vegetarians/vegans are vegetarians/vegans because they believe in a healthy life style. You don't know why each vegetarian/vegan chooses to be so.

If your asking "Would you bend your personal values in order to there be a greater good for the world?" Yea, i probably would. I firmly believe in my second amendment rights. But if you were to tell me that the world would become a peaceful place, that it would finally be a Utopia if i just gave up my guns. Then yea, i probably would. Simply because sometimes the good of the many does outweigh the good of the one.

But your going about asking the question in a very weird way. I highly doubt if Roethke were to run down to Jack-in-the-box and scarf down a greaseburger, that the word would be a better place, and she wouldn't probably feel very good after doing it.

Secondly if i had the ability to travel in time, Jane Doe's abortion or non-abortion would not be my biggest concern. Plus they did a series of movies about this, it's called Terminator. Rent all of them if you want to see how it turns out.

Plus, the white men tended to just kill the bison for their hides and tongue--it was concidered a delicacy (spelling?) by the Europeans. The rest of the bison/buffalo--some 1500 to 2500 pounds of meat per animal--were usually left to rot in the sun. Additionally, many buffalo were killed for sport, and left to die on the prarie, hides, tongue and all.

I wouldn't say that vegetarianism could have prevented this, or that it's meat-eaters that are bringing them back today. I'd say that it's good old-fashion greed and stupidity that truly caused the downfall of the buffalo.

It's kind of well known that widely farmed animals are rarely going to end up on the endangered species list, because people who farm them have a strong incentive to breed them and keep numbers up. (Put very simply.)

But what you haven't mentioned here is the property rights issue underpinning all this -- we need enforceable ownership over these animals to be able to breed them and be rewarded for keeping their numbers up in the first place.

This can make for cute dinner party debate when you can say things like "I don't think we should ban killing fornsnoggles for their horns. That won't take them off the endangered species list, because fornsnoggle horns are so in demand that the price of fornsnoggle horns will make it economical to bribe the gamekeepers and park rangers to allow fornsnoggle hunting to continue. No, we should allow fornsnoggles to be privately owned and farmed, and culled for their horns."

Who knows, that may save the fornsnoggles from extinction. But the ecosystem will change, and the balance of nature wil be altered, one way or another.

Moreover, "privatising the commons" is difficult in many cases. Harvesting bison may result in higher bison numbers, but higher consumption of fish pretty clearly results in lower numbers of fish.

(I, of course, blame the "but I eat fish" sub-category of vegetarians for declining fish stocks.)

Damned equivocators. There's a special place in hell for them when the firestorm comes.

Turning back to the vegetarians qua vegetarians side of things, I think this argument also assumes that vegetarians and vegans generally believe in proselytizing, and that the world will eventually come around to their way of thinking (and hence the poor bison and fornsnoggles will go extinct). I've been to one too many ruined dinners (and probably seen far too many glossy veggie lifestyle magazines) to believe that's a commonly held goal, just as much of a mistake as assuming vegetarians have some particular interest beyond the average person's in the fate of bison and fornsnoggles.

This really makes me want a fucking fornsnoggle burger.

Bison jerky is yummy.

Buffalo burgers are delicious. Ask Ted Turner.

Do you mean Ted Nugent?

No. I mean Ted Turner. He's all about the buffalo meat.

We could have a Battle of the Teds!

Media Mogul vs Primal Rocker!

Or something.

me too. vegetarians are delicious with a good lemon sauce.

I'm not a racist! Look at my black friend!

Um not to ruin this highly intelligent discussion but there have been many animals that we do not eat that have been brought back from near extintion not to mention the genetic reproduction of some species of animals that are technically extinct but they are using genetics to bring them back from extintion. I believe this was being done with some variety of tiger.

Grant it I'm a vegan so I could be wrong but I'm still pretty sure people on the whole do not eat tigers. It's unfortunate that in the case of the bison it's profitable to have reprodution programs in place to bring this animal back from extinction. Which is what most things are based on these days. The big profit. Gotta love capitalism.

I personally believe that we as Americans, living in pretty much the wealthiest nation in the world, where there is no shortage of food to eat, should be in the fore front of helping the invironment by becoming a nation of vegans but that will never happen because on the whole Americans and most humans are selfish creatures that would rather consume, consume, consume than conserve for future generations.

I think I'm going to sell my house and start a vegan commune some where. I'm so sick of selfish people.

You are absolutely right. For any food chain, calories are lost at each stage in the chain (each trophic level) so that for the food which a cow consumes, much of the calorific content / protein content will be lost in the from of heat, urea, undigested food etc and will not be available for transfer to the next trophic level.

These days cows etc don't just eat grass and other stuff which humans don't eat. These days cows are fed commercial animal feeds made from soya, wheat, fish meal etc.

I used to work as a laboratory technician for Dalgety Agriculture (used to be a big manufacturer of animal feeds but now they have downsized into non existence). My job was to test the nutrient content of commercial animal feeds and the ingredients (note: the job did not involve performing tests on animals - the feeds were tested for protein, fibre, moisture, minerals etc using chemical and physical tests). This meant that I got to see the ingredients.

All of the soya beans, wheat etc fed to cows could feed far more humans than could otherwise be fed by the body mass which the cows produce from the soya etc.

That can be true. Sometimes no one even sees what they're doing until the effects of it are right under their noses.

Have you seen some of the genetic freaks that are bred for food nowadays? I'd be happy to see some of those species die out. Cows that can't give birth, chickens that can't walk, etc etc. *shudders*

Someone else commented on this above, but FOKs point provides a better foil for me...

This is not entirely true. What happens is that the animals that are domesticated become something else. Dogs are not wolves any more. The aurochs is totally extinct, and really only fairly recently. It was one of the progenitors of modern cattle, but the wild version is gone. Wild horses barely exist in the wild any more. I don't even know what the forerunners of sheep and goats were; they may be around or they may not be.

But the point is that domestication changes things. Unnatural selection is right, as someone above said. There was a cool experiment in Russia on domesticating foxes - they took black foxes and bred them purely on their friendliness. Nothing about coats, nothing about health. After a surprisingly short number of generations the foxes got pretty dog-like - they started showing curly tails, blazes on their foreheads, among other traits. This stuff can happen quickly. There are many reasons to conserve/preserve/maintain a species, and domestication is not sufficient for many of those reasons, especially maintaining genetic diversity.

Bison are already being crossed (intentionally or accidentally) with cows, and managers of wild populations are having trouble keeping the stocks of managed populations pure. This is not good for bison. I don't actually think domestication will do any better of a job saving bison as we know them today or knew them in the past than will hunting them for market.

(Actually, that's a damn cool thought: we need to encourage HUNTING of WILD bison, thus creating incentives for preservation of habitat and promotion and management of the animals as a resource, rather than dumbing them down. In the fifties, several species of north american ducks were on their way out, for real, we're talking declines of 80%, in large part due to habitat loss. Because they are game birds, initiatives were taken on multiple levels (local, private, state, and federal) to keep them around.)