Jonathan Ball > wrote:

> First, the grain fed to livestock is generally not
> considered edible by humans.

Babe, they're selling cow brains in *cans* at your local grocery
store. How are you going to tell somebody that low-quality corn isn't
considered edible?


> Second, there is more than enough "surplus" human
> edible vegetable material availabe in the developed
> world, mainly the European Union and North America, to
> feed the "starving" of the world right now. The food
> isn't going to them. Why not? The answer has nothing
> whatever to do with grain being fed to livestock in the
> U.S. Feeding grain to meat animals in the U.S. is not
> "causing" starvataion in the world in any way whatever.

If it were just individual farmers feeding enormous amounts of grain
to billions of cows, that would be true. Instead, we're looking at
agribusiness, which exerts vast political power, which determines
foreign policy, which keeps cruel leaders in power, which keeps food
out of people's mouths.

It's not so different from the way American energy interests have a
deleterious effect on people elsewhere in the world.


> We're addressing the "vegan's"
> ****witted belief that excluding meat from his diet,
> all by itself, is *necessarily* going to mean he's
> doing more to reduce animal death and suffering than
> ANYONE who consumes a meat-included diet.

Which vegans? (I'm brand new here, so maybe there's this huge
contingent of people with no idea of moral subtlety that I haven't met
yet, or perhaps the "vegan" in quotes is a specific person.)

If the belief you outline were held generally by vegans, sure, yes,
****witted. But if instead you create the old straw man (perhaps out
of dent cornstalks!), then how can the argument proceed?


> Remember: we're not playing a counting game. The
> "vegan" says he's (in order of the lies they tell):
>
> a. not causing any animal death and suffering;
> b. "minimizing" animal death and suffering;
> c. "reducing" animal death and suffering.
>
> Each claim is weaker than the one that precedes it, and
> all are false.

Obviously (a) is false. But is the idea of reduction so unrealistic?
The individual consumer makes microscopic, almost--almost--negligible
change. But put enough consumers together, and you have a market
force; weak, surely, but able to grow. This may not make the vegan
consumer eligible for immediate sainthood, but certainly it entitles
one to saying he is reducing (even if mostly in future subjunctive!)
animal death and suffering.


> Irrelevant. There's plenty of land to grow potatoes in
> addition to the grain fed to livestock. Why aren't
> potatoes being grown and shipped to starving people
> today, presumably for free?

They'd certainly taste better than that horrible cheese the government
hands out.


> Any *given* person at this point in time can clearly
> and even relatively easily do much, much better than he
> is. Only "vegans" are under any burden to do so,
> because they alone have made stupid, false claims about
> "minimizing" and so on.

Isn't everyone under the burden to do so, the old moral imperative and
all? And isn't there something sociopathic about industries trying to
make us forget about this burden? To have the most basic choices--to
kill or not to kill--hidden away behind colorful menus and food
pyramids, to pour billions into making the consumption of mistreated
animals seem a god-given right, to gloss over the environmental burden
caused by the mass-produced animal; how can we live comfortably with
this industry bleeding all over us?

-atax