Hello Dermot >Keith Addison wrote: > > >Hello Dermot > > > ><snip> > > > >>Many very extensive studies have been done on various vegetarian groups > >>such as Seven Day Adventists and some vegetarians claim that as these > >>people are healthier than average that it must be due to their > >>vegetarian diet. I don't subscribe to this view because these people > >>don't smoke or drink either. > >>What I do conclude from this however is that a vegetarian diet doesn't > >>do these people any harm. This is the important point to realise. > > > >One of them, and there are exceptions. > >I'm not quite sure what you mean here.
It's only one of the important points to realise in connection with vegetarianism, and there are exceptions to that point. Not everybody thrives on a vegetarian diet. >Of course one can cite studies to > justify any case in the area of diet and health. Of course, as with all things. >We are still in the >dark ages as far as the "science" of nutrition and diet is concerned. >You can have two scientists who have received the same training who when >presented with the same evidence will come to diametrically opposite >conclusions. A bit like the dark art of economics! A bit like everything else too. This does not mean however that there's no way of sifting the wheat from the chaff (or the goats from the sheep perhaps). > >>It may be the case that some people cannot tolerate a vegetarian diet. I > >>don't know. My point is that IF we can tolerate this diet that we should > >>because it is unethical to kill sentient creatures for no good reason. But there IS good reason. > >>ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS. That is not in question. >Just because they are dumb I don't agree that they are dumb. Quite a few of us have not been agreeing with that, didn't you notice? >doesn't mean we can > >>deprive them of a happy existance because they happen to taste nice. No, you didn't notice. :-( > >Some people really hate it (and hate me) when I say these things, but > >there is no sustainable way of raising plants without animals. There > >is no traditional farming system that doesn't used animals, and never > >has been. It just doesn't work - soil fertility sooner or later > >fails, and then everything else fails too. Likewise in nature mixed > >farming is the rule, plants are always found with animals. God can't > >do it, and neither can we. Sustainable farms are mixed, integrated > >farms. > > > > >Can't see any reason to hate somebody who expresses an opposing view. If that view happens even unwittingly to challenge certain cherished notions it can be perceived as an unprovoked personal attack and often responded to with a vicious personal "counter" attack, rather common, especially these days. >Everybody should be open to having their views challenged. Scepticism is >something we can't have enough of! I'm glad you raised this objection >to vegetarianism because it is the first time I have heard this >particular view. Well, it's not just a view, there's massive and incontrovertible evidence to support it. We've discussed it here before, as we would, since sustainable farming is obviously a part of sustainable energy - if you can't grow biofuels crops sustainably how can they be sustainable fuels? And it takes animals in the system, as food, not just as respected working labourers who go into retirement when they get too old to work. In fact many sustainable farmers treat their breeding animals like that, but not the offspring. >I don't know a lot about the detail of sustainable agriculture Then you're not in a position to make a case for vegetarianism, as you did. >but I am >aware of at least one farm here in Ireland that is run on a stockless >system that the owners claim is sustainable. Similarly there is a >organisation in the UK called the Vegan Organic Trust that certifies >farms as being vegan and sustainable. >In America there is a guy called Will Bonsall who has run the Khadighar >Farm near Farmington, Maine for the past 25 years, using veganic >methods, i.e. no animal inputs, for the past 20 years. I do know a lot about sustainable agriculture, in practice and in theory, and I've seen a lot of sustainable farms. I've seen a lot of farms too that claimed to be sustainable but they weren't. Yes, for 20 years and more. >Just suppose for the sake of argument that it is possible to have >sustainable agriculture without any animal input But it's not. >and further suppose >that it is possible to lead a healthy life on a vegetarian diet, would >you then consider it wrong to eat non-human animals? No I wouldn't consider it wrong. But it's much too broad a brush, it's all black and white in your book, it's unrealistic, and I think you're aiming at the wrong target anyway. Don't eat meat? Which particular meat shouldn't I eat? Should I eat a quail that I knew had come from a horrendously crowded and evil factory farm? No I shouldn't, but that won't help the quail, will it? Market forces, yeah, right. What if the quail came from my farm? Sure I'd eat it, nice happy quail, very healthy too. What if I'd bought it in a local village market from an old peasant who'd raised it himself? Sounds okay? What if the old peasant obligingly skinned it for me - but without bothering to kill it first? With these sweet old peasant ladies waiting to buy their quail while the poor creature struggled and screamed itself to death and nobody even noticed except me? Try this: http://journeytoforever.org/MMT/keith_doggie.html Keith Addison: Pass the Doggie Bag > >Mixed farming does NOT mean miles of monocrop grains on one side of > >the fence and an intensive pig/chicken/turkey/beef "farm" (factory) > >on the other, with its shit-lagoon. > > > >Farming with animals means one of two things: killing the inevitable > >excess or competing with them as they eat you out of house and home. > >Killing them and not eating them would not be sane, and criminally > >wasteful. > > > > >I don't actually have a problem with animals being used in agriculture. >If they get reasonable care they can have a pretty decent existence and >they can contribute to soil fertility. It's a win-win situation for >everybody. >I do have a problem with cutting short a sentient creature's life if it >is unnecessary. On truly sustainable farms you find lots of animals living decent lives and you do not find them being killed unnecessarily. >I can't see how there needs to be an excess of animals that have to be >killed if we have the technology to limit their breeding. Oh, a technology fix! Sustainable farming hasn't thrived a lot on most of those so far. >If for some reason culling is required, It's part of the sustainable system, and it produces large quantities of valuable products without which the world would be much the poorer. There is no sound reason to curtail it. On the contrary, what we're after doing here is promoting it as widely as possible. Small, mixed, integrated farms are the sane road to the future. >I don't think that there would >not be any ethical dilemma in eating their flesh. Sorry, your double negative has me baffled. > >Widespread vegetarianism would condemn more animals than mixed > >farming ever could, and could easily condemn us all to the > >consequences (the further consequences) of unbalanced farming > >systems. > > >I would turn this argument on its head by saying that widespread meat >eating would condemn us all to the consequences of unbalanced farming >systems. Most people on this planet are vegetarian most of the time. That's not true, quite the opposite. >If >everybody was to eat a meat diet similar to the meat eating patterns in >the West then everybody would starve. >I know this is not what you advocate No it's not, and therefore it turns nothing on its head. It's odd how often when one talks about sustainable farming to people opposed to eating meat they respond by attacking unsustainable farming to support their views. >but it's worth bearing in mind all >the same. Everybody says that about the meat-eating patterns of the West and it doesn't make sense to me. First there's no chance that everybody is going to start eating the same diet. Chinese will always eat Chinese food, Indians will always eat Indian food (both including plenty of meat). There's nothing particularly unsustainable about Western meat-eating per se, it's the production system itself that's unsustainable, not the categories of food it produces, and industrialised food production is not only Western. > > Even your healthy vegetables will not be very good for you > >if they're not properly grown in fertile soils, which means that a > >proportion of the "wastes" recycled back to the soil goes through the > >gut of animals en route. >Don't forget recycling food through our own guts. Human waste, with >proper treatment should be used to fertilise soils instead of polluting >the planet as at present. This would further Further than what? Further than vegetarianism? Vegetarianism doesn't cut down the need for manure, it exacerbates it. >cut down the need (if there >is any) YES THERE IS ANY! It's been discussed often before, it's in the archives, and there's a lot more at the Journey to Forever website (which is not just about biodiesel!). It's not up to me to prove anything, already done that, it's up to you to disprove it, and I think you have some studying to do. >for animal manure. I think they are doing that very successfully >in Shanghai at the moment. They were doing it very successfully in Shanghai a hundred years ago, not so sure about now. The Chinese still composted absolutely everything possible then. We've discussed humanure composting here too, quite a number of us do that, successfully enough. But, sorry, even by traditional Chinese standards of how much land it takes to feed a human, or how little rather, human manure is not enough to put back what a human takes out. It helps, but you just don't get the biological knock-on effect you get with grazers like cows (see earlier message about ley farming), or even pigs, they're much better at it than we are. I tried every which way to get that to figure out, but it doesn't figure out. Best wishes Keith > "Food is fabricated soil fertility." > >(Albrecht of Missouri) > > > >Best wishes > > > >Keith > > > > >Regards >Dermot Donnelly > ><snip> _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
