Hi everyone,

How many people here are vegetarian? and does anyone consider vegetarianism as a way of reducing their entropy?
I know I can't eat animals since I was exposed to the cruelties these beings suffer for the pleasure of human consumption.
Being conscious of what atrocities were done to what we see as "lower beings", when I knew the pain, the darkness the loneliness the sickness we inflict animals, I knew there was no way for me to even hope to get out of this life with a better consciousness if I support a system that generates that much cruelty or try to ignore it.

any thoughts on that?

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I'm just curious

eat or be eaten?
Not really. I bought free range chicken and my daughter likes her chicken abused better, really she likes regular store bought chicken and she has seen the Meet Your Meat video from PETA.

It's kind of freaky that we are made out of meat and most of us eat meat and messes up my if we weren't suppose to eat animals they wouldn't be made out of meat theory;). Seriously though this is something that is up for vote in America in a few week, proposition 2 to improve the life of our food. It's about time.

My thoughts and desire about food is that we need to go back to local production and distribution and eat what grows in the same environment we grow in. I drink water from a source 50 miles up the road from me and eventually want to try and get my community involved in growing food local for local consumption. There is a movement about this too, local food being better for you. I think it is called slow food, I want to open a drive thru serving good home cooking with local ingredients and call it Slow Food Fast.

My actual behaviors with food are atrocious and I won't even claim them here.

Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

I recognize that most people are not well informed on the food they consume every day (and maybe they don't want to be). Its a "But now that you know what will you do" kinda thing.

If someone was insensitive to the PETA video I would recommend the following experience;
Get fertilized eggs from a local farmer and build an easy incubator and have the egg hatched. Take care of the chick, give it a name, observe it, notice its character, its personality. keep it for 6 months - 1 year and then pull its head off squeeze the blood out and eat it.

I'm just saying that because people are not sensitive to the animals they eat because they take them for objects, for things without feelings, and its just not what they are.
Since I became vegetarian or you might say "vegan" I have a feeling of profound peace in my life. Every time I was eating animals or animal secretions I was lying to myself. I feel good about living a life style that reflects my values of peace and love.

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I'm just curious

Hi Sebastian,
A man after my own heart! you don't know how wonderful it is to hear you speak as you do!
If people did as you suggested then I think the meat eating population would be reduced by half at least.
Every year here on the island that I live, behind my house they bring a pig to the large almond tree haul him up screaming from his back legs by a chain and cut his throat....The first time it happened I went rushing around to see 7 or 8 men standing around laughing at the pig struggle for his life.
The only way i console my self is by thinking that the pig has had a relatively easy life compared to the factory farmed pigs that i have a lot of knowledge about.My sons father was a pig farmer in England where the welfare standards are somewhat better than the rest of the world,even so, I did report him on several occasions for breaches of standards.However I failed to have him actually closed down....
I always remember once saving the life of a new born piglet that had been born, as i thought, dead but after massaging his heart and breathing into his little pink snout he gasped for breath and started to breath on his own .he then went on to have his tail cut off and his teeth clipped with no anathestic and to be manhandled. I bitterly regret saving him,he was kept in squalid conditions and abused and never saw daylight except when he was loaded up to go to be slaughted.I should have left him to die...
Its not so much the eating of meat I object to,it is the conditions and way animals are kept as objects purely for our own use that disturbs and hurts me deeply.Meat used to be a small part of the human diet but as factory farming has grown so too has mans demands to eat like Kings everyday. Even if people just reduced their intake it would maybe help reduce the suffering as the amount of animals required would be far less .
I appreciate it is a very emotive subject but the food industry is very good as covering up the actual process of meat production. I see trucks over here full of squashed chickens falling from their crates along the motorway to be hit by cars or worse still, be left suffering on the hard shoulder. I rescued one once on my way to work that had had both legs broken,one wing and most of his chest torn away.I was working as a veterinary nurse as the time so asked the veterinary surgeon to put him to sleep humanely for me,he died being held by someone that loved him so much for a few hours.
I could go on and on but back to your post,i think vegetarian/vegan diet is the way to go.
My Brother has been Vegan for 45 years,me not quite so long and i have on occasion eaten meat since becoming veggy much to my deep saddness,I think this helps me realise that as much as i love animals,and i do with all my being and strength.they are the only thing thats evokes true passion within me,i have still failed and therefore this helps me realise how difficult it would be for someone that has no particular feelings one way or another towards animals,to give up what has become such an intrinsic part of the western diet.
Tom has spent hours explaining to me why animals suffer as they do and this has helped me so much to accept,no sorry ,not accept, but understand why it happens(General low quality consciousness)it makes it bearable(sometimes) for me to continue to live in what I once truly believed/ considered to be the bottom rung of PMR's(AKA Hell)
Good subject,thanks for post.

Hi
sebastien I'm not saying my daughter wasn't moved by the PETA video, she was and it worked for awhile with her. I suppose I made it difficult because I am a cannibal so if she wanted to eat eventually she had to start eating meat again. I was saying something about the quality of the meat, sorry. Now I see that is just gross to you most likely.

cherie I saw a cable show, Dirty Jobs, and saw what they do to piglets. Very inhumane.

What do you two or others with this interest think about the work that Temple Grandin has done? She is a very smart lady with autism that thinks like a cow and designs cow environments that are more pleasant, less fearful for the cows.

It would do people good to see exactly what happens to get them food. The farm industry is farmacide. Proposition 2 in the USA, or at least California, is for more humane treatment of our food animals. I eat meat but I still love animals. I don't think we can ever treat them good enough that they would willingly give it up for us, put their own head on the block to say. We can do better now though.

Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Hi,

Sometime people get very emotional about meat because we have to kill animals to feed ourselves. I don't think this is the root problem... The real problem is how it's done. Cherie and sebastian described it clearly (I personally think that this is an atrocity).

I am an animal's lover. I lived with pets all my life. I have great respect for them... But I also know that I need to eat meat. Our body is constructed to digest meats... It's harder for it to digest veggies. Herbivores have many stomachs, we only have one. Being vegetarian is a lot of work , if it's not done correctly, it can lead to weakness rapidly.

So the solution for people likes me? It's to support meat productor that treat animals with respect and dignity. That allows them to have a more 'normal' life before their execution. In that case, I would not care paying twice the price of my food. I already do it for bio food.

Hi Bette,
Temple Grandin is a saint as far as I am concerned. She designs slaughter procedues for factory farmed animals and ALWAYS has the animals welfare in mind. Contradicitory you may think but she has realised, as I have, that meat (therefore animals) will be consumed so she has pushed and pressed for more humane methods of slaughter to be implemented and studied the subject to such an extent she is considered the foremost authority on humane animal slaughter methods.
Bette.
"I don't think we can ever treat them good enough that they would willingly give it up for us, put their own head on the block to say. "
The south american Indians before they went hunting used to thank the spirit of the animal they were going to cahch and hunt.This made it acceptable to the animal being hunted to give up his life.
An animal communicator has reported that it is not so much the fact that animals are being killed for their bodies that upsets them but the total lack of respect for them during this act.
I personally do not think mankind will ever give up eating meat,but the best I can hope for is good treatment and humane methods of slaugher and an abolition of the very worst types of meat.ie. veal,pate de foie gras,lobster,monkey brains freshly scooped from the split skull of a LIVE monkey etc etc.

Cherie.

Hi Cherie
I concur all over the place with your thoughts. Native Indians respected and appreciated everything. They gave back and gave thanks, and respected the life they had taken for sustenance. It would be nice if this was thus again.

Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Sebastian and Cherie,

I agree with you both. Animals are sentient conscious beings just as people are and deserve our respect as individual units of consciousness. As Sebastian says, the problem is in supporting a system that generates cruelty and insensitivity to other conscious beings, not the eating of meat. If the choice is eat meat or starve (a choice a dolphin or lion or our ancestors or populations of primitive hunter-gatherers must make daily), the issue is entirely different. Ingesting meat is not the issue - the issue is violently violating the free will of other beings without appropriate justification.

The very occasional meat I eat (fish & seafood mostly but also chicken occasionally and beef extremely rarely), is for the most part done without contributing to our culture's system of animal abuse and cruelty -- like a vulture, I come by the meat I eat more as an opportunistic scavenger than a purposeful consumer. That is, I mostly eat meat when doing so does not trigger a response in the meat production system (a new critter must be slaughtered and put into the supply/distribution system to replace those consumed in order to meet demand).

Absolutes generally don't lead to balance. There is often a web of circumstance and relationship that must be balanced between us, others, and the world as we find it. How each of us achieves that balance is a reflection of his/her awareness, intent, compassion, balance, and understanding. People do as they do because they are as they are - intent rather than action is what is fundamentally important. I try to keep the words "always" and "never" out of my descriptions of acceptable actions - most particularly if I am talking about the actions of others. Things are usually not as simple or black and white as they seem to our limited perspective.

Tom C

Thank you for everyone's answer,

There are a couple of things I would like to add in response;

1- I would just like to correct Mr. Campbell on one thing, most anthropologist and archaeologist agree that the prehistoric man was more a gatherer-hunter. The main basis of the diet was plant based (80%) and complemented by occasional kills.

2- The human body resemble more a herbivore than a carnivore and can very well live entirely without animal products and contrary it has been proven that many disease are related to the ever growing consumption of animal flesh. True we do not have many stomachs but we have a very long intestine and the size of our stomach is only 20% of the total capacity of the digestive system whereas every other carnivorous mammals stomach represent between 60-70% of the total capacity of the digestive system. Also in our saliva there is a digestive enzymes designed to start the digesting process as soon as vegetable products are inserted in the mouth, a useful characteristic only shared with our herbivorous companions. (source: The Comparative Anatomy of Eating, Milton R. Mills, M.D.)

3- We don't need to eat animals. Most of the concern in this domain is the intake of protein in the vegetarian diet to this I respond as follows:
Beef 7 grams/ounce
Poultry 7 grams/ounce
Fish 7 grams/ounce
Soybeans (dry) 10 grams/ounce
Peanuts 7 grams/ounce
Lentils (dry) 6.5 grams/ounce
Cashews 5 grams/ounce
and much more. This was based on a quick net research but its just to show that we can very well suffice our needs in protein in the vegetable kingdom. And when I say need I mean that nowadays we eat much more protein than needed.(this could also be backed by stats but ...)

4- I don't agree that its not the eating of the flesh that is unethical. I think that even if animals are treated well during there lives, slaughter will always be the same. Slaughter means cutting the throat of a living being who doesn't want to die having it hang upside down while still living to allow the heart a gravity to pour the blood out. I cannot imagine a world without cruelty in which we use animals.

Thank you everyone for responding,
I really have this subject to the heart

Seb,

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I'm just curious

Seb: I don't agree that its not the eating of the flesh that is unethical. I think that even if animals are treated well during there lives, slaughter will always be the same.

Tom: You missed the point that eating animals and causing them to be slaughtered is two different things. The first does not necessarily lead to, support, or cause the second. Vultures eat meat almost exclusively and cause nothing to be killed. Humans are in many situations where their consumption of meat adds nothing (not one infinitesimal increment) to the demand for meat. It is the abuse and mistreatment of animals by the arrogance and insensitivity of humans (and not just for slaughter) that is the problem, not chewing and swallowing meat -- the two do not have to be logically connected. If you add no increment to the demand for meat then you are not part of the problem no matter what you eat. If there were no demand for meat no animals would be slaughtered. Your passion for a very good cause seems to overwhelm and thus limit your thinking on this subject.

Tom C

Mr. Campbell, (can I call you Tom like everyone else?)
I understand this point, and I was more addressing to the meat consumers who wish their cattle to live a better life before being eaten. And since I have only been enlighten to this reality recently I admit being overwhelmed, but still struggling for limitless thinking (I do my best!).

I haven't read mbt yet (still waiting for it to be shipped) but from what I read uptill now, causality is part of the rule set in pmr. If so, mustn't we consider this factor in lowering our entropy while in pmr? A part from scavenger (which is not viable in our modern world) isn't it logic to think that to consume meet we need to kill?
I am just trying to understand how humans can consume animals without incrementing the demand, I have never been across the body of a cow who died of "natural death" and was there for me to eat, and I wonder what are the chances I ever will and how many people actually do.
What do you refer to when saying "The first does not necessarily lead to, support, or cause the second ". I have a hard time imagining humans living like vultures.
And as much as I admire the beautiful creature that is the vulture, I would not eat the body of the dead cow for the same reason that I would not eat the body of my mother when she dies. Because I love her. You might say that I attach to much of the consciousness to the body, but I would see it inhumane to detach it that much. And isn't that very detachment and inhumanity what lead to the slaughter we have today?

Also, sorry for my weird use of English, as you might have noticed, its not my first language.

Seb,

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I'm just curious

Sebastian,

Please do call me Tom -- we all respect each other here so special titles of respect are unnecessary.

I agree, making the slaughter of animals for food less cruel and disrespectful is a big step in the right direction -- a necessary step because you cannot get to step 2 until you have first taken step 1 -- nevertheless, though it makes the problem less horrible, it does not solve the problem. The problem is humans violently trampling another beings free will when there are perfectly satisfactorily alternatives that uphold the health, vitality, integrity, and free will of all the beings involved.

Though we as a culture have many strong beliefs attached to care and handling of dead bodies, from the big picture, what happens to a discarded physical form whether it's human or cow, is irrelevant. However, the attitudes and intents of the living toward those deceased is very relevant. Because we in PMR so strongly associate an individual with their body we mistakenly think that our respect/love for the deceased being should be transferred to the carcass left behind. In these beliefs, the dead body is only a symbol of the individual that once inhabited it -- any symbol-object, by itself, has no intrinsic importance -- the ideas and feelings (all nonphysical) that the symbol embodies carry all of the significance and importance. Don't confuse the symbol with what it symbolizes (we have a tendency to do that all the time). From a big picture perspective, there is nothing immoral about snacking on mom's dead body after she is gone, however there is much personal and cultural belief, ego attachment, as well as local law that makes that an exceptionally bad and inappropriate idea for those in our culture. (Think of Heinlein's man from mars in "A Stranger In A Strange Land")

Next: The meat eating vegetarian human vulture. Consider A, an ethical vegetarian, goes out to dinner with his significant other B. B, not a vegetarian, orders baked chicken. Now B has just contributed to the demand for meat since the restaurant will now order another chicken from its supplier, causing that supplier to kill another chicken. At this point (after B has been served) it does not matter one iota what happens to B's chicken - the demand has been registered - eat it, bury it with a sacred ceremony, give it away - doesn't matter as far as the demand for chicken meat goes. Halfway through the meal, B is too full to eat another bite. B offers A the chicken that has not been touched. A can eat the chicken knowing that doing so is in no way contributing to the future slaughter of chickens. Another example (not as simple and straightforward as the first, with perhaps a tinge of grey depending on how one defines the details): A goes to B's annual office xmass party buffet where several hundred people (none of which A knows) eat, drink, dance, and socialize in the holiday spirit as they wander about the facility. Every year they serve the same amount of the same things (some of which are meat) at the same place in the same way. Again, A (the meat eating vegetarian human vulture) can eat the meat knowing that doing so is in no way contributing to the future slaughter of animals because A realizes that eating meat is not the problem - killing animals to eat them when it is not even vaguely necessary to do so is the problem. There are many other such real world examples where a meat eating vegetarian human vulture can eat meat without contributing to the abuse of other sentient beings.

Don't let beliefs, habits, and passions, rule your behavior - it is only your intent expressed by your responsibility to do the right thing as best you know how that can raise or lower the quality of your consciousness. Refraining from eating your recently deceased mother or purposely eating a recently deceased chicken does not automatically raise or lower the quality of your consciousness - however both are likely to resonate with your cultural beliefs and habits. Likewise, believing the eating of meat to be immoral because you associate that action with the unnecessary killing of sentient beings (which is immoral) is to confuse two things that are culturally, and sometimes causally, connected -- but are not always or necessarily connected.

Tom C

twcjr: "The problem is humans violently trampling another beings free will when there are perfectly satisfactorily alternatives that uphold the health, vitality, integrity, and free will of all the beings involved."

After reading Ted's "The Nature of Free Will" and your statement it unnerves me about my dietary habits. I would never ever have believed I'd quit eating meat, but now it's hard to look at that peace of meat and not think about the free will aspect. So is this the "Higher Spiritual Love" or something similar you guys talk about? Should say that one doesn't interfere with another's free will.

Guess this is good timing, now I'll look for meat that's going to be "thrown away".

Shin

I know I am a very passionate person and I am still in the process of hunting my beliefs, I therefore will have to ponder more on natural death and scavengers.

However, I think that eating the animals that were killed by humans can have a broader impact. For example if that friend B gives his plate half full back to the restaurant, if there is one chance that this restaurant realizes that their plates are going to waste and that in result they reduce the amount of food in each serving, it would be good news. (I say that because worked in a restaurant and my boss actually took those measures). And at the party or anywhere in public, just projecting the image of someone eating meat can give appetite to meat eaters and advertises that meat consuming is an 'ok' thing. This may be more part of the political factors, but I think we agree that food is political.

Seb


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I'm just curious