Anyway, really enjoyed the post and the intelligent comments of the readers too. I’ll subscribe by RSS.

I doubt most vegetarians have philosophical views that simplistic.

First, nature doesn’t equal morality. Humans murdered each other in our natural environment too, but we consider murder unethical.

Second, the argument isn’t over a “soul” but whether animals can suffer. I’m not going to go into the extreme details, because the actual argument is more complex. But, the moral argument of vegetarianism is whether animals can suffer, and if they do, whether inflicting that suffering for the purpose of food is ethical.

-Scott

Anyway, really enjoyed the post and the intelligent comments of the readers too. I’ll subscribe by RSS.

It’s a blog on many topics. As you’ll see from viewing the archives, my discussions of vegetarianism are only in about 3-5 articles of 700. Which means that less than .5% of the content of this blog is aimed at that subject.

Variety is the spice of life, and my blog.

-Scott

No, thanks for posting, I always like a contrasting view.

I’ve never read the book in question, but I’m extremely skeptical of it’s premise, namely that vegetarian eating supports agricultural mono-cultures and results in a higher net-death of animal life. I’m not saying the book’s premise is incorrect, just suspicious.

First, in order to factory farm meat, one needs to feed cows, pigs or chickens a lot of mono-culture grains. Sure, some animals are pasture raised, but as Michael Pollan explains so eloquently in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, this is not the case with almost all meat production. So, in order to eat meat, not only are you consuming the cow, but all the 2nd and 3rd degrees of separation away from those monocultures used to support traditional livestock.

Second, who says you need to eat a monoculture diet while being a vegetarian? I see no restriction that disables a vegetarian from eating a large amount of species, that would somehow be available to a traditional omnivore. Perhaps I’m missing your argument here, but it doesn’t add up from the first glance, maybe you could elaborate it for me.

Finally, with regards to the animal deaths and ecosystem collapse involved in the mass production of farmland, I have two points:

1. I agree, there are considerable consequences. However, the practice of organic farming seems to offer only a somewhat better alternative as the restricted growing environments reduce the yields on crops and force foods to be shipped further distances, increasing the impact of fossil fuels.

2. Unless you hunt your food, or only eat meat from pasture-raised livestock, you’re also buying into the monoculture agricultural paradigm. Cows, pigs and chicken are fed on corn, the highest calorie per acre yielding crop ever invented by humans. So, any problems that occur with animals dying, ecosystem collapse and increased environmental damage would occur to an even higher degree with a meat-based diet (because the amount of input calories of corn, for example, to raise a cow are many times higher than the calories humans derive from it’s meat).

So, unless I’m missing an important point, I fail to see how, except in highly unique cases, vegetarianism creates the loss of more life and ecosystem destruction than meat eating.

-Scott

One reviewer on Amazon for Lierre’s book put it much, much more eloquently than I did in my above comment:

“Lierre Kieth has been accused of being against veg*ns, but after reading her book I don’t agree. Here’s what I think: She is against industrial agriculture, because agriculture annihilates ecosystems–agriculture is bio-cleansing; it’s killing the Earth, one sterile petro-chemical saturated field at a time. It can’t go on. And because she’s against agriculture she is, by default, against vegetarianism, because vegetarianism can’t exist without the expansive farming of mono-crops. ”

Cheers.

I hesitate to make this comment, but will do so anyway.

There’s a book that many readers here might find valuable — The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. There’s a reasonable review of it here:

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/lipid-hypothesis/the-vegetarian-myth/

Recommending a book called “The Vegetarian Myth” to a group of veg-sympathetics is a bit like recommending The God Delusion to a group of Christians.

But I assure you the book is not about picking fights with vegetarians. It’s a bit of an unfortunate title, because the book really explores some of the subtleties behind vegetarian dogma.

You hear a lot about the ecological benefits of vegetarianism, but ecology is not so simple. Every decision we make has an infinite series of cascading consequences.

(Like how you wouldn’t be here if your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents didn’t meet after a series of synchronistic events.)

The ecological/moral impact of eating agrarian foods is a lot more complicated than we think. A field of grains is responsible for the death of countless animals during the harvesting process, the deaths of numerous bacteria — and quite simply, the death of entire acres of habitable land.

Grains kill ecosystems.

I want to puke every time I hear Mr Pavlina meat eaters don’t feel moral remorse for animal murder because the act is “out of sight”, therefore “out of mind.” I eat a cow, and am thus at a single degree of separation between the death of that cow. But eating grains and other agrarian foods puts you 2-3 degrees away from the deaths of infinitely more organisms. Out of sight, out of mind, eh?

The more I read about the interconnected, down-cascading consequences of our dietary decisions, the more I think that eating a humanely-treated, grass-fed cow is probably the most ecologically and morally responsible decision we can make.

Either way, I really don’t have a beef (haha) to pick with anyone, veg or not. Just realize that some of the popular arguments for vegetarianism are sophomoric at best. That doesn’t mean more sophisticated arguments don’t exist. But dig a little deeper before accepting the current dogma.