Vegans to blame for frog populations…It sounds so absurd it could almost be a joke…wait
It’s carbon-14 to carbon-12, you insensitive clod. 
Carbon-16 has brutally short half-life.
But you can take the ratio of nitrogen-15 to nitrogen-14 and check if the self-professed vegans don’t help themselves to a piece of ham here and there. And even date the time of such indulgence from the position of the isotopic signature in the hair, given known hair growth rate.
And you can even check the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 and see if their diet is primarily C3-plants or C4-plants.
And as the 14/15N and 12/13C are stable, you can do it couple millenia after death, or on a living sample, as you please.
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Ha! Well, leave it to me to miss a parody. I should have picked up on it when you responded to a post about vegan-hate by calling them obsessive and misguided, then started obsessing about what it says in the National Review of all things. But you know Poe’s law, there really are advocates who sound like that.
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I was serious about the rest … I was just joking about vegans being solely responsible for the disappearance of amphibious life. That’s as ridiculous as veganism being ethically superior to omnivorous diets.
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The original magic of eating meat was that cows and goats could turn huge expanses grasslands and mountain scrub that you couldn’t farm into something you could eat. And pigs, they could turn your garbage into bacon! We’ve somewhat gotten away from that by growing crops just to feed the livestock, though now meat production doesn’t so much require huge expanses of land that would get pretty trashed by cows, who aren’t exactly stewards of the land.
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aaarrrrrggggg, if new hydroponic farming allowed indoor (vertical greenhouse) production of plants with significantly lower animal deaths than both the number of animals killed in pasture based cow rearing and regular plant agriculture would you then become vegan?
About the book, it arguably looks very CHEEZY which of course is a bit weird from a vegan POV. But if there are some recipes in there, so what? It is actually less uncommon than one might think that people pop into r/vegan and ask “Hi vegans, I’m dating a vegan girl tell me what I need to know”. Being vegan means, among other things, being repeatedly surprised and amazed and - to avoid the brain from exploding, amused - by all the quirky preconceptions people have about veganism.
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Ok, I’m sorry, but the words “A supremely weird book” is like a gauntlet thrown in my face. I’m not even going to mention ‘House of Leaves’ weird as it is. No, I give you “Toplin” by Michael McDowell, who wrote some strange stuff, but nothing stranger than ‘Toplin’ This (from Goodreads) pretty much lays out the bare bones: “A nameless, paranoid narrator, compelled by mysterious warnings and sourceless messages, sets out to kill a deformed waitress whom he feels wants to die.” That is just the beginning. This is the only book I ever threw across the room because the ick factor went beyond “Eewwww!” You just really do NOT want this thing to crawl into your mind.
It is doubtful. The thing is, I don’t claim to base my diet some imaginary ethics that fall apart with the slightest scrutiny. What I’ve been saying is those subscribing to the vegan principle of least harm are hypocrites in that their diets are responsible for more loss of animal life as well as in that they lose their vote between factory/feed-lot meat and more ethical sources (dollars are the only vote that count in this regard). Also, I remain unconvinced that humans can get all their nutritional needs met on a vegan diet. I believe than an omnivorous diet fundamentally changed human development in areas like brain development and digestion and that ignoring that fact may be hazardous to my health. I do source my meats from the most ethical/humane sources whenever possible inasmuch as I avoid factory meats.
Now, on the other hand… if a suitably nutritious laboratory meat were to become available…
I’m still trying to understand the math that means 1 mouse = 1 head of cattle.
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0.03-0.04 pounds versus 1,200-1,400 pounds
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10^11-10^12 conservatively estimated number (no evidence how many are killed in cultivating plants which are then fed directly to people versus being fed to animals who will be killed to feed people) versus 13^8 beef cattle (of which 3^8 are killed each year for human food)
If you really want to wow us with numbers, why not talk about mosquito kills, or e coli, or fleas?
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Are you suggesting the value of a life is measured in pounds? That’s a new one.
Some things shouldn’t require explanation but here goes…
The value of food often is measured in pounds because of weight’s correlation with calories and nutrition, but I don’t know anyone who says a life that weighs less is a less valuable life. In other words, it makes no sense to measure life in pounds when discussing the ethics of taking a life … it only makes sense when that life is considered to be food. I’m glad you brought it up because it illustrates perfectly how ridiculous things can get when you begin with an absurd premise.
Glad I could help.
I do not recommend eating feed lot cattle (grass fed cattle eat grass they harvest with their teeth) but Corvallis’ study accounted for feed as well and the nutritional density of meat still meant that omnivorous diets accounted for less loss of life in total.
…and by all means let’s talk about insects!
Perhaps there could be a weighing coefficient for the life form, perhaps for the entity’s age (spawned or not, how many times) too?
Also, why are insects exempted?
Is there also an opportunity-cost penalty, e.g. not allowing the bugs (or mice) to breed instead of killing them? Is a life that does not happen different that much from a life that happens and is terminated?
Questions, questions, questions!
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Precisely. Who are the true speciesists here! When the the frogs and mice are killed in rice and grain harvests harvests countless insects suffer and die as well. Frog death is the tip of the iceberg in regards to VEGAN MURDER! Not only that but insects are poisoned by the trillions in non-organic farming.
True enough, but while that is indeed hardly unique to the group “vegans,” it’s also not true of every vegan. It’s true of very few I’ve met, actually. If any. Veganism isn’t automatically an “obsession,” any more than exercising regularly or brushing one’s teeth twice a day. And it’s also not the “single political issue” that any vegan I know takes an interest in.
Your rather pass-agg wheeling out of more stereotypes about vegans did not win the internets today.
Neither did your anecdotal evidence and self-congratulatory omphaloskepsis.
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And Ketoers. Disclosure: I eat Keto. I annoy myself sometimes.
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I could introduce you to a couple vegetarians who seem to be struggling to stay just this side of psychosis, if you’d just explain to them that they are giving the rest of the group a bad reputation.
