But but, vegetarians and vegans are notorious proselytizers! THEY NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT!! (etc.) /s
Thanks for the book rec, looks great.
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Have you tried bacon made from dogs?
We eat pigs because they are delicious. Pigs are also common livestock to raise in places where open grazing space is difficult to non-existent. Since they eat more or less the same stuff that we do, they were easier to raise in more confined family spaces for subsistence farmers.
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It was actually a rhetorical question about ethics, not a practical question about what tastes nice.
There is also the fact that dogs have co-evolved with us for at least the last 17000 years. They are, I believe, the only animals that understand the human pointing gesture. The corresponding part of their brains responds to speech as does the one in humans. We’re not quite a symbiosis, but we are commensals in a very different way from the way we are with rats. We have a particular responsibility to dogs, because they are our creation.
The same goes for pigs, horses, chickens and cattle which we have also selectively bred (the milch cow especially so), but it is a different kind of responsibility.
The thing is, one can look at this objectively, scientifically or even psychologically, and still have very mixed emotions about the whole thing.
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It is all really question of where you draw the line of similarity. We all need to consume other lifeforms to survive. So is the line same species is it mammals is it vertabrates is it all animals is it eukaryotes. In the end you must consume part or whole of another lifeform to survive so the question is wheres the line.
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Utility forms the ethical consideration here, which was my point in a rather silly way. Take horses for example. In Western/European have a general aversion to eating horses because they are usually considered as “work” animals. But some places consider it a delicacy (France, Japan).
Almost nobody worries about the ethical considerations of aquaculture. Raising fish and invertebrates for food. They are considered too different from ourselves to worry. Octopi are considered the most intelligent invertebrates out there, yet people don’t really say much about them ending up on sushi plates.
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cough
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Octopus are definitely on the list of animals I refuse to eat no matter what. I don’t care how tasty they may be, I’m not eating super-intelligent shape-shifting alien-DNA creatures.
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You’re missing out. I guess its more miniature cthulhu starspawn for me 
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Yes, and of course there’s going to be that one damn vegan there who insists on having a bag of something else, specially prepared.
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Tofu Testicles?
Soy Scrote?
FauxDingus?
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This is true. They also have a depressingly short lived life cycle in which they reproduce and die, so all that intelligence goes to waste, as it were.
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yeh, the ozzie ones in the northern territories are often half waterbuffalo much of their farmed livestock is, you know. the ones we get in New Zealand however, are usually Hereford or Angus, the local dry stock being the source. the three or four i made the mistake of walking up on were Hereford by the coloration. i got about as good a look at them as you might get of a wasp nest you kicked over. 
was going away just as fast as i could.
the State hunts them out of the national forests but they still exist in large numbers where there are communal farms owned by Maori, i.e. Northland and Eastcape on the borders of state forests. for various reasons
Colcannon! (Which is surprisingly easy to mess up).
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Citation? Vegans and ‘vegetarians’ don’t eat fish, for ‘ethical reasons’. And there are enough veg*ns now that I don’t think your argument that fish are considered beneath chickens/cows/etc by almost nobody holds water. No pun intended.
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Still some cultures eat them. Individual cultures respond to the powerless among them in so many different ways. In the west, we hide them away in ‘CAFO’s’ and institutions, so we can be guilt free. I take your point about dogs and I agree with your posts, I’m just pointing out that you can’t make generalizations about the way humans respond to animals.
The future looks grim for our current meat-eating paradigm. Eating meat is just a preference, one that is costing us more and more, including our environment and humanity. The factory farms I’ve seen are a type of hell that only a human could come up with, and something we should all be ashamed of.
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I don’t think of them that way either. I mean, I respect them as individuals, but don’t believe that they are a lot like us. For me, it was the realization that I hate violence. It was enough for me, when visiting my grandfathers farm as a kid, to realize that I was incapable of breaking a chickens neck for dinner. When I got older, I learned I was fortunate to not HAVE to eat that or participate in that. I was fortunate to live in a time and place that had plenty of choices of things to eat. Different time, different place, maybe different outcome.
/begin sermon
But personally, having a choice, I made it, and it’s one of the few choices I have felt certain about over the years. Honestly, I credit it for causing an intellectual ‘awakening’ in myself. When you reject a core tenet of your culture, and experience the resultant effects, it is incredibly startling to realize how ‘out in the open’ things are. Eschewing dairy/meat led to small enticing revelations for me of the nature of our culture; masculinity, denial, how we treat the powerless, the value of pleasure, patriarchy, etc. I imagine every minority has those types of thoughts though.
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I am lucky enough to live near two different families who keep chickens so I buy eggs from them, and their kids get to save up for college, a car, etc.
I am lucky enough to have a small patch of land where I can grow some of my own food (this time of year it’s figs, pears, pomegranates, grapes, chard, Malabar spinach, improved lambsquarters and black-eyed peas).
I am lucky enough to be literate and have learned things (culturally/osmotically, since half my fam is Chinese, and soy has always been part of our intake) to be safe and healthy being a vegetarian. If you are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, Malaysian, Mayan, Hopi, etc. or live in a family or home culture with intact foodways, consider yourself lucky you have options.
We in "first world countries"don’t realize that being a vegetarian is a kind of privilege. People who eat as I do can do so very cheaply (yay!), but must make time to cook and have a place to do it (so we have a stove); must have a way to store beans and pulses in bulk (so we have a house and/or kitchen); must pay attention to our intake (so we have at least a layman’s grasp of nutrition).
I see these as real privileges. First Nations peoples who live above the treelines, Arctic Circle, etc. will never be vegetarians. Working families and low- to no-income folks often haven’t options. It’s fast food or no food, or they live in food deserts, or they have specific physical health concerns, or they have to make every penny (and calorie) count. Meat-eating makes sense especially for them, just as it did for our ancestors on the African plains 200,000 years ago. I just wish modern humans had cleaner, better food sources.
It’s not fair to assume my privileges are everyone else’s. I wince when I see zealous preachy folks, vegetarians and religious people and gun rights advocates and all the rest, because it’s impossible we will all be the same person living the same life. “Don’t you want to be healthy?” some vegetarians pitch, to seal the deal. Pshaw: go talk to my neighbor across the street who nearly died of anemia. A former vegetarian, she had to start eating meat on the advice of her physician. I’m glad she did, she’s a light in my life.
I get it that some people enjoy eating meat. That it tastes good. I get it. People should be happy. If they are, maybe they will live in peace, take care of the planet, and love each other. I want more happiness in the world. Eating meat gets you there? Please do!
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In my old workplace, I can’t tell you how many conversations I had that went like this:
“So you’re a vegetarian. Do you eat fish?”
“No, fish are animals. I don’t eat animals.”
“Oh. Do you eat chicken?”
“No, chickens are also animals.”
“Oh, huh. Do you eat eggs? Because they’re baby chickens.”
“No, I’m not a vegan. Eggs aren’t chickens. They’re unfertilized.”
“Well, I guess I just don’t get it.”
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