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[i2amroy]

Hilariously, I'm not sure I could manage to catch a Squirrel without a lot of prior practice.

I know the general theory of a squirrel trap at least, though I've never had need to put it into action.

Spoiler: For all you amateur squirrel hunters out there: (click to show/hide)

You take a large stick and a fair bit of wire (preferably painted brown/green). Then you shape the wire into a slip knot loop about 1 finger in diameter. After setting the wire's memory to this point you make a small kink about 2-3 fingers in diameter and stretch the slipknot out to that size. Then attach a series of these loops to the stick and lay the stick at a 45^o angle against a tree. Squirrels, being lazy bastards, would rather run up the stick then go straight up the tree, and many times would rather go through the loop then try to go all of the way around it. The end result is that when the squirrel sticks his head through the loop the wire moves off the kink and the memory rapidly reduces the size of the loop. Then when the squirrel struggles it just tightens the loop further. Eventually the squirrel should fall off of the branch and hang themselves on the wire, also saving you the trouble of killing it.

As for me I think that my views closely align with this quote from SirHoneyBadger from an old old post on this forum:

I don't understand why anyone would want to exist solely on meat, or solely without. They taste better together, in a nice stirfry perhaps.

As far as morality goes, plants are fairly closely related to animals, genetically, so whether you live on acorns and dandelions, or you eat chilled monkeybrains for dessert every night, you're still destroying a living thing to perpetuate your own existence.

Atleast an animal has half a chance to avoid their fate. Plants can't even run away. 

At the same time, though, when you eat, you're also preserving and bettering your own life, and what's wrong with that?

Humans might not be the single best thing that ever happened to the planet's ecosystem, but we're sentient beings. We create a lot of cool things, and think a lot of cool thoughts, and if any species on Earth has a shot at turning a dead world, like Mars, into a green paradise, it's us.

Cows aint gonna do it. Dolphins aint gonna do it. We just might.

Humans are awesome. We eat animals because we kicked all of their asses, even though we're the weakest, slowest, blindest, and deafest creatures on Earth. We clawed our way to the top of the foodchain, and it took us a couple million years to do it, and now we can celebrate that victory with a nice juicy steak.

The fact that we even care about, and have conversations about, where that steak came from just proves how awesome we are.

[Muz]

I don't see death as the ultimate evil, just a checkpoint everyone has to reach.

Morally, I think every living creature has to contribute to the world. Animals are not picky about eating other living creatures, so why should we be picky about eating them? It's a part of the food chain.. plants consume nonliving things, animals consume things that are a little less sentient, we consume animals that are a little less sentient.

Besides, we don't process stuff like grass so well, and need animals to support that diet.

[EnigmaticHat]

I define personhood* as a being having preferences as to what happens to it.  As far as I can tell, a plant doesn't care what happens to it and thus fails that test.  Microorganisms may move around and superficially appear to take actions to maintain their survival but I don't see them as actually caring what happens because they don't think or feel anything.  I'm not sure what I feel about small, basic life such as insects; but larger animals are clearly people to me.  They obviously feel emotions and have preferences as to how they are treated, so morally they are on the same level as humans.  I'm still on the side of humans for obvious** pragmatic reasons, but I don't think that humans are any greater in terms of abstract moral worth.

I don't get mad at people that cause unnecessary or useless harm to animals.  Everyone does things for a reason, and in this case its because they believe/have been taught that animals aren't people. All that being said, a lot of the arguments against personhood for animals seems ridiculous to me.

Frankly, I think that most people that dismiss animals as morally irrelevant because they aren't smart are hypocrites because they don't apply that view to humans.  If personhood is determined by intelligence then babies and the severely mentally disabled are less of a person than the average adult.  There are some humans that are clearly less intelligent than the smartest of animals, yet there's no movement to farm the retards for organs.  To anyone who thinks animals aren't people because they aren't as intelligent as humans, I ask this: if a super-intelligent alien race were discovered tomorrow, would they be morally more important than humans?

I have a rather cynical view of humans as a result of my mindset.  I honestly believe that animals suffer on the same level humans do, so to me the factory farm system is basically just as bad as the slavery of old.  Yes, some animals are more accepting of captivity than humans.  If you think captivity is the worst we do to animals you haven't been paying attention.

Besides, we don't process stuff like grass so well, and need animals to support that diet.

You think we feed our animals grass?  There are no subsidies for grass.  Animals are eating corn, same as humans, regardless of what is good for them.  Also, to graze, an animal would have enough room to be able to move, and live in a place with enough light to be able to see.  So obviously grazing isn't an option.

*I mean person in the moral sense of "life that has value" as opposed to a simile for the word "human"

**well, I guess you don't KNOW that I'm human.  I could be just a spambot that developed sentience and is trying to prime you for my "spambots are people" rant

[moocowmoo]

As it stands I am currently more concerned as to the ecological impacts of raising animals for slaughter.

This is the reason I eat mostly vegetarian too. If I remember right, we feed something like 50% of our grain grown to feed livestock. A diet high in meat is an inefficient use of highly important, diminishing resources (arable land and fresh water). I don't object if meat is obtained from smallscale operations, where animals are allowed to forage. Factory farming though, where confined animals are stuffed full of grain and antibiotics, is both cruel and wasteful.

I have more respect for illogical vegetarians than illogical non-vegetarians. I mean, one group is really empathetic without having thought it through and the other group just parrots "But how can you not eat bacon?" at vegetarians constantly. One group is naive but well-meaning while the other group fuels most of their arguments with internet memes and links to Epic Meal Time.

Agreed.


Hey someone should make a thread for vegetarian cookbooks and recipes if there isn't one already.

[Frumple]

Huh. I'm asking because I don't actually have enough background in agriculture to know, but is feeding the current livestock population 50% of our grown grain actually a less efficient use of arable land and water? I'd think (perhaps erroneously. I haven't exactly seen the numbers crunched) we'd be being even less efficient in that manner if we tried to keep the current livestock population while leaving them free range. I'm not even talking keeping the current consumable meat stocks going, just the same population.

'Cause if we were actually trying to maximize use of arable land and water, we'd genocide most other large animals post haste and turn their habitat into farmland, insofar as I'm aware.

[moocowmoo]

I mean more efficient to consume the grain, rather than feed it to livestock for meat. Our land resources can't support the increasing global consumption of meat. Small grazing operations can be highly beneficial to the land, maintaining or boosting soil fertility. But raising animals large scale in feeding pens and feeding them grain drains soil fertility and uses more water, while feeding less people.

[Blargityblarg]

I'd like to point out that American meat-raising techniques are not necessarily ubiquitous worldwide. Most beef in Australia is grass-fed, such that grain-fed is a delicacy here in the same way that grass-fed is over there.

[King DZA]

I usually tend to judge all life based upon its individual actions and intentions, rather than the form it happens to take, and thus generally don't see any entity as inherently more valuable than any other. Because of this, whenever I must fulfill my mortal need for sustenance, I'm pretty much willing to consume whatever is available to me; be it plant, insect, animal, human, or whatever.

That being said, I stand strongly against the unnecessary suffering of any life form, and strive to prevent it from occurring whenever & wherever I am able.

[Realmfighter]

To anyone who justifies eating meat because the animals themselves would eat meat given the chance:Male Lions will often kill unrelated cubs so that they can impregnate the cubs mother. Would you consider this justifiable behavior for a human? Natural is not the same thing as right.

[Frumple]

I mean more efficient to consume the grain, rather than feed it to livestock for meat. Our land resources can't support the increasing global consumption of meat. Small grazing operations can be highly beneficial to the land, maintaining or boosting soil fertility. But raising animals large scale in feeding pens and feeding them grain drains soil fertility and uses more water, while feeding less people.

Brain's going weird places. It sorta' sounds like the best suggestion going via the arable land/water heuristic would be to murder grazing animals outright and stick to something else for free-range livestock. Pigs and chickens are actually pretty prime for that, because both are more forest(/jungle, in the chicken's case)-dwellers than plains. We could double-purpose our woodland while decreasing the amount of grain we wasted on non-humans.

Even if we did stick with feeding-pen type raising, both those two would open up other possibilities for expanding their diet, since they're prime examples of omnivores. Roadkill, the unused parts of the harvested animals (waste organics in general, really, and I'm not sure about pigs but I know chickens are cannibals.), possibly dead humans if you were going balls out for it. I'd imagine you could decrease waste overall quite a bit with that sort of program. Why put stuff in the land fill when you could put it in breakfast's belly?

To anyone who justifies eating meat because the animals themselves would eat meat given the chance:Male Lions will often kill unrelated cubs so that they can impregnate the cubs mother. Would you consider this justifiable behavior for a human? Natural is not the same thing as right.

I honestly don't know of many cases where people are going out and killing lion cubs so they can attempt to impregnate their mothers, but yeah, it'd be unlikely. We tend to have a decently strong taboo about cross-species copulation.

Also humans aren't large felines, so it's not quite best of analogies. Try primates, there's plenty of messed up (and admirable) stuff there.

[RedWarrior0]

Oh, I've got an idea! Read The Omnivore's Dilemma. I have not, but my dad has and found it quite interesting.

[Bauglir]

Basically, my stance comes down to arbitrary decisionmaking being okay in areas of vast uncertainty.

I can't come up with a reliable, consistent list of criteria for what makes a human life inherently valuable, even though I refuse to accept that it isn't. Any such list has corner cases I'm not comfortable with. As a result, I can't apply those same criteria to nonhumans to see if they're inherently valuable for the same reasons. Because I cannot approach the problem from a rational perspective, having no useful premises to operate on, I'm forced to make an arbitrary judgment about how to respond. I could, and maybe should, err on the side of caution and refrain from eating meat (although I'd hesitate to assume it's actually the side of caution, given the known goods eating meat provides me, even if none are necessary), but my decision to this point has been that while raising animals for slaughter is not inherently evil, there are certainly ways of doing so that are, and it's important that if you're raising an animal to be killed and eaten, you make an effort not to be a douche about it (inasmuch as that's possible given your ultimate goal). Because this decision is arbitrary, though, I can't insist that it's the correct decision for everyone, much as I don't insist that other people share my (lack of) religious beliefs. All I can insist upon is consistency with whatever other, related, beliefs you happen to have (such as those on cruelty to animals).

[Xantalos]

I am unique among the people I know in that I am the only one that has considered cannibalism. Basically the only thing that keeps me from trying it is
A: I'm not a very good cook
B: I would get murdered by someone. Since I don't want my life package to be cut short, I will not cannibalize people unless it's necessary.
I will try almost anything, though. Extreme Omnivore for the win.

[Vattic]

I was brought up vegetarian and taught that it was immoral to kill and eat animals. Having struggled with the question on and off I still don't eat meat, but it's not for the exact same reasons any more. These days, besides all the ecological arguments, I don't eat meat because I don't want to kill or cause any suffering if I don't have to; If there is a viable, affordable alternative then I'll take it. Funnily enough this includes cannibalism, but only when necessary.

[penguinofhonor]

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