People can change.

Do not insult the wise and wonderful people of Africa by suggesting that they cannot decide to change, once they see a better way.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

the suffering of a single sentient being should be preferred to the suffering of very many sentient beings

Are not vegetables living things too?

Who is to say whether consciousness does not exist in a sunflower...

Texeme.Construct(Participant)

50 years after this idea was first articulated, people are still playing word games and arguing semantics. We are our own worst enemy. Driving another creature to extinction through increasing it's appeal as a food source is exactly the opposite of preserving the integrity, stability, and beauty of our oceans.

If even the articulate and educated people that regularly post here waste their time picking fights with each other over every triviality then no progress is made and nothing is accomplished.


If you continue to do what you've always done you'll continue to get what you've always got. - Yogi Berra

Driving another creature to extinction through increasing it's appeal as a food source is exactly the opposite of preserving the integrity, stability, and beauty of our oceans.

You know, we are hardly the only species that exhausts its food supply via rapid growth.  It happens all the time.    It's just that we have these big brains that sit around and worry about it all the time.

Fast growth, depletion, burn out, extinction -- that's Nature!


Texeme.Construct(Participant)

1. A simple "sustainability" metric is not sufficient since the value of highly sentient beings is simply made subservient to the desires of humanity- that's a very shallow environmentalism

2. Angry African- we get it- you like meat- you got something different to say? And I agree with caniscandida- Africa is not some homogenous place that you think you can speak for- the African bushmeat trade is devastating the continent and many Africans are questioning their habits- maybe you should pay attention to the true costs of what you "love"

3. jabailo- I'm hesitant to respond to anything you write but please, 85% of crops are fed to animals so you get the worst of everything when you eat a burger- suffering animals, wasted plants, tons of energy and water use, and tons of pollution- since you seem to play the role of a free-market contrarian I'm sure that at minimum you agree that people who eat meat should pay the full cost right? And also, that society shouldn't be forced to pay for health costs that meat eaters impose on the rest of us right?

To my knowledge, we are, in fact, the only species that "rapidly" consumes another species to the point of extinction.

Most other species will start to see a decrease in their own numbers (though delayed) as their food supply disappears, which gives the food supply a chance to recover, which results in eventual increase of the predator species once again.

It's very rare for a species to exceed it's carrying capacity, and when it does, it collapses back down soon afterwards.

The same can't be said of humans.

1. why do you even need to say that? - "We don't look down at vegans".

2. Maybe you are so Angry becuase you are killing animals that you really do not need to eat

3. Why don't you feed the other starving Africans in your country, the grain your country is exporting as animal feed!

4. I would rather eat my fresh veggie then eat a money or elephant anyday!

Its got nothing to do with them caring about other animals, example the millions of cows being killed in America every year!

John Bailo (whom I somewhat perversely rather like, though rarely for anything he actually says)
might be right, or at least close to it, that "we are hardly the only species that exhausts its food supply via [not the finest use of that Latin loan-word; one might think that as an Italian-American, he would be a more careful cultivator of the language of his ancestors, and mine, the Lingua Mater] rapid growth."  In sub-Arctic and Arctic eco-systems, for example, there are indeed well-documented cycles of abundance of quickly reproducing small rodents, with consequential high numbers and health of rodent-eating predators, and the reverse.

But it surely is very rare that any predator might "eat up" its preferred prey species.  Is any predator, other than us, ever so relentlessly efficient?  So I join TasPar in wondering what examples John could produce, for our edification.

As for John's next remark, "It's just that we have these big brains that sit around [sic!; grotesque metaphor!; remember that gag in Mel Brooks's "Young Frankenstein," when Ygor goes late at night to the Brain Depository of Transylvania, and the sign on the door says, "After 5 PM, deposit brain through slot"] and worry about it all the time": Would that that were true, and we worried about it so much!  We do not, actually, for the most part.  But some of us do, sometimes.

And that is of crucial importance to us humanists, whether secular or religious: A fundamental part of our humanity is worrying about the consequences of what we choose to do; more abstractly, considering the ethical value of our unconstrained actions.

So John is totally wrong to blow that aside as so much fluff.  Nay indeed, that is the core, the kernel, the heart.  Why the hell else do we do what we do?

(As Barack Obama once said of his daughters, explaining to his friends their absence: "So they're upstairs, doing what they do.")

As for Peter Singer and Jim Mason: I know they said, very hypothetically, something along the lines of what I wrote earlier.  But their excellent book, "The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter," is not excellently indexed, and I cannot now find their throw-away passage on whaling.

More relevantly, here is a recent (and still timeless, principles-wise, but going a bit stale, news-wise) piece by Peter Singer, an Australian, on mid-January news about what is going on in Antarctic seas:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jan/19/anima ....

It is VERY important to notice that at the end, he makes pretty much the same point as our wise JavaEarth, that we anti-whaling activists have a hard time making our point, in view of the horrors of our own meat industry.

One might think that the Princetonian John Bailo would want to lick adoringly the words of the Princetonian Peter Singer till they shine from New Jersey to Seattle, the energy of which radiation might even charge BioD's e-bike.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.