I'm not a ecologist, but wouldn't it throw off the natural order of our world if we stopped eating meat? Do you remember in class the other week when we talked about the pig farms and how their waste smells for miles...? Well think if we didn't eat them. There would probably be a lot more pigs...and a lot more pig waste.
What would we do with all of our animals, just keep them as pets? Farmers wouldn't be able to do that because they would have no money from selling them therefore no money to feed them. If everyone was FORCED to be vegetarian, one the other hand, in some twilight zone world of my own, then farmers would be very rich. The meat black market, anyone?
But what do I know, like I said, I'm not an ecologist. I found Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth documentary on google videos
as Johnson mentioned on Michelle's blog. He talked a lot about the CO2 levels being correlated with the increase in temperates. Yet, since mammals breathe out carbon dioxide and if we didn't eat meat there would be more animals, wouldn't a decrease in meat eating have a deficient effect global warming?
Maybe I'm wrong, if we let them all out in the wild they may become extinct because they don 't know how to defend for themselves. Pigs and cows have been domesticated for so long, do they still have their natural instincts? If they don't, is it worth saving ourselves to risk their species?
You have the situation perfectly in reverse: Humans artificially maintain the numbers (billions) of intensively reared animals we consume.
ReplyDeleteOkay, like I said. "Maybe I'm wrong." But what about the farmers they wouldn't make money if everyone was a vegatarian, which would hurt our economy. Also, wouldn't the speices become extinct because they don't know how to fend for themselves?
ReplyDeleteYour concern about the potential economic decline of the farmer is logically and morally indistinguishable from the one posited by the abolitionists of human slavery. Recall all the arguments in favor of human slavery, as without it southerners said they would surely face economic ruin. The issue is not about favoring one group over another—the issue is whether it is morally justifiable to treat sentient beings-humans-or non-humans-as commodities. Also, there are many other harvesting opportunities for the farmers that do not perpetuate the needless suffering of sentient creatures. Pain is pain. As far as pigs, cows, goats, chickens, and the many other animals that are exploited for our usage going extinct if they were let loose in the wild, this is probably not the case. There are other (morally permissible) methods of animal preservation and intervention that do not collapse into a false dichotomy. (We either breed animals to kill them or they will go extinct.) And, consider the millions of people who have these animals on farms as pets, alongside horses, dogs, cats, turtles, and other sentient creatures.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, that is a really good point about the abolitionists and slavery -- I give you props. I never thought of it that way.
ReplyDeleteYet to rebut, some farmers are not interested in growing crops, they just want to breed. And if all of the livestock farmers did change into crop farmers, they would need to invest a lot of money to that, and therefore would not be able to keep their livestock as pets.
Secondly, if it is a "false dichotomy" what are these other "morally permissible" ways of keeping these animals alive in the wild? How do you know it wouldn't be so dichotomous as: either they are extinct or we breed them? How do I know it would? I don't. Yet, my rational tells me that since they have been domesticated and the natural order of the food-chain has done without these creatures (or very few, there are wild pigs)for so long, it will have an effect. There has to be an effect somehow, someway, whether that change is a slight increase for a short period of time or a over a large time span. These changes might be: a population increase in animals that would eat livestock like coyotes; a decrease in the livestock; an increase in car accidents (deer cause a lot of accidents, it only make sense that cows would too.) Of course these are just a few things that might happen. No one knows what will truly happen, we can only theorize.