A question to answer!

You're at the supermarket, you go to the meat section (or the crying aisle, as I think of it) but there are no burgers, sausages, drumsticks etc....there's only a holding pen, and in this pen is a cow, a calf, a pig, a chicken, a lamb and a turkey.Picture them all there looking at you...confused and terrified, backing away. They don't know why they're there or what's going on. One by one you have to catch them and hold them down, they're trying to get away, they're screaming, but if you want meat you have to kill them. Could you do that? Cut their throats, watch them bleed out and slice them up?

On to the milk section (another crying aisle). No milk on the shelf, but there's a cow with a calf suckling. If you want milk, the calf has got to go. Could you pull the calf off of the mother, drag the calf away...never to see the mother again?...then milk the cow while she's crying and bellowing
and grieving for her calf?

On to the eggs...can you walk by the bedraggled, sick, miserable hens that are crammed into cages so small they can't even stretch their wings?... can you help yourself to their eggs without any concern for the misery they have to endure? And can you macerate small chicks just because they cannot lay eggs?

Imagine if what ends up at the supermarket also has to start at the supermarket...would you still go there?...would you take your children?...would you take part if you were face to face with your food?

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.9

Wanna turn veggie think about it.

While religious and ethical beliefs, as well as economic factors have a lot to do with the profusion of vegetarians in countries like India and Thailand,more and more people, particularly in developed countries, have given up and continue to give up meat and other animal products for health reasons. This has to do with scientific reports around the world showing that a vegetarian diet can considerably reduce the high cholesterol associated with heart disease.Likewise, research done over the past twenty years strongly suggests that there is a link between eating meat and cancer of the colon, rectum,prostate, breast and uterus, which is very rare amongst cultures who eat little or no meat.One reason given by biologists and nutritionists for such serious imbalances is that the human intestinal tract is not suited for digesting meat. Animals that eat flesh have short intestines to pass rapidly the decaying and toxin-producing meat out of their body. Plant-eaters have intestines at least six times the length of their body, because plant foods decay more slowly than meat.The human body has the long intestinal tract of a herbivore, so the toxins produced during digestion(and by any undigested meat) can overload the system, especially the kidneys, and lead to gout, arthritis,rheumatism, and other diseases,including cancer. Plus, the meat industry adds nitrites and other preservatives to keep the decaying meat a bright red color, and even before being slaughtered livestock are fed enormous amounts of chemicals such as tranquilizers, hormones, antibiotics, and many others(Gary and Steven Null mention 2,700 drugs given to livestock in their book Poisons in Your Body). Although these drugs will still be present in the meat when you eat it, the law does not require that they be listed on the package.We humans need protein. Yes, it is a fact that protein constitutes the building blocks of our tissues. But animal flesh is not the only source of protein available to us. Dairy products, grains, beans, and nuts are all concentrated sources of protein.Cheese, peanuts, and lentils, for instance, contain more protein per ounce than hamburger, pork, or steak. Animal protein requires much energy to digest and transforms into energy quickly, making it readily available for< you although it also gets quickly consumed. Vegetable protein does not use as much energy to digest and transforms into longer lasting energy.In excess, animal protein will more likely reduce your body's overall energy because of the energy it takes to digest. Studies show that
vegetarians are able to perform any physical activity 2 to 3 times longer than non-vegetarians, and that they recover from fatigue 2 to 3 times faster as well. Fish may be considered somewhat “cleaner” than read meat or poultry, but nowadays you need to be careful, as many types of fish have unhealthy amounts of mercury, as well as other contaminants like PCBs, chlordane, dioxins, and DDT. The American Dietetic Association notes that most of mankind for most of human history has lived on vegetarian or quasi-vegetarian diets. And the modern 20th-century consumer society significantly changed people's diet in industrialized countries. Furthermore, the slaughter of animals and meat consumption has become excessive, leading to serious imbalances and disease. Yet, this seems to be slowly changing, as more and more people are becoming concerned about their health and more conscientious about what they put into their bodies. We are finally making the connection between diet and health that Ayurveda has stated for thousands of years, and taking more responsibility for our own well being instead of just blindly following the mainstream behavior. Spiritual Reasons to Become a Vegetarian In most Eastern cultures, vegetarianism is also imbued with the ethical principles of spiritual traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism, which follow ahimsa (non-violence) and metta (universal love). Love and non- violence refer not just to humans, but to all living beings, because we cannot find peace within ourselves if we are not willing to respect nature and be at peace with the world around us. The slaughter of animals is violence and there is no such thing as “humane animal slaughter.” It is written in the Vedas that, “Meat can never be obtained without injury to living creatures.” Indian spiritual teachers have promoted vegetarianism as an integral part of the spiritual path for thousands of years, not only because not killing animals is part of ahimsa, or non-violence, as a general precept, but also because participating in the wholesale slaughter of animals, or killing animals as a form of entertainment or sport creates karma.Since the aim of a yogic spiritual path is Liberation, partaking in theslaughter of animals means promoting our own suffering (by supporting the suffering of others) and binding us to the world. Yet now that yoga has become so popular in the West, we see yoga and meditation retreats where meat is served, which goes completely against the principles of true yoga, as it condones a worldly and desire-based mind frame, as opposed to a liberating path of inner peace and self-awareness.

The absurdity of plant pain.

Well i really turn corybantic when people question a Vegan/Veggie being a hypocrite. Well yes I've been questioned a lot regarding plants feeling pain. So here I'll try to explain on my.part with some biochemistry and moral ethics in mind.

First I want to comment on the absurdity of we humans that first started with Rene Descartes who argued animals lacking consciousness to the worst some people still believe in that. So I'll first like to comment on that.

For anyone to feel pain the anatomical process is called nociception or perception of pain - Which cause due to the presence of nociceptors/sensory receptors. These responds to the potentially damaging stimuli by a sending nerve signal to.a spinal cord.in peripheral nervous system.
These have been showed to be present on cutaneous i.e. External and internal system of the body. And these receptors have been.documented in non mammalian animals like - fish; invertebates - leeches, and even nematode; sea slugs; fruit flies etc. So the animal not feeling consciousness is ruled out.

Now let me come to plants no one has ever came to show the presence of nociceptors in plants. And moreover plants don't have any limbic system to understand any form of senses. Also they don't show.any episodic memory storage capacity so they do not remember any harm caused to them as it would be a evolutionary waste. In practical terms this isn’t so much a logical point as it is an ad hominem but even were it not a fallacy it’s still based on a rather shaky assumption; namely that plants feel pain. Let me say this right up front. There is no empirical evidence of plants experiencing a sensation even remotely close to what we call pain. Pain has a very specific definition that is often lost in the colloquial use of the word. Simply put, pain is a negative sensation that occurs when an organism has suffered some sort of physical injury. Depending on the nature of the pain the response could be either unconscious, as when you pull your hand off a hot plate without thinking about it, or conscious, as when you stick your hand under freezing ice water for as long as you can on a dare.

Sometimes cited as support is the fact that plants are certainly capable of responding to outside stimuli. Sunflowers are able to move their flowers and track the sun across the sky while tress have been shown to shift nitrogen (important in photosynthesis) to leaves in heavier sunlight. However from an anatomical and physiological point of view the idea that plants feel pain finds little support. Plants lack pain receptors that would allow them to experience negative stimulation in the first place as well as lacking both a brain and a nervous system that would be required to analyze and respond to such sensory information. There does seem to be evidence that plants release hormones after being damaged much in the same way animals will but plant hormones are quite different from those found in animals. Furthermore this would not be evidence of a pain response in plants but rather an automatic reaction to stimuli. More damning for the position though is the total lack a reason for plants to have evolved a pain response. Pain is a useful adaptation for animals because it helps them avoid dangerous situations. A perfect way to illustrate this is to look at humans born without the ability to feel it. The condition is called congenital analgesia of congenital insensitivity to pain. A rare genetic condition the prime symptom of which is the total lack of any ability to experience a pain response. As you may have been able to guess suffers often do not live long and those that do must be carefully watched. Broken bones may go untreated or infections unremarked upon if only because they have no reason to be concerned about them. Without pain there is no reason to pull your hand out of the fire. Pain helps animals survive but the same cannot be said for plants. With no ability to avoid danger if it arises, such as retracting a branch being munched on by an herbivore or uprooting to a new spot during a fire, the development of a pain response system would be an evolutionary waste. It would add nothing the fitness of the organism (the ability to reproduce) and the resources that would be used to grow it could instead be put into growth and reproduction. Plants certainly can respond to threats, many species of algae increase their production of defensive chemicals after suffering damage from herbivory, but such things only indicate a response to outside stimuli not pain. Some objections can be raised to the position I’ve offered. One is that any negative experience qualifies as pain. Since plants are able to respond to stimuli, and therefore must experience it in some way, and some stimuli are certainly negative plants then would be said to experience pain. This however is conflating two separate issues; the question of panpsychism and the question of suffering. As shown above it is quite possible for a human to possess the ability to experience while simultaneously lacking the ability to feel pain. A similar situation is found in those lacking photoreceptors in the eyes (blind) or who have suffered damage to chemoreceptors in the nose (lack of smell). One could hardly say that a blind person is able to experience sight or a deaf person able to experience sound even though they are certainly able to experience other stimuli for which they have the proper tools. In a similar vein a computer is clearly able to respond to stimuli such as the introduction of a virus into its software but very few would say that such an event causes the computer any sort pain. As it currently stands it makes little sense to extend our moral sphere to encompass plants but that does not mean we may ignore the role they have to play. As primary producers all life on earth ultimately derives from the ability of plants to provide energy for the rest of us. The continued happiness and prosperity of both us and the rest of the animal kingdom requires the continued health of.the ecosystems we share.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.8