What are your thoughts on veganism?

Faith & Science Conversation
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True, and that’s been true of humans from the start. For example, early cave art depicts large prey, and there are percussion marks on the cave walls from sticks being hit on the drawings. The theory is that it was a ceremonial ritual asking the spirit(s) for success in the hunt.

Incidentally, the gender divide in hunter-gatherer societies (men-hunters, women-gatherers) has been overblown. Women participated in large-scale hunts alongside the men as far back as H. heidelbergensis, who hunted horses by herding them into lakes and ravines with no escape. In a small group, it’s “all hands on deck.”

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I was thinking about 10 or 11 thousand years later than that.

; )

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Here’s the article. Fascinating stuff.

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aman.13914

Woman the hunter: The archaeological evidence

Abstract

The Paleo-fantasy of a deep history to a sexual division of labor, often described as “Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer,” continues to dominate the literature. We see it used as the default hypothesis in anatomical and physiological reconstructions of the past as well as studies of modern people evoking evolutionary explanations. However, the idea of a strict sexual labor division in the Paleolithic is an assumption with little supporting evidence, which reflects a failure to question how modern gender roles color our reconstructions of the past. Here we present examples to support women’s roles as hunters in the past as well as challenge oft-cited interpretations of the material culture. Such evidence includes stone tool function, diet, art, anatomy and paleopathology, and burials. By pulling together the current state of the archaeological evidence along with the modern human physiology presented in the accompanying paper (Ocobock and Lacy, this issue), we argue that not only are women well-suited to endurance activities like hunting, but there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting in the Paleolithic. Going forward, paleoanthropology should embrace the idea that all sexes contributed equally to life in the past, including via hunting activities.

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I would love to watch “Complementarians” chew on this.

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I’ve resisted saying something light hearted here about veganism being okay for vegemites but I’m both more and less fussy about what I eat.

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My thoughts is that it’s simple.

If you think it’s ok to cause another conscious sentient being to feel afraid, suffer and die so you can eat its corpse than that’s what you’re going to do. You’ll be ok with causing pain and suffering because you like the taste of a dead body.

If you’re not ok with causing a sentient being to suffer and die then you can eat just plants, algae and mushrooms and take a vitamin and get absolutely everything you need. Fish get their DHA and EPH from algae. Or either fish eats other fish that ate algae. For $20 I can get double the amount of DHA and EPH that I need. For $8 I can get b12 for a month.

So primates most closely related to us like Chimps and Bonobos eat round 96% of their diet as plants. Gorillas and Orangutans eat more than 99% of their diet as plants. These animals are also far more predatory than humans are.

After all, if you think being vegan equals pretending to be prey then by all means be a predator. To chase down an animal. Grab it and tear into with your “claws” and almighty “canines” ( which is just a name btw horses have them too and theirs are far bigger ) and chew through the fur, eat the raw bloody parasite infected flesh and enjoy it. Smell roadkill and drool over how nice it smells. If we are going to be like so many of the animals then get ready for Andrew Tates alpha male mentality to rule over you. You’re either strong enough to fight off the top dude or you can sit to the side and watch him kill your kids and get your women pregnant to have his offspring.

As for things like the Mediterranean diet that’s also debated. It was debated 20 years ago when I was in college taking nutrition classes for 2 years and it’s still debated now. The debate centers around what actually makes it healthy or not and comparing it to who?

This medical doctor and dietician dives into the diet.

There is also some terms that have been being slightly hijacked lately. Take vegan and plant based. Veganism is a philosophical and ethical stance against causing animals unnecessary suffering and death through exploiting them as goods or entertainment. Plant based is not the same as veganism because plant based is just about what the material is from. Someone can have a plant based diet but not be a vegan because they support rodeos, they wear leather from livestock and so on.

There is also a good book on fish and how intelligent they are and how they even have their own personalities, just like bees do.

“what a fish knows” by Jonathan Balcombe.

Also when we look at coprolites of prehistoric men most of the concepts people get is from Hollywood movies or a very small slice of their life. Like they ignore 300,000 of humans for a time span 20,000 or so years ago. Even then, they act as if most
Did not remain in tropical spaces. There is a reason why modern white people popped up just like 10k years ago. Blue eyes even evolved before pale skin. Anyways the coprolites are often around 120g of fiber meaning roughly 7lbs of plants and mushrooms a day. Some even showed dental studies indicating almost no or any animal flesh eaten

But really it just comes down to this.
If you would not like someone to do it to you, your kids or your pets than you should consider not doing it to others. Golden rule after all.

People often fall back to the Bible to defend things that we now know is bad. Take slavery. The Bible never says it’s wrong for me to go to war and bring back a woman to be my concubine and for another person to be my slave. But I should be a good master. The Bible never says it’s wrong for me to decide to make my daughter marry a man because he’s giving me a really nice set of goats and a cow.

A lot of people also like to bring up… but what about is you’re on an island or living in some hellish place of ice and not plants… who cares that’s not you right. You can get every single macronutrient, micronutrient, vitamin you need without causing an animal to suffer. It’s also cheaper. You eat meat because you want too, not have too. You eat meat because you feel your tastebuds are more important than beings being hurt for you.

Also Angela Davis, a civil rights icon, goes into how animal abuse and liberation runs parallel to what is happening to marginalized communities. Babies are separated from their mothers. Many slaughterhouse workers get severely injured, depressed and so on.
One of the main reasons why I am walking further and further away from Christianity is the abuse Jesus carried out against animals though.

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Depends on the species. Some African hominids, Paranthropus and others, were vegetarian and had teeth suitable for such a diet. On the other hand, Neanderthals were eating much meat, probably because there were not much plants with much energy during the ice ages. Also the northernmost human populations have been based mainly on carnivorous diet, for the same reason. Meat is available throughout the year, berries and other edible plants only during a short season.

The changes in human jaws and teeth during the last 10’000 years may reflect both a higher proportion of meat and the increased proportion of cultivated grains. Agriculture may have had a stronger role in these changes, although animal husbandry has been part of the diet change for longer than the cultivation of grains.

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I respect your opinion on this, but I think this may be taking it a bit extreme. There are humane ways to kill animals for harvest, and I agree that factory farming is very unethical. Generally speaking though, too much hostility won’t do anything to advance the discussion.

Thanks for the vegan perspective, though! It really does put some things into perspective.

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I think it is amusing the way people play with the word “abuse” in self-serving ways.

Some say treating animals any other way than a beloved pet is “abuse.”

Others say teaching religion to their children is “abuse.”

And I suspect this is only the tip of the iceberg regarding how the word “abuse” is abused. LOL

By way of contrast, I might suggest that keeping pets at all is a kind of abuse – infantilizing these animals to make them dependent on you for their survival. But then forcing them to struggle and mostly die in the wild – perhaps that is abuse too. Evolutionarily speaking, becoming part of human agriculture might considered one of the best guarantees of survival for species on earth. So perhaps human unawareness is the greatest abuse and death sentence of all as they fail to survive the changing environment without our help.

Hey when you walk, you are giant machine of marching death to those you step on. And then the armies of your immune system slaughter trillions every hour.

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I have considered a vegetarian diet. I share your same concerns with factory farming. I truly do. But I don’t appreciate you trying to connect me to child abusers or genocidal monsters. I was just trying to calm the discussion down, because you got me intrigued that there may be something to veganism.

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Having a vegan in the family increases the work at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners

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Let’s see. My grandfather was a butcher. His brother “farmed” chickens in Arkansas. My dad ran grain elevators and later became an agribusiness exec. Most of the grain harvest isn’t fit for human consumption (too many insect parts) and goes to feedlots. I worked at the elevator in my teens and early 20s and knew pig farmers who came to sweep up the spillage and rotten grain to feed their pigs. My older brother worked at a slaughterhouse in his teens and early 20s. My wife’s grandfather is a semi-famous rancher in New Mexico who ran for governor in the 70s. Her father retired from the Dept. of Agriculture.

In short, I’ve seen it all, and animals for the most part aren’t abused. They live a pretty cushy life where they’re well cared for and well fed, more like pets than wild animals. Their death is humane and painless. I have no compunctions about eating meat.

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I, too, live in an area where cattle is grown in large amounts, and you see happy babies running in fields. I think that (at least for the most part) cattle enjoy roaming wide plains for the most of their lives, and go to feed lots prior to butchering.

When I say “factory farms,” I don’t refer to the ranches that treat their cattle well. I’m referring to the REALLY bad factory farms, along the lines of chickens spending their entire lives in a small cage.

I’ve got no problem eating local meat (especially wild game) because I believe for the most part the livestock was raised with great care.

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Fact: the death of an animal due to a human hunter is far more humane that what they face “naturally”.
Whether the same is true of livestock depends on how the animals are raised.

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While traveling through California with a college friend we stopped at a combination cattle/dairy operation run by a rather distant cousin (4th or 5th). The place had like 1200 head on less than 40 acres – which in the area was considered “soft” on the animals. My friend was very polite during the tour, but afterwards as we drove away he said, “I need to go throw up. I’m ashamed of my name.”

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To say a little more I am glad Mi cares about the other creatures who inhabit our world. I do too. But I don’t feel that feeding on them is wrong. I also care very much about plants and appreciate feeding on them too. Both are healthy for us in balance. But I care about animals as my neighbors in the web of life. We all take our lives from there, feed from there and return to there when we’ve run our course. It would please me greatly to think my molecules would nourish my neighbors when I’m gone. No concrete box for my ashes.

At one time I really hoped someone would haul me somewhere to be consumed by animals who specialize in carrion but I’ve been convinced that our bodies are too toxic given our longevity, medications and marginally healthy diets. So now I’m content to have my moleules sterilized through incineration and then be scattered or else, if it is available and affordable, to be composted.

I think I respect us all who make up the web of life and it pleases me to fully participate in that cycle.

@SkovandOfMitaze I appreciate that you care about our fellow critters too even if I feel differently about the need to take our nourishment from them.

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I second this notion. We may have different ideas but at the very least we should always be conscious of the impacts of our decisions.

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Yeah, cattle spend less than a month at a feed lot. It’s just to fatten them up before they’re sold (by the pound). My great-uncle’s chicken ranch was weird. He had three big metal barns (mainly to keep the chickens safe from predators). The chickens roamed around them freely. The first was hatchlings and young birds. The middle was maturing birds. The last was the equivalent of a feed lot for cattle, but chickens are different. The lights on this barn were never turned off, and the equivalent of a conveyer belt supplied feed 24 hrs. a day. The chickens will stand there and eat all day and all night until they’re sold for slaughter. A few will literally eat themselves to death and have a stroke. Is that abuse, or do the chickens think they’re in paradise? I have no idea.

Dairy ranching is probably the worst offender.

Note: I should add that almost all farming and ranching is done on an industrial scale these days. The “family farm” or ranch is pretty much a myth from the past. Look up Cargill sometime. It’s a privately-owned agriculture monopoly. They control 25% of the US grain market and 22% of the meat market. They’re also responsible for the worst abuses in the industry.

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If you ever saw the movie “No Country for Old Men,” you saw the method of killing livestock in the slaughterhouse. Javier Bardem used a hydraulic bolt gun to blast open deadbolts on doors. The same is used to kill cattle and pigs instantly.

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