Your feelings about animals...

[graceslick]

Heya

I was watching an interview with Grace and a doctor/pharmacist guy the other day (CD sent me the links to the interview...as usual I can't work out how to put it here), and one part of it annoyed me.

Grace said something about how some people eat racoons or cats or whatever (or maybe the doctor guy brought that up, I'm not sure), and then the doctor said it was disgusting. Grace was in the middle of talking so didn't say anything in response to the doctor's remark, but I thought that it's so silly and hypocritical for this guy to think it's disgusting that some people eat cats or dogs or whatever.

My question is how is it any different to eating cows or sheep or pigs? Just because we personally recognise cats and dogs as animals to value and love as our pets or friends, this means to many people that they are more important and shouldn't be eaten. So they should be respected because of what they give or do for US, as "superior" humans. Yet because pigs and cows and sheep are "normally" eaten by us, the human, that's ok and it's not "disgusting" to eat them, unlike cats or dogs.

You know what I mean? It annoys me!! So many people have this attitude. ALL animals are the same!! They ALL feel things and are sentient beings, aren't they? Why should it matter if one has big ears and no fur and another has fluffy fur and big eyes?

A friend of mine used to have chickens as pets. They used them for enjoyment and eggs. One of them died and my friend was really sad for a few days, and yet this whole time, the whole family ate chicken. Not THEIR chickens, OH NO, that would be DISGUSTING. Isn't that totally hypocritical?? I said this to me friend. I asked her how she could justify eating chicken and yet having chickens as her pets? She didn't understand my question. She said she didn't eat HER chickens so what was my point?

So, AGAIN, it's us the human projecting our own feelings onto other beings, so the animals WE know are worthy of life and feeling pain, but the nameless chickens we don't know that lie in pre-packaged packets, are just our food.

Anyway...what do you all feel about animals? I get the feeling that, especially several years ago, Grace may have got VERY annoyed and impatient with the many people who don't seem to understand this sort of stuff.

[Susan Butcher]

I think pigs are definitely too self-aware and intelligent to eat, even if few people keep them as pets in Western countries. I'm a lapsed vegetarian, by the way, but it don't eat very much meat.

[DonRico1967]

ALL higher mammals have brains and feelings and thoughts and SOULS.

In NATURE, some animals kill and eat other animals.

But THAT reality is NOT the same as lazy, unthinking humans eating dead animal flesh because they have been "raised" to do such barbarity.

I myself used to consume dead animal-flesh until I was a teenager and read some books:

ANIMAL LIBERATION by Peter Singer

MAN KIND? by Cleveland Amory

And not only but also the biography of the Mahatma Gandhi.

THESE BOOKS did open my eyes.

I am from TEXAS... I was RAISED to adolescence eating "MEAT".

But when I grew old enough to THINK FOR MYSELF (age 15 years, coinciding with the first time I smoked cannabis and experimented with PSYCHEDELIC awareness)--

It was THEN that I realized TRULY, that all "animals" are truly creatures of GOD and they, like humans, deserve to LIVE...
They do NOT deserve to be exploited by a corporate industrial-agriculture "factory-farm" culture of DEATH.

In the wild, animals have no choice.

As highly-evolved HUMAN animals, WE ourselves DO have a choice.

One can choose to eat dead animal-flesh and cause untold-amounts of pain and suffering for innocent creatures...

OR one can choose to NOT eat the flesh of dead animals and therefore spare innocent living beings' their lives of torture and suffering and eventual merciless murder.

So yeah... Just SOMETHING to THINK about if you are evolved enough...

And WHAT is the by-product benefit of NOT EATING MEAT???

HEY!!!
You just might live a longer, healthier, happier, more SPIRITUALLY-EVOLVED EXISTENCE!!!

...Seems like a no-brainer to me!!!

But whaddahell do I know anyways-- I am just a CRAZY VEGETARIAN...

[purt]

To share this earth with them and let the animals go about their business, be it cat, dog, cow, goat...pig...deer, you get the idea.
Unfortunately with most human-animals and how we relate to other animals we share this earth with many cultures are flat out meat eating folks. Really, a number of domesticated 'food' animals have been bred that way for centuries, that is just for our consumption. Sheesh ponder that one awhile. I'm not certain what it is that drives humans in trying to control or 'solve' everything. We would screw up the planet and then think we will solve that 'problem' too. (Wait a minute! We have already been doing that!) If it comes down to food, an animal makes its selection based on what it is instinctively prepared to eat, be it another animal, a plant or even a plump human animal if it wanted. In a pure subsistence mode, humans would do the same but most of us are so far removed from subsistence eating the bulk of our population would die off if faced with that one! If people had to track, hunt and kill an animal each time they wanted to consume it for food, instead of buying it as a packaged product...there would be a better balance.

[IneedaBonghit]

I never had that Pink Floyd album but I understand its about Flying Pigs.
"House of the Rising Sun" great song by them.
Sometimes I eat animals. I get their meat from a paper bag at the drive-through window.
I find it disgusting to have to clean up the carnage of entrails our cat severs from its latest hunt.
Our dog is allergic to the food it sneaks from our tables.
I am a animal of the evolved brain sort.

Jack

[IneedaBonghit]

Have you seen what animals do to other animals?

I saw a nature video of wild horses. A mare gave birth to a foal. Unfortunately the foal had trouble walking. A Stallion came along and picked up the foal by the neck with it's mouth and did the equivalent of shakin baby till it was dead. The pack of horses just left it in the field for the rest of the animals to feed on. It was cruel to be kind.

Was the Stallion arrested and taken away to prison. No. It went off and probably tried for a new one.

Is beef what's for dinner or are cows sacred?
This is a question which man will ponder for many generations.

Mother nature is a cruel world.

My kids won't eat at McDonalds after seeing "Supersize Me". People will stop doing wrong things to animals when one of those species evolves a way to fight back. It may take some time but it could happen someday.

Jack

[IneedaBonghit]

Some humans kill for fun, but most kill to survive like the rest of the species on this planet.

The humans that kill for fun are either young kids, or misguided adults.

[IneedaBonghit]

Try not to look at just what we do to animals, look at what we do to all the other species...

Have you ever eaten bread?
The bread is made with a living species called yeast. The yeast is allowed to multiply and then the bread is placed in the oven and all the yeast are killed.

Is there any wood in your house?
The living trees that the wood came from was chopped down and killed.

That burger from the bag?
Some people raised the cattle, slaughtered it, packed it up, shipped it, prepped and cooked it so I could eat it out of a bag. The steer got killed.

Yep humans kill other species for survival. Animals, Plants, Bacteria etc...

Please don't single out the cute and cuddly animals and discriminate from the rest of the species in this mental institution we call Earth.

We did not create this psychiatric ward were living in, we are all just doing the best we can given the situation we were born with.

Rats, cockroaches, ragweed, bats, and staphlococcus bacteria, you gotta love em all.

Jack

[Susan Butcher]

I think cats enjoy stalking and killing rodents. I have a friend with a perfectly well-fed cat that still likes to bite the heads off baby hares. I managed to save one of the hares, but I actually felt slightly guilty because the cat seemed to be offering us its catch, and in any case rabbits and hares are exotic pests in Australia. As are cats.

[Elephant Sky]

Well.. I used to be a vegetarian, but now I'm not , well I guess I am, I'm a vegan

One difference between us and a lion is that, humans can make the decision to be vegetarian, while a lion can't do that as easily. A lion can't gather vegetables or go up to a tree regularly and pick some fruit or anything.

And I don't think that us vegetarians feel like we're a supreme race of humans who don't contribute to the pain of any being that exists, I might accidently step on hundreds of ants, or a few animals might have died from the vegan food I eat, but it is not a direct result of factory farming nor does it fuel that industry and vegetarianism drastically reduces the amount of suffering of animals that we're responsible for. Of course bread has yeast in it, but yeast is not on the same level as an animal, yeast does not have a heart or a brain or most of the things that animals have. Yeast is bacteria and humans kill bacteria by brushing their teeth and I'm not going to quit tooth-brushing lol.

Peace out!!!

[thinklikeastone]

Your text is full of tenderness as the song "comin'back to me".

Well, I suggest to consider the hypothesis exposed in "3001, the final Odyssey", by the writer Arthur C. Clark:

The black monoliths (You can see one of them on the Moon in "2001, a Space Odyssey") will come back in our solar system to check up the evolution of the life, and they will be very angry to see that the animals eat one another.

First, they will destroy Jupiter on which living clouds eat one another, and Jupiter will be transformed in a second sun.

Then, I'm afraid that the monoliths will consider our very bad case...

Maybe only the life under Europe, Jupiter's satellite, will be safe (Maybe they don't eat one another under the ice).

I like your mind.

[PsychedelicRabbit]

Mentally, I'm a vegetarian. I plan on going vegetarian one day, as soon as I move out from my parents house. I hate the taste of meat, and ever since I've been hearing Grace and my friends talk so passionately about animal rights, I really want to stop.

I've always hated the taste of meat. I put anything on it to make it taste better: cheese with ranch, ranch, ketchup, barbeque sauce, salsa, ANYTHING. Because I simply can't stand the taste of plain meat.

Mentally, I'm already a vegetarian. But I'm kind of stuck living with carnivores.

Though, if when I go vegetarian, and one day I want a big, fat cheeseburger, I'll eat it. If I want ribs, I'll eat it.
And I can do the no dairy stuff; I don't like cheese all that much, except in mozzerella sticks. I can do no yogurt. But milk is harder. I looooooooove milk. So I'll just have to be a milkatarian. Go me for making my own -atarian.

[graceslick]

Oh no, see, I love dairy things. Cheese, milk, cream, CHOCOLATE. Lol.

I also love eggs, BUT I don’t see eating them as a problem as long as the chickens in question are left completely to their own devices. Like, if a chicken laid an egg and if someone didn’t take it for people, it would just rot on the ground, well…you know, in that specific case, why not eat it? lol (I’m sure it’s not quite as simple as this though maybe)

Good for you, Rabbit. My best friend is a vegetarian (as is my girlfriend and some of my other friends) but she first tried to do it when we were 16 and still at school and she had no say over what meals she got, and she just left the meat, but then ended up fainting and having dangerously low blood pressure cause she wasn’t able to replace the iron and stuff with anything else. So she had to wait but she’s happy now, not eating meat.

I am sort of the opposite of you in terms of you saying you’d eat a cheeseburger if you wanted to, even as a vegetarian. I’m sort of not like that. It’s one of the things I would completely avoid, because for me, it’s like throwing away the cow’s life for a crap, fast food burger. If I’m gonna eat meat, I at least want it to be a gourmet steak meal at a lovely restaurant that I can savour and enjoy, you know?

Meh.

[V I C E]

what's the differece between killing and eating a cow or a dog ? in my opinio , there's no difference , just different coultures .if the doc says that is disgustig eating a cat , he should also be disgusted by eating a chicken . not just because kittens and dogs are more friendly , they must not be eaten .

[graceslick]

Hey VICE, that was entirely my point in starting this thread.

I was annoyed that the doctor on that show, and SO many others (pretty much most people I think) believe that to kill and/or eat a dog or cat or any other “cute” and pet-like animal is abhorrent, and yet to kill and eat a cow, pig, chicken, etc is fine. That was my whole point. It really pisses me off cause they don’t understand that ALL animals are living, sentient beings, and the only difference between a cow and a dog is in OUR minds as to what we’re used to in terms of friends/pets/named animals and faceless/nameless/food.