Frazzled's Nightmare Becomes Real - Vegan ELementary School!

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**timetowaste85**

Yeah, Dogma, you understood that backwards. Its pretty clear he said pigs n boar are more alike than dogs n wolves.

**Orlanth**

timetowaste85 wrote:
Yeah, Dogma, you understood that backwards. Its pretty clear he said pigs n boar are more alike than dogs n wolves.

How. Size doesn't matter only genetics do, are we counting chromozomes here? If so how.

Lets stick to which is tastier and which makes a better companion, it's simpler.

**Wyzilla**

Smacks wrote:
NuggzTheNinja wrote:

They have a lot of nerve saying veganism is the "right thing for the living biosphere." Here are a couple living biosphere inhabitants...go tell them they're doing it wrong.
Are you implying that because animals murder, steal and gak in the woods, that we should too? While nature might be ingenious, animals are not. They do what they are programmed to do in order to survive, and will usually continue that behavior even if they are introduced to a new ecosystem where the behavior is destructive. Humans, on the other hand, have a choice.

I think morality is all about choice. In times of desperation, e.g. war/famine, people will stoop to all manner of depravity to survive: killing, stealing, cannibalism. If the only alternative is death, then it could be argued that they have no choice (at least not a choice they can live with). We do not live in a time of desperation. We do not need to kill, or steal, or resort to cannibalism. So we have the freedom to act in a way that is moral rather than just necessary.

I might not be a vegetarian, but I don't want to see animals suffer and treated cruelly to be my food. Given a choice I would rather have food that is treated ethically. I think in the future more and more people will start to see killing for food as something that is unnecessary entirely, and they will make a moral choice not to support it.

Why would you care about the suffering your food may or may not endure? Unless its a companion animal, the only purpose we give farm animals to exist is to be bred, slaughtered, and eaten. Their health does not even factor in unless it would have an adverse effect on the quality of the meat and potentially harm the humans eating it. Oh, and FYI, there is no such thing as morality, or at least not in the way people normally define it. There is nothing objectively "bad", merely that which is subjectively viewed by the observing party as a negative action, however what they think is ultimately irrelevant and without worth.

Also, for people who don't understand what a Boar is and just how dangerous they are-

Spoiler:

This is a medieval Boar Sword, used by ballsy hunters who preferred the sword to the spear to take down wild boar in the hunt. See that crossbar mounted in the blade? That was installed because Boar would impale themselves on the blade of the sword after you stabbed them, sinking their body down the entire two feet or more of the sword just to gore you to death before it died of blood-loss. This was such a large threat that in the later periods, this kind of guard was common place.

**Gogsnik**

Wyzilla wrote:
Why would you care about the suffering your food may or may not endure?

Indeed, why would you care...

NSFW

Spoiler:

**Grey Templar**

You realize that undercover videos are almost always staged and fabricated. People deliberately infiltrate places where they can film themselves doing horrible things to get the company in trouble.

**Ensis Ferrae**

Also... if they are "true" videos, that just saves me money on the tenderizer

I kid I kid... Im not some PETA type, but I also think that anything other than a quick clean death in the process of becoming food is bad. Not really for an animal's sake, but it's bad for business. I've read too much that suggests/says that if an animal, including humans die in a painful/stressful way that there are chemicals naturally released by the body that make the meat less desirable. It becomes tougher/gamey, etc. Not to mention, it just doesn't make sense economically to "torture" an animal. The plant, Im sure, has quotas to meet, and wasting time beating something to death is counter productive to that end.

**Grey Templar**

Indeed. Those activities are NOT good for business, and thats even without bad PR. Abused animals don't make good product.

**hotsauceman1**

I mean, how many off use do not know just how bad the meat industry is and how the meat gets to our table?
I know several vegetarians who are accutely aware of that, and cannot morally handle meat knowing that an animal suffered fors it entire life for a chicken nugget.

**Grey Templar**

Most of those people are far too ill informed to make a call if an animal is suffering. They have no idea how things actually work.

**hotsauceman1**

So you are saying that all those books and all those authors are wrong about just how bad those animal farms are, and just how screwed up the meat industry is?

**Grey Templar**

Yes. They take isolated instances, bald faced lies, and a general vendetta against using animals as food and mash it all up into a spewing mass of filth packaged as the truth.

It is extremely illogical for a business to treat their animals badly because animals which suffer don't produce profits. Animals which suffer lose weight, become sick, and generally don't thrive. Meat from said animals would taste absolutely awful, nobody would eat it.

**dogma**

Grey Templar wrote:

IE: Pigs are closer to boars than dogs are to wolves.

Fair enough, I may or may not have been hungover when I typed that. That admission made, I think that you're splitting hairs as domestic pigs can interbreed with wild boars just as domestic dogs can interbreed with wolves.

**hotsauceman1**

Except they do treat animals badly, they pump them full of hormones and chemicals to make them fatter, tons of anti-biotics are used.
I recommend you read Omnivores Dilemma by Micheal Pollan. great book. He is an author who talks about just this.
Except he eats meat. Weird I know, but you can be against the meat industry and still eat meat. They arent all stupid vegetarians.

**KalashnikovMarine**

Anything PETA says is suspect considering they regularly slaughter animals at a scale to make the worst carnivore blush, and steal animals to boot.

**Orlanth**

hotsauceman1 wrote:
Except they do treat animals badly, they pump them full of hormones and chemicals to make them fatter, tons of anti-biotics are used.
I recommend you read Omnivores Dilemma by Micheal Pollan. great book. He is an author who talks about just this.
Except he eats meat. Weird I know, but you can be against the meat industry and still eat meat. They arent all stupid vegetarians.

A meat eater has a vested interest in reform of the meat industry, a hardcore vegan has not, they just want it shut down.

**Grey Templar**

hotsauceman1 wrote:
Except they do treat animals badly, they pump them full of hormones and chemicals to make them fatter, tons of anti-biotics are used.
I recommend you read Omnivores Dilemma by Micheal Pollan. great book. He is an author who talks about just this.
Except he eats meat. Weird I know, but you can be against the meat industry and still eat meat. They arent all stupid vegetarians.

Hormones haven't been used in a large scale for decades. They've been totally illegal in poultry since the 60s. rBST is unpopular and so most dairies don't use it anymore, even though it doesn't have any side effects on the animal or humans. You could drink a cup of rBST and have nothing happen. Its a protein, thus it gets totally broken down by your digestive tract(you can't absorb whole proteins) and even if you were injected with it it wouldn't do anything. The B in BST stands for Bovine, Human Somatrophin is radically different chemically. Your body would just treat it as another protein coming down the digestive tract.

Antibiotics are important for animal health. You call all those people who are against vaccines crazy right? How is it ok for humans to take, but animals are off limits? There are cases where animals are given too much, but again its the exception and not the rule. Medications are expensive, businesses have zero motivation to overmedicate if they don't have to.

The Omnivores Dillema is one of the more sane books from the other side, but its still full of misinformation.

**Orlanth**

Grey Templar wrote:

Antibiotics are important for animal health. You call all those people who are against vaccines crazy right? How is it ok for humans to take, but animals are off limits? There are cases where animals are given too much, but again its the exception and not the rule. Medications are expensive, businesses have zero motivation to overmedicate if they don't have to.

Sorry thats a strawman argument, which is odd as factory farm animal normally avoid straw to save costs.

There is a world of difference between taking antibiotics when ill and taking large amounts of antibiotics as standard in order to help counter appalling sanitary conditions.

Anitbiotic veterinary care is not a problem, slaughtering livestock which have been fed antibiotics is also ok, its however not ok on large scale. Factory farming is one of the major causes of anti-biotic resistent bacteria because its systemically throwing antibiotics into an arena where disease naturally thrives.

Animals give a choice will avoid sick members of their own kind this can even be achieved in pen conditions to some extent. However packed gulag farming doesn't allow this, also farming of this intensity is intended to minimise costs and due to lower staffing animal welfare priorities are lower and dead or sick animals are not isolated as quickly as in other farming conditions.

**Grey Templar**

You are basing your stance on misinformation, as usual for that position.

Cleanliness is one thing factory farms do quite well. Cement floors and cages keep animals out of their feces. Which reduces disease transfer.

Laying chickens are actually less likely to injure themselves if kept in tighter cages. Leghorns are extremely flighty birds, they're easily startled. If they are given more space, they both waste energy running around their cage instead of laying eggs AND they're prone to injuring themselves because they can get running starts. And an injured bird will quickly get eaten by its penmates as chickens are extremely cannibalistic, once they taste blood they won't stop.

**Smacks**

Wyzilla wrote:
Why would you care about the suffering your food may or may not endure?

Because I'm not a sadist. Why on Earth would you want an animal to suffer unnecessarily? Just because an animal is destined to be eaten, doesn't mean it has to live a life of abuse.

Wyzilla wrote:
Oh, and FYI, there is no such thing as morality, or at least not in the way people normally define it. There is nothing objectively "bad", merely that which is subjectively viewed by the observing party as a negative action, however what they think is ultimately irrelevant and without worth.

FYI, no one needs "good and bad being a human creation" explained to them by Captain Obvious. Morality might be a somewhat subjective human notion, but since humans and their cultures do exist, I can categorically say that there is such a thing as morality. To say that it is irrelevant and without worth is asinine. I'm sure there are plenty of people in prison who thought that other people's ideas about right and wrong were irrelevant. Now they have a lot of spare time to contemplate just how relevant other people's ideas turned out to be. Morality has as much worth as any other human endeavor, it is part of the glue that holds societies and cultures together. It might all exist in people's heads, but there is still no escaping it.

**Grey Templar**

Smacks wrote:
Wyzilla wrote:
Why would you care about the suffering your food may or may not endure?
Because I'm not a sadist. Why on Earth would you want an animal to suffer unnecessarily? Just because an animal is destined to be eaten, doesn't mean it has to live a life of abuse.

While true, the people crying abuse over the meat industry have zero idea what abuse actually is. It requires context, which is something they don't have.

**Smacks**

Grey Templar wrote:
While true, the people crying abuse over the meat industry have zero idea what abuse actually is. It requires context, which is something they don't have.

Regardless of the context, less abuse is nearly always going to be preferable to more abuse.

**Deadshot**

I'm just wondering what happens when it comes to teaching a healthy balanced diet which IIRC is compulsary to teach, or at least should be. Because there's a reason some people almost die from switching to a balanced diet. We're omnivorous creatures designed to eat meat. Milk, maybe not, but eggs and meat, certainly, are vital parts of human diet.

**dogma**

Grey Templar wrote:

Cleanliness is one thing factory farms do quite well. Cement floors and cages keep animals out of their feces. Which reduces disease transfer.

How does a cement floor keep an animal out of its feces?

Grey Templar wrote:

If they are given more space, they both waste energy running around their cage instead of laying eggs AND they're prone to injuring themselves because they can get running starts.

That sounds like a factory farm mentality.

**Grey Templar**

dogma wrote:
Grey Templar wrote:

Cleanliness is one thing factory farms do quite well. Cement floors and cages keep animals out of their feces. Which reduces disease transfer.

How does a cement floor keep an animal out of its feces?

Because the floors are regularly hosed down and sloped. Thus ensuring feces are removed.

Grey Templar wrote:

If they are given more space, they both waste energy running around their cage instead of laying eggs AND they're prone to injuring themselves because they can get running starts.

That sounds like a factory farm mentality.

Its true. My own school did a study which proved conclusively that larger cages were detrimental to the health and production of the birds.

**Ensis Ferrae**

Deadshot wrote:
I'm just wondering what happens when it comes to teaching a healthy balanced diet which IIRC is compulsary to teach, or at least should be. Because there's a reason some people almost die from switching to a balanced diet. We're omnivorous creatures designed to eat meat. Milk, maybe not, but eggs and meat, certainly, are vital parts of human diet.

Well... it's one of those oddities where the human digestive system is kind of adaptable. Remember that article a few years back that teenaged girl from Scotland (IIRC) who ate nothing but Ramen squares? As in, the claim was made that she could "only eat" ramen as everything else she ate, from carrots to chicken made her sick. I have no doubts that this person was not a healthy individual and that the reason she became "sick" from eating real foods was her body's attempting to repair the damage done by her piss poor diet.

But, I think that, as per your first question: how to teach healthy balanced diets; I don't think that private schools are required to teach that. As such, I don't think that there would be anything to teach an actual diet other than the proposed Vegan only stuff. If there were more compulsory teachings, then Creationism wouldn't be allowed to be taught, even in a religious school.

**dogma**

Grey Templar wrote:

Because the floors are regularly hosed down and sloped. Thus ensuring feces are removed.

Fair, but that's the argument you should have led with.

Grey Templar wrote:

Its true. My own school did a study which proved conclusively that larger cages were detrimental to the health and production of the birds.

How was "health" defined?

I mean I'm sure production was negatively impacted by larger cages, but health is a very different thing.

**Grey Templar**

Death, rate of cannibalism, and injury.

Fair, but that's the argument you should have led with.

I would hope that its pretty dang obvious. Cement is put in so you can clean.

**dogma**

Grey Templar wrote:
Death, rate of cannibalism, and injury.

Death, or rate of death?

Grey Templar wrote:

I would hope that its pretty dang obvious. Cement is put in so you can clean.

I suspect that most of us haven't worked on farms, so it isn't obvious that cement floors slope into a drain.

**Grey Templar**

Rate of course.

Death was about 5% higher in the lower density cages, this includes death caused by cannibalism(which starts due to injury or disease opening a wound which chickens have a compulsion to pick at). While it is a small increase, it does show that having more space doesn't improve the bird's welfare like proponents of larger cages claimed.

**dogma**

What does "Lower Density Cages" mean?