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The Ethics of Eating Non-Human Animals


Angry Goose

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Pigs roam around eating garbage and live quite a filthy life, and yet killing and roasting them converts all of that terrible stuff into delicious food? I think most meat eaters couldn't stomach killing their own animals for food. All they really see is a neatly packaged box in the grocery store without thinking about what it is that they're consuming. You guys are like vultures.

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Haha I never thought I'd find myself on this side of the argument but this guys seems like he needs some support and there's been some pretty sloppy reasoning going on here. I won't get into the animal rights bit as that's quite contentious depending on your point of view. However from an economic and social perspective, it makes a lot of sense to limit your animal protein intake or even go cold turkey. I'm not going to get into a huge debate as I try to avoid such things over the internet but I think it can't hurt for people to have a look at some facts about their diets.

Since people like to quote the biology angle, as you go up trophic levels (food chain) only 10% of the energy is transfered between levels, the rest is lost as inefficiencies. For example, if you have 100 units of energy in grains, and you feed those 100 units to a chicken, you are only able to consume 10 units of energy from that chicken. As we try to feed 7 billion and growing people this poses a slight problem.

Keeping things short I'll throw out some numbers that cause me quite a bit of discomfort as an avid meat eater.

-If everyone were to have a heavy meat diet, the world could sustain only 2.5 billion people, if everyone were vegetarian that number grows to 9-10 billion people.

- Half of the worlds agricultural area is dedicated to growing food for our food, as mentioned quite inefficient.

- The amount of land used to produce 1 unit of a meat eaters diet could sustain 20 units of a vegetarians.

- In the US, 70% of grain grown is for the purposes of animal fodder and livestock requires half the water withdrawn in the country.

- You need 1000 liters of water for 10 grams of beef protein and only 67 liters for 10 grams of protein from potatoes, (476L for pork and 135L for wheat)

- Along the same lines you need 4900 liters of water for 500 calories of beef and a measly 89 liters for 500 calories of potatoes, a magnitude shift of 55x.

It maybe delicious but going forward it certainly is not a smart means of consumption.

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