Discussion Board

What is your point in defending slaughter houses exactly? That it's okay to kill animals for our culinary pleasure as long as it's done 'humanely'? That's what it sounds like.

By the way, there's still another hour + to go on earthlings.

You are really preaching to the choir here.

You need to re-read what I wrote. I was relating my personal observations as to how I witnessed animal processing. Where did I defend slaughter houses. Where did I write or could you even construe that I said is ok to kill animals for "culinary pleasure". I said in my earlier post that "factory farming is abusive" and later said the whole process was "gruesome." You are way, way off base.

I have seen this video before and many far worse. Frankly, the videos of human suffering disgust me far more. If you feel the need to discuss this further with me, please feel free to PM me as I requested in the post above.

j

Sorry if I came to the wrong conclusion, but it looked to me that you were defending the meat industry, which is guaranteed to make me punchy.

What a powerful speech! And an amazing man! It is very heartening to hear of influential people who are speaking out like this - gives me hope for our world!

The kosher slaughter video filmed by PETA at AgriProcessors Inc. was a-okay according to some religious authorities.






Videos Cited in Calling Kosher Slaughterhouse Inhumane

So, why is it clear that actions presented in the video are not done in line with kosher ethic? Many experts seem to think that this kind of action is perfectly okay and kosher.

Will add my two cents. Re: slaughterhouses, I think people focus too much on the "death" part of food animals's lives. But it's worth remembering too that their entire lives are pretty much miserable too. For example, an egg-laying chicken lives its entire life in a space that is probably smaller than the screen you are reading on now. Their beaks are sheered off of course (no pain killers) and many simply die of the stressors in the henhouse. Of course, the males never make it that far - indeed, they are simply ground up alive, right after hatching. And that's simply egg-laying birds, but there's many more species of food animals out there, who are born into misery, know nothing but misery their entire lives (never being able to act on any of their natural drives and instincts, forced to live in deplorable conditions), before being killed in the slaughterhouse. This, to me, is what hurts my heart personally.

I also believe that animals have the capacity to suffer as sharply as humans can - even if they may not have the foresight of their death. We share much in common with them due to our evolutionary heritage. Emotions evolved for a reason - to guide animals towards and away from certain behaviours. So I think it would be amiss to assume they don't have such feelings.

Further, I think because humans *do* have the capacity to empathize, that we have even more of a moral imperative to act on the knowledge of the suffering of others, to the extent that we can. For example, my cat recently beheaded a mouse - torturing it before he killed it, I imagine. I'm not going to hold it against my cat, since he can't reflect on the suffering of the mouse, not really. But any person that did that to a mouse, or otherwise tortured animals - I would consider them a psychopath. Yet, it seems to be acceptable to do this to certain animals en masse, as long as it's hidden away.

I recently read Jonathan Saffron Foer's book "Eating Animals," which is a very good book describing the author's own journey to veganism. I recommend it!

Some interesting information about him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wollen

http://www.theage.com.au/national/radic ... -a25j.html

http://www.kindnesstrust.com/Karen%20Ha ... 0pdf-4.pdf

www.kindnesstrust.com

I agree, Didi. I thought it was one long litany of cliches, non sequiturs, and fallacies of assertion.

I agree with Whollen that man should not eat meat, but not because (non-human) animals have rights. They do not--and if you think that they do, I give you the challenge of figuring out how to make animals honor the rights of animals, by which I mean something as simple as preventing lions from killing gazelles for food, and of showing the reasons that lions should not ("should" is a term of morality) kill and eat animals. Then, try to apply this throughout the domain of animal life.

He makes much of suffering as the reason animals have rights. Rights do not derive from the ability to suffer.

His first lines are complete rubbish: He quotes "King Lear," and Gloucester's line "I see it [the world] feelingly." And he says we all should do so. No, we should not. Emotions are not thinking, and are not tools of cognition or truth finding. They are important, but they are not means of determining truth or means of evaluation.

He jumbles together many different rationales for not eating meat: Emotional, health, environmental. There are cogent points to be made about all of these. But he does not construct a good argument from any of them.

I believe that the reason that humans should not eat meat is moral. But a valid morality is not a set of groundless but intensely felt sentiments or intuitions. It is grounded in reality, observable biological facts about man and the damage that consuming animals does to our health, to our ability to live and sustain our lives. The reasons we should not eat animals have to do with us, not with the animals.

Of course, you do realize that he was limited on time and needed to get as many points as possible in the 10 minutes he was given. It wasn't an hour-long discussion for him only.

And his speech must have been effective, as the audience of close to 80% meat-eaters voted close to 80% in favor of keeping meat off the menu.



Emotions sell products, beliefs and can heavily sway opinions. Every marketing firm, government elective, church, spokesperson and entertainer knows this.

As we can clearly see in our society, facts don't always invoke change, but emotions certainly do.

Reading that 100,000,000,000 animals a year are killed for food has less impact than seeing a calf being separated from their mother. If emotions can drive someone to eating better or to abstain from harming animals, then so be it. With animal rights issues, it's often the emotions which cause people to look deeply into the facts, not statistics, numbers or reports.

At the end of the day Mr. Wollen has done so much for the worlds under privilaged. I give him kudos, regardless of his style.

Yes, I do realize this. But he was in a debate and either did not at all try to make a rational argument, or was incapable of it, and his own reasons for believing are the mishmash of non sequiturs he presented. I believe that it is the latter.


"Effective" is not the same as valid. He may have made an emotional impact, but he did not make a valid argument. And citing a vote of people is a logical fallacy, ad populum.


I did not deny this, but in fact stated that I agreed with it as a claim of fact. Moreover, I was in advertising for over two decades, and know what emotion can do. I also know what it cannot do, and that is discern truth or substitute for reason.


Yes, emotions do. That does not mean emotions cause good change. Emotions can cause good change or bad change--and since they are not tools of cognition, and cannot judge truth, it would be wrong to say that emotions are reliable producers of good any more than of bad.


Know any hunters? Do you know what their emotions are about? How about any devoted gourmands or "foodies"? Know what their emotions are about? Eyes wide open, people can easily eat meat while knowing how it got from living animal on the pasture to choice cut on a plate.

dstewart, I think you need to watch the debate in its entirety. I think anyone who has would agree that his part was by far the most valid and compelling arguments delivered by either side.

Let's put it this way, the counter-side argued that animals should be slaughtered for food simply because "I love meat, I love cooking meat, I love eating meat, and I love serving meat to other people. If it's got a pulse I can cook it".

Talk about a compelling argument, eh?

The latter is not a compelling argument at all. I think it's stupid, frankly. And it's all emotions: "I love meat..." There's no reason to that, and I didn't say there was.

Wollen may have had the best argument presented--and still he had a lousy argument that was all cliches, non sequiturs--and emotion-jerking. I think that most of his argument (which was the one posted here; I didn't need to see the others to observe the quality of his, even if the other arguments are of lower quality) is the same as your paraphrase of the meat-heads' argument: It is HIS emotions.

So--if you think that emotions are cognitive, how are you going to decide between the meat-eaters' and the vegetarians' emotions? Do you doubt that both feel very strongly that their position is the right one? And are you really sure that the "I love meat, I love cooking meat" line is any less persuasive, to people who are persuaded by their feelings, than "The animals suffer"? I don't think so, and if you enumerate meat eaters versus vegetarians in the places where this debate would have any audience, the meat eaters win. Even if 80% of the audience at this debate favored Wollen, I would bet that 80% or more of those people will get over their agreement with Wollen in a day or two.

Let's take a step back and go over the points which Mr. Wollen made. Of these points, most were statistical facts and could be easily confirmed with a few minutes of research. Perhaps you listened to a different version, but these points are quite compelling - even though they are brief.

- Animals must be off the menu because tonight they are screaming in terror in the slaughterhouse, in crates, and cages. This is observational, but valid for this argument.

-And in their capacity to suffer, a dog is a pig is a bear. . . . . . is a boy.
We are now learning about how animals suffer and they do suffer in a similar capacity to people.

-CO2, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide from the livestock industry are killing our oceans with acidic, hypoxic Dead Zones.
True

-90% of small fish are ground into pellets to feed livestock.
True

-Vegetarian cows are now the world’s largest ocean predator.
True

-The oceans are dying in our time. By 2048 all our fisheries will be dead.
True

-Billions of bouncy little chicks are ground up alive simply because they are male.
True

-Only 100 billion people have ever lived. 7 billion alive today. And we torture and kill 2 billion animals every week.
True

-10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one species.
I haven't confirmed the numbers, but I believe it is true.

-Animal Rights is now the greatest Social Justice issue since the abolition of slavery.
This is opinion, but the implications are valid.

-Meat is a killing industry – animals, us and our economies.
True

-Medicare has already bankrupted the US. They will need $8 trillion invested in Treasury bills just to pay the interest. It has precisely zero!!
I believe this is true

-They could shut every school, army, navy, air force, and Marines, the FBI and CIA – and they still won’t be able to pay for it.
Without looking at the numbers, I believe this to be true.

-Cornell and Harvard say’s that the optimum amount of meat for a healthy diet is precisely ZERO.
I haven't checked this.

-Water is the new oil. Nations will soon be going to war for it.
Opinion, but historical events in South America has shown this to be a very real future.

-It takes 50,000 litres of water to produce one kilo of beef.
True

-1 billion people today are hungry. 20 million people will die from malnutrition.
True

-Cutting meat by only 10% will feed 100 million people. Eliminating meat will end starvation forever.
Opinion, but a mathematical possibility if people shifted their priorities and actually fed the poor or at least made food accessible to them.

-If everyone ate a Western diet, we would need 2 Planet Earths to feed them. We only have one.
True

-Greenhouse gas from livestock is 50% more than transport . . . . . planes, trains, trucks, cars, and ships.
True

-Poor countries sell their grain to the West while their own children starve in their arms. And we feed it to livestock.
True, even if dramatic.

-If any nation had developed weapons that could wreak such havoc on the planet, we would launch a pre-emptive military strike and bomb it into the Bronze Age.
Opinion, but certainly possible given our history.

-Meat is like 1 and 2 cent coins. It costs more to make than it is worth.
True

-And farmers are the ones with the most to gain. Farming won’t end. It would boom. Only the product line would change.
True and validated by many farmers who have switched from livestock to crop production.

-Governments will love us. New industries would emerge and flourish. Health insurance premiums would plummet. Hospital waiting lists would disappear.
Opinion, but very likely to be true.

-The peace map is drawn on a menu. Peace is not just the absence of war. It is the presence of Justice. Justice must be blind to race, colour, religion or species.
Can't argue that.

So, in the end, I think Mr. Wollen has made several valid arguments (in ten minutes) which is hard to counter, since the points are based on fact. Of course, one can present facts emotionally, but that doesn't diminish the impact it gives.

Also, just because they voted THIS TIME to keep meat off the menu doesn't mean they didn't hit the McDonald's drive-thru on the way home. A decision based on emotions is frequently not a decision a person sticks with for an extended period. Knowledge and fact-based decision-making have a much better chance of resulting in permanent change to behavior.

Nettie

I just watched the video againd and found it as moving and as accurate as others have mentioned. There are so many reasons to keep ALL animal products off our plates, animal rights, health, enviromental degradation. Here's another "cost" of animal products to consider: how CAFOs (where most "meat" animals live their short lives) lower the quality of life in rural communities. For the obvious reasons of smell, air pollution, fly/bug issues, and health effects, etc, no one wants a CAFO near them. CAFOs are also not healthy places to work either - unless you are in an office removed from the site. Citizens groups have tried to raise their voices against the building of these mega "farms" - sometimes they win and sometimes not. Ag is a powerful industry, as powerful as Big Pharma. Choosing to eat animal products is voting with your fork for many awful things. There really is no good outcome for choosing those products, except more money for those at the top of the Ag foodchain. Just my .02. Again.