Meat Free Mondays
Posted by jennifer, June 21st, 2009 - under Humour.
Tags: Food & Farming, Humour
a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment
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It’s interesting to see how strident vegetarians are in seeking to impose their standards on we natural evolved omnivores.
The likes of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UNs IPCC, a vegetarian,(now there’s a person who meets janama’s desciption of a vegetarian) urges a radical shift in diet “as a personal and effective sacrifice that would help tackle climate change” (The Guardian 7/9/2008).
He went on to say that diet change was important because the huge greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental problems, including habitat destruction, associated with rearing cattle and other animals.
What he fails to acknowledge is the vast numbers of cattle in his native country of India. Of the world population of approx. of 996,000,000, India has 281,700,000 or 28.3%, Brazil has 187,100,000 or 18.8%, China has 140,000,000 or 14%, USA has 97,000,000 or 9.75%, EU has 87,650,000 or 8.8%, Argentina has 51,100,000 or 5.15 %, Australia has 29,200,000 or 2.95%, South Africa has 14,200,000 or 1.42%, Canada 13,950,000 or 1.4% and other countries, 49,750,000 or 5.0% plus 20,000,000 for the rest of Africa or 2%.
So how many of these cattle in India are just wandering around and belching methane for a zero contribution to food supplies?
Yes, do as I say but don’t look in my back yard ought be Dr Pachauri’s motto.
By the way brahmin cattle meat is crappy stringy stuff suitable only for mince meat. Hello burgers! No juicy steaks there, no sirree.
dhmo mentioned PETA. Among other things, PETA is a companion-animal killing machine. Here’s the MO. PETA people promise to find a loving home for the dog that you can’t take care of anymore. Then they take your money and promptly kill your former pet. Here’s a link to the story.
http://tinyurl.com/9p8a7j
The issue of PETA is something which the AGW and greens generally do not want to confront; its hard to really get a clear idea what PETA stand for at all;
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/dog_of_an_animal_rights_group/
Nonetheless PETA is at the cutting edge of noveau naturalism which appears to be some sort of egalitarian equivalence between humans and animals;
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/peta_killing_a_man_no_worse_than_killing_chickens/#commentsmore
At the heart of the green ideology is this equivalence whereby animals are invested with human attributes and therefore rights; this goes well beyond the idea that the dominant species should not be cruel to animals because as the actions of PETA clearly demonstrate they really don’t care about animals; that being the case all that is left is self-loathing and misanthropism.
There’s a problem with misdirected empathy as well with the nice animal loving people , that are very distanced from the real nature.
Currently my home is full of ” orphaned” animals as this is the breeding season. I do take care of orphaned animals and raise them , but lately there has been an epidemi of people bringing bird chicks to me that have parents. They do not know that many/ most animal babies are left lonely most time of the day AND ARE NOT ABANDONED.
People just don’t know anymore how the nature and species are functioning! All this has now gone so far that I get about 6 calls every day to take care of seabird chicks that are not abandoned at all.
I have called the district chief veterinarian and urged the NGOs and authorities to urge people to notice that the ” abandoned” animals do have parents in 99% of the cases. It is all about animal abuse. This is the result that people have estranged themselves from the natural environment. An animal that is raised by humans cannever function as well as it had had natural parents!
Perhaps we have it all wrong and need to follow the green prophets like these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle-killing_movement#Xhosa_cattle-killing_movement_and_famine followed their’s.
janama wrote:
“Apparently there is only one fully vegetarian society and it exists in southern india.”
I’m assuming that fully vegetarian means vegan. There are a number of health issues associated with that lifestyle. Interestingly, protein isn’t the biggest one. Using protein complementarity, as described in Diet for a Small Planet, you can get a survivable amount of high-quality protein from a plant-based diet, if you know what the hell you’re doing.
The biggest problem is Vitamin B12. The vast majority of humans simply cannot get enough of it from plant-based foods. If you try–and don’t cheat when your vegan buddies aren’t looking–you’re probably looking at pernicious anemia several years down the road. Not a fun way to go. At least one vegan society recommends that vegans either take a B12 supplement or eat B12-fortified foods. Example: certain vitamin-enriched breakfast cereals.
Prior to B12-related research in the 20th Century, long-term Veganism, which didn’t even have a name in the 19th Century, was essentially an evolutionary dead-end for humans.
I feel comfortable with 4 oz (113g) of beef per day. A 12-oz steak isn’t really necessary. I don’t regard meat-eating as morally neutral, but I’m more important than the cow. (At the moment, dairy products–aside from butter–don’t agree with me.)
” Nonetheless PETA is at the cutting edge of noveau naturalism which appears to be some sort of egalitarian equivalence between humans and animals;” – Cohenite
Noveau naturalism says Cohenite. As mentioned in my above post I see it contrary. Animal loving people or the so called ” greens” are VERY DISTANCED from the natural world. Actually most contact seems to be Animal Planet, the TV show, and not the real nature.
I see it from the ” greens” that want wind turbines in areas with high biodiversity and cutting down animal habitats for bio fuel.
I see as well that animal loving people don’t know how to handle an animal
Yesterday I had a very disturbing day. I visited a tropical butterfy house. You would guess that animal loving people would visit such a house. What I did see was very sad, people harrassing animals , even if there were signs ” Don’t touch the animals”.
My posts are not a generalisation. There are good NGOs and ” greens” , there are average ones and there are bad ones, as Drongo rightly pointed out;))
Birdie,
and if peta can stop this travesty they will be doing something worthwhile.
This is where most of our industry will be going.
http://www.peta.org/feat/ChineseFurFarms/index.asp
I suppose the opposite to all this is the genetically engineered sirloin steak.
Waiter:
“No animals suffered to produce this Chateaubriand, the Sauvignon Blanc is a “substitute” so no plants had their right to fullfill their life and breed interfered with….enjoy”
oops – it should have been a red substitute wine with a red substitute meat
I’m so uncool.
I’m actually serious as this is where we are headed IMHO.
janama
Not really – the ruling classes need lots of achohol to amuse the proletariat – or drugs. Looney Vegans might want to eliminate it, but alas, history shows otherwise.
They really are misnathropes.
I had the opportunity to observe one particular follower of causes cool and forthright who essentially ate himself into a wheel chair. Fred C. had all the badges and slogans but decided that he could get all of his nutritional needs from a diet entirely of very ripe bananas. His methane budget was something extraordinary but his disability pension went a lot further. He was ideologically opposed to just about everything, including the medical profession. But what he did not appreciate was the fact that bananas are very rich in either potasium or phosphorous (I don’t recall which) and the only way his body could deal with his mineral oversupply was to combine it with calcium and pass it in his urine. The problem was that he did not combine his banana fetish with a suitable source of calcium, like milk etc, so the only available source of calcium was from his own bones. Some six months later I saw him in the street in a wheel chair, very frail, and unable to propel himself. He had quite literally pissed his own bones away, and is now presumed dead.
You are spot on about the Byron vegans, Janama. Although it is hard to distinguish between the impact of diet and substance abuse. Amazing really, folks with a fetish about farm chemicals who will then take any number of substances manufactured without any controls by anonymous persons with zero chain of custody and zero product liability cover.
Ian: “Although it is hard to distinguish between the impact of diet and substance abuse.”
Often it’s not a case of distinguishing people who over indulge substance abuse don’t usually care about nutrition; it goes hand in hand.
And the skeleton is meat-free.
There is something Pythonsquely absurd about this whole beat-up. Cattle (herbivors) can only intake carbon from the fodder they eat (whether feedlot or pasture). That carbon came from the atmosphere via photosynthesis. Herbivors – like vegans – must be carbon neutral. If the cattle (sheep, vegan) hadn’t eaten the grass/fodder/vegetables it would have decomposed into – guess what? – CO2 and methane.
If the herbivor is eaten by a carnivor, (not that I suggest vegans should be eaten) it just takes a little longer for the C to be recycled as CO2
You are quite right, Roger. I have been trying to get to the full carbon budget for ruminants but stll have large gaps that none of the researchers appear eager to fill.
One thing for certain is the fact that the carbon in grass is part of a cycle of annual growth and decay. And therefore any intervention in that cycle that does not alter the basic balance of growth and decay cannot be regarded as an emission. So when we determine an emission level for livestock we/they SHOULD be deducting the amount of natural CO2 and CH$ that has been diverted through the ruminants stomach. But they don’t, and I/we am having difficulty finding the data that would enable this to be done.
If anyone would like to nail down the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of this matter then all assistance would be most welcome.
One very interesting point to note about Australian livestock methane emissions is the fact that emissions from this sector have not changed since about 1910. Total grazing activity has actually declined since then. Sheep numbers have declined by almost the equivalent of the cattle herds increase and the age and body weight of slaughtered animals has declined. The quality of feed has also improved with pasture improvements so there is no doubt at all that Australian livestock have made zero contribution to the doubling of global atmospheric methane over the past century.
Yes, the original build up of the Australian livestock herd had an impact on global atmospheric methane. But given that our herds account for only 2.9% of global domestic animals, one can only conclude that we did so at a time when the global environment was more than able to deal with it.
So when urban Australia can claim to have reduced their emissions to 1910 levels then, and only then, would they have any moral right to demand reductions in livestock emissions.
Ian,
Now that you mention ruminant emissions, it’d be fun to do the same sort of analysis for North America. (Not that I believe in the Flying CO2 Monster.) 200 years ago, we had tens of millions of bison farting up a storm in the Great Plains area. Since then, they’ve been mostly replaced by cattle. Has this affected the total ruminant methane emissions for N America significantly? If not, then cattle grazing on my continent has been essentially carbon-neutral. Do we win a prize?
Yes, Larry, there was a lot of Bison and Deer, maintained in a landscape managed for that purpose by the first nations. In fact, all over the world we see domestic animals replacing wild species who obviously burped methane too. So what is/was the natural level of ruminant methane emissions?
More importantly, what was the size of the North American ruminant herd in 1910, ie before atmospheric methane took off.
The simple facts of the methane curve are that the rate of increase has diminished to zero. So any of the IPCC projections of future emissions that include ANY increase in atmospheric methane are in very serious error. Can anyone enlighten us on this point? Were increasing methane levels included in the projections?