While i´m glad to see people caring deeply about animal welfare, may i share my opinion on some of the points you made?
I have nothing against veganism, i trully don´t, but i´ve met enough vegans to learn that some people are so for bad reasons.
For starters, the movie Earthlings is highly sensationalistic. That is NOT to say that the horrible things shown in the film don´t happen, which sadly they do, but they don´t happen anywhere near the frequency that is implied in the film. Of course, one could argue that these things happening just once is enough, but personally i think it matters a great deal that things are very different in most cases. The film is designed to hit very hard on your emotions, but provides little or no contrast with other parts of reality.
Your first point i can agree with. I care deeply about this and my personal criterion for consuming meat is that the animal must have been sacrified following certain strict guideliness created to guarantee the least possible amount of suffering, as well as the animal having had a sufficient quality of life. As i say that is what i personally demand in order for meat consumption to be acceptable, but i sympathize with the vegan aproach too. Cruelty, suffering and compromised welfare are not acceptable.
Your next point i think is a bit bogus...i´ve heard it before and it sounds like a great deal of mumbo jumbo to me. No evidence supports this. All you have is the personal testimony of obviously biased individuals who mostly, just want it to be true.
The third point i think makes a semi-valid point. That is to say, meat
can contain substances that are undesirable for any consumer, like hormones, but also as you say, can carry bacteria, and even parasites. This however is solved by improving the legislation concerning meat production, to prevent the use of hormones, guarantee high meat quality controls, etc. The reason why i consider it a semi-point is that vegetables are actually rather worse in this respect...they tend to contain more artificial substances and are more likely to contain heavy metals. They can also carry potentially dangerous bacteria and parasites.
Now, your last point i have to disagree with. Apart from the fact that i take issue with the concept of "sacred", which to me is a meaningless word, it is demonstrable that as a species we are supossed to consume animals. Our dentition is clearly omnivorous, our digestive enzymes have been selected to include a significant portion of animal products in our diets and not to make the best of vegetable matter, our intestines are not those of a vegetarian (including the vestigial appendix), etc, etc...Even the morphology of our craneums, with our highly reduced and punny masseters and infantilized jaws, that work well with cooked meats and vegetables, but not so well with raw vegetables...
The list goes on and on.
I don´t mean to say that because we are biologically predisposed to a cooked omnivorous diet, that therefore that is the only option, not at all, but it does mean that we were "supossed" to have such a diet.
As for not having the right to use other animals as food, that´s just not how it works. We don´t have a right nor do we have not. Rights are given to us by ourselves as societies, they don´t come from somewhere else. Lions don´t have a right to eat wilderbeest....peregrin flacons don´t have a right to eat pidgeons. They just do because that´s what their survival is dependent on. The same thing in our case. However, since we have a highly developed (at least some people do) empathy and we are conscious to a much more sophisticated degree than lions or falcons are, we have the moral responsability of reducing suffering to an absolute minimum. So i agree 100% that given our current circumstances and technology, it is entirely unnecessary to torture and abuse animals, and therefore it becomes undeniably wrong to do so. I can´t agree that this necessarily includes using animals, as "using" them doesn´t necessarily imply abuse.
Sorry for the rambling, and i know this wasn´t what you were asking for once again xDD I sympathize with your decission and i think it is a commendable thing, but i think it´s important to make this kind of moral decissions basing them on a real analysis of reality. Sadly, many vegans are vegans for all the wrong reasons and don´t just demand respect, but seek to impose their standards on others, and if someone is going to do so, they better have a solid basis for their position, because the wishy washy stuff will only gain them looks of contempt, and that´s too bad, because it takes away from the legitimacy of some of the arguments and the importance of animal welfare ethics.
I hope i didn´t annoy you too much
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PS: Holy Newt this ended up being a long *** post.....
