Animal Person

OCTOBER 26, 2009

He always refers to himself and his wife and his child as "vegetarian." But why does he say "vegetarian?" That bothers me, as there's a significant difference in motivation for vegans and vegetarians and he sounds like one, yet calls himself the other. You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer.

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Animal Ethics

JULY 7, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. Presumably most animals—even infants—would have the right not to suffer. Some vegetarians have argued that it is impossible for one to maintain without absurdity that animals have a right not to suffer pain and yet have no right to life.

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Animal Person

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

Some go vegetarian first, then vegan. Then there's me, going vegetarian then vegan, and then eating filet mignon and salmon for a year before going vegan again, and my husband who went vegan overnight after being an omnivore for 38 years. But they too lead one to accept "ethical meat" as an option because their focus is on suffering.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 21, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. SOME PROBLEMS OF MORAL VEGETARIANISM With respect to traditional moral vegetarianism some problems immediately come to the fore. Who Should Not Eat Meat, or What Does a Vegetarian Feed His Dog? Not necessarily.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 23, 2009

There are two approaches a vegetarian might take in arguing that rearing and killing animals for food is morally offensive. A vegetarian of the first sort has no grounds for objecting to the eating of animals—molluscs for example—too rudimentary in their development to feel pain. Or he could object to the killing itself.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 16, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. The Argument from Glass-Walled Slaughter Houses Mel Morse, former president of the Humane Society of the United States, once remarked: “If every one of our slaughter houses were constructed of glass this would be a nation of vegetarians.”

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 20, 2008

Ethical vegetarianism is the thesis that killing and eating animals is morally wrong whenever equally nutritious plant-based alternatives are available. The case for ethical vegetarianism starts with several uncontroversial premises. Most people hold that it is wrong to cause animals unnecessary suffering.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 9, 2009

A third of a century ago, when the modern animal-liberation movement was in its infancy, Martin published an essay entitled “A Critique of Moral Vegetarianism,” Reason Papers (fall 1976): 13-43. I suspect that many readers of this blog are Christians but not vegetarians. The contrast would be, for example, “health vegetarianism.”

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Animal Person

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

Do they suffer any more or less in death? There is a rational, and for some people a spiritual, case for being a vegetarian: Killing animals is wrong. But it's also remarkable in that Roger Cohen, a 50-something man who writes for the New York Times, wonders: But do pigs have any more or less of a soul than dogs? I think not.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 30, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. The Argument from Human Grain Shortage All of the clearly moral arguments for vegetarianism given so far have been in terms of animal rights and suffering. It is argued that beef cattle and hogs are protein factories in reserve.

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Animal Person

SEPTEMBER 22, 2009

With regard to cruelty and suffering, it's clear from the film that the human animal has been profoundly negatively affected by climate change, but there is no attention given to nonhuman animals. There was no meaningful discussion about our inefficient use of resources (grain and water) in the feeding of animals to kill to feed people.

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Animal Person

JANUARY 23, 2010

God thinks vegetarians are evil, and we want to please god. Ingesting suffering can't possibly be good for anyone's karma. Not to be confused with #1, this one comes directly from The Bible. Cain was a farmer, Abel was a herder. Cain was the bad guy, Abel was the good guy.

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Animal Person

MAY 30, 2009

If any "drastic measures" are employed, they are to remove animals from suffering, not to impose our dietary choices on others. Often confused with American Humane Association, they raise tens of millions, not to ‘save the animals’ as most people assume but to further the causes of vegetarianism and ending animal agriculture."

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

In other words, we become vegetarians, not through any decision of principle, but through being unable to bring ourselves to continue to dine upon the flesh of animals. What the vegetarian wants, surely, is that we should stop eating meat even if our liking for it exceeds our revulsion at the suffering endured on factory farms.

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Animal Ethics

JULY 7, 2008

What have humane people to say to the tremendous mass of animal suffering inflicted in the interests of the Table? Salt , The Logic of Vegetarianism: Essays and Dialogues [London: The Ideal Publishing Union, 1899], 42 [italics in original])

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 3, 2008

There I argued that the interests of animals ought to be considered equally with our own interests and that from this equality it follows that we ought to become vegetarian. Peter Singer , "Killing Humans and Killing Animals," Inquiry 22 [summer 1979]: 145-56, at 145 [italics in original; endnote omitted])

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

This passage puzzles me: Unsurprisingly, I believe it is wrong to inflict pain and death unnecessarily on a creature capable of suffering. While this belief might not compel us to be vegetarians, it does demand significant changes in the way we raise animals for food, and it forbids wolf hunting as a form of entertainment.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 7, 2008

According to Singer , the principle of the equal consideration of interests 'requires us to be vegetarians'. Interests arise, Singer contends, from the capacity to feel pain, which he labels a 'prerequisite' for having interests at all; and animals can and do suffer, can and do feel pain.

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Animal Person

AUGUST 16, 2011

And this is partly what’s so disappointing about the message of this book: Herzog amasses the research, and sees and does things that involve tremendous suffering and injustice. He watched cockfighting and killed and skinned animals, but won’t eat veal. But I’m merely making his point.

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Animal Ethics

OCTOBER 31, 2010

By carrying out a slaughter system that greatly reduces the suffering of chickens, Bell & Evans and Mary’s Chickens show that animal welfare and good business go hand in hand. While ever more consumers are going vegetarian or vegan, almost every consumer is demanding that companies take steps to reduce animal suffering.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 17, 2008

Salt , The Logic of Vegetarianism: Essays and Dialogues [London: The Ideal Publishing Union, 1899], 51-2 [italics in original])

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 24, 2008

Not all meat eaters are cold, cruel, selfish individuals insensitive to animal suffering. They don't want to contribute to the unnecessary pain, suffering, and death of the animals they eat, but they simply can't imagine life without meat. They realize that factory farming is inhumane. Life without meat seems unbearable to them.

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Animal Person

JUNE 8, 2009

The tiresome Hitler was a well-known vegetarian comment is included in this segment, but I found it irksome long before that. In 10 or 15 years of life, he suffered through multiple surgeries and infections and endless hours of restraint in a plastic chair. Part III: Pepper Goes to Washington. And for what?

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 24, 2009

22): Mr. Steiner might feel less lonely as an ethical vegan—he says he has just five vegan friends—if he recognized that he has allies in mere vegetarians (like me), ethical omnivores and even carnivores. Go vegan, go vegetarian, go humane or just eat less meat. Suffering and injustice are inherent in life, and time is short.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 2, 2011

I propose that the moral significance of the suffering, mutilation, and death of non-human animals rests on the following, which may be called the overflow principle: Act towards that which, while not itself a person, is closely associated with personhood in a way coherent with an attitude of respect for persons.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 17, 2011

And I suspect that people become vegetarians for precisely that reason: that by doing so they overcome the residue of guilt that attaches to every form of hubris, and in particular to the hubris of human freedom. If meat-eating should ever become confined to those who do not care about animal suffering then compassionate farming would cease.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

I suspect that many regular readers of Animal Ethics are already vegetarians. That's because those who read Animal Ethics with regularity know that there are many compelling reasons to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. a vegetarian diet is associated with a lower risk of death from ischemic heart disease.

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Animal Ethics

MAY 24, 2009

It seems, generally speaking, that the foods which are the costliest in suffering are also the costliest in price, whereas the wholesome and harmless diet to which Nature points us is at once the cheapest and most humane.

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Animal Ethics

MAY 4, 2008

It does not settle such questions as to whether it is right to kill them if they are a burden or if they are enduring pointless suffering, but it does bear in an important way on such questions. If animals have rights, the case for vegetarianism is prima facie very strong, and is comparable with the case against cannibalism. (

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 28, 2010

Of course even though they may not have the capacity for happiness and suffering that whales have, nevertheless I would suppose that chickens can suffer quite a lot, even though their consciousness should be very much a sort of daze, and this should be taken into account in our dealings with them. I am myself not so heroic.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 18, 2006

I simply believe that when animals are killed it ought to be for a good purpose, and in a manner that is respectful to their capacity to suffer. Also, I am not a vegetarian, though I attempted to be one last year (an experience I plan on posting about).

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 24, 2008

To demand a product which can only be procured at the cost of the intense suffering of the animal, and the deep degradation of the butcher, and by a process which not one flesh-eater in a hundred would himself under any circumstances perform, or even witness, is conduct as callous, selfish and unsocial as could well be imagined.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 2, 2008

As a recent convert to vegetarianism, I found that it reinforced my feeling that the eating of living, thinking, emotional creatures is just plain wrong. Doesn’t he realize that he does not have to engage in this voluntary activity, which causes moral conflict for himself and suffering for the animals? To the Editor: Nicholas D.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 16, 2009

Animals raised for food suffer miserably. After time in the Marines, I veered strongly away from eating creatures, thinking of their suffering. In my 40s, I became a vegetarian because I was saving sick and injured birds, and I just couldn’t eat them and save them.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 2, 2008

If you are already a vegetarian, make this the year that you decide to go vegan. For no extra charge, switching to a vegan diet also dramatically reduces your contribution to unnecessary animal suffering. If you are like most people, you think that it is seriously morally wrong to contribute to unnecessary animal suffering.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 4, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. In fact, animals used for food do suffer a great deal. Now there is no doubt that the actual treatment of animals used for food is immoral, that animals are made to suffer needlessly.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 15, 2006

According to this study published today in the British Journal of Medicine , "Higher IQ at age 10 years was associated with an increased likelihood of being vegetarian at age 30." The study itself doesn't explain why individuals with higher IQs are more likely to be vegetarians as adults, but Catharine L.

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