Thousands of Animals Slaughtered?

[Rise]

Have you considered switching to plant based diet to....and reduce the suffering caused by your sponsorship of the meat industry?

You are commiting the fallacy of a false dichotomy. One which is very commonly committed on this topic.

It's not an either/or situation. You don't have to choose between supporting the immoral practices of the big meat industries or not eating meat.

You can buy meat from small produces who treat their animals very well and slaughter them with care for their comfort.

improve your health,

That's also a lie by itself.

If you take a standard American diet and simply remove animal products from it you are not going to be healthier.

A bag of sugar is vegan. But eating nothing but a bag of sugar will literally kill you.

So you can't say veganism is inherently healthy just because it doesn't have animal products in it.

If you just cut animal products out of a standard American diet you'll be deficient in various nutrients unless you proactively replace the animal products with a range of produce, nuts, and supplements for vitamin B12 that will make up for what you are no longer getting.

Raw veganism is different. You can almost get away with saying someone will automatically be healthier if they go raw vegan because this diet necessarily forces them to only eat things the way God intended them to be eaten. That automatically excludes a lot of unhealthy vegan options like bags of sugar, because it's not raw. Sure, you could eat fresh raw stalks of cane, but that's not going to be harmful to your health the way processed sugar is.

But even raw veganism is prone to fault on the part of the individual: You still need to have a balanced diet of raw produce, fruit, nuts, and seeds. You can't just eat bananas and expect to be healthy.

reduce your carbon footprint,

A load of satanic inspired BS. It's anti-life to try to pretend animals are inherently damaging to the earth and they should be killed off so they stop "contributing to carbon emissions".

God designed the presence of animals within the biosphere to play an important role which adds to the growth of the system and therefore it's capacity to support further life. Satan tries to kill, steal, and destroy, which is why his goal is to reduce the capacity for the earth to support life by convincing people to kill themselves and needlessly kill millions of animals, in the name of saving the earth.

Bison are what built the deep rich carbon-filled life supporting soils of the great plains. If you need to understand how that works, look up Joel Salatin or Alan Savory to learn about how large herding herbivores restore desertified land into good soil. Man killing the Bison, and then overtilling the soil with agriculture, is what lead to the destruction of that soil with the great dust bowl and the desertifying of states like Arizona (which use to be grassland in the early 20th century).

The great irony about the anti-life claims of animals being harmful to the earth is the fact that the presence of more (well managed) bovines on a desertified piece of land will actually INCREASE the fertility and water retention of the land which allows you to next year put MORE bovines on that same piece of land because the healed soil is producing more food for them to eat!

There were no doubt more animals in North America prior to the arrival of europeans than there are in North America today. Herds of Bison are estimated to have been anywhere from 30-60 million in 1600. It's insanity to then claim that somehow animals are a problem today when they weren't then.

The only difference is they were doing what they were designed to do instead of being confined to concentrated feed lots.

The animal isn't a problem, but their management can be.

 

[Rise]

This may all be true but is this thread about the provision of healthy food for the specified recipients or is it about animal sacrifice defended on religious beliefs?

I don't understand what the point or purpose of your question is.

Someone tried to argue that feeding the poor with sacrificed animals was unnecessary because they claimed you could grow 10 times more food for people if you used land for plant growth instead of livestock.

I pointed out why that line of logic is false. Poor people need animal based food to be healthy too. Especially in less economically developed parts of the world.

It's wrong to only look at how many calories you can get off a given acre of land and not consider the full range of nutrition that is required. Which also requires that you take into account the fact that very little land on earth can currently be used to grow a balanced vegan diet of the type that relatively wealthy westerners enjoy. It's not just about how many calories you get off that acre of land, if the only thing you're growing is corn you'll be severely malnourished. Further, adding to that the fact that much land used for pasturing animals isn't currently suitable for growing edible food at all anyway, so you actually would be less productive if you switched to trying to grow plants on it.

 

[Secret Chief]

Isn't your human rule condemning it equally arbitrary with your attitude?

As arbitrary as condemning murder, if you consider that arbitrary.

 

[Secret Chief]

I don't understand what the point or purpose of your question is.

The point or purpose was that the OP is placed in the Religious News sub-forum, not the Food & Beverage or Health & Healing fora.

It's wrong to only look at how many calories you can get off a given acre of land and not consider the full range of nutrition that is required.

It is, but then I don't think I've said anything about calories, in isolation or otherwise.

 

[Secret Chief]

You have to understand that God designed animals and plants to work in coordination with each other in a way that would result in an ever increasing abundance of both plants and animals together.

God designed us to be caretakers of the earth and stewards of it in the Garden of Eden

destroying or healing the earth based on our actions that no animal shares.

Satan corrupted mankind so that he no longer followed only the voice of God and His ways, which then introduced the curse of man now mismanaging the land in ways that destroy it, because satan's goal is to kill, steal, and destroy.

It's telling that much of your posting on this thread focuses on pushing agricultural, economic and nutritional arguments but then bottom line you post stuff like this. The B12 is all very well but the main thing is to fight Satan, because the rest of the animal kingdom isn't able to live in harmony with the biosphere. Marvellous.

 

[Secret Chief]

slaughter them with care for their comfort.

Comedy gold, but sad.

If you take a standard American diet and simply remove animal products from it you are not going to be healthier.

Of course not. But given that in 2016 36% of adults in the US were obese something should maybe change, given how much obesity causes premature death:
Obesity

A bag of sugar is vegan. But eating nothing but a bag of sugar will literally kill you.

That's an excellent argument against a vegan diet. Thanks for the relevance fallacy. If you eat nothing but lard it will literally kill you. There's one for not eating meat.

You can't just eat bananas and expect to be healthy.

Again, that'll be helpful to a lot of people. I've been a vegetarian for nigh on 40 years and I can't believe I've been so lucky not to fall for that mistake.

 

[Tambourine]

Your claims are wrong. Dr Wallach did several years of research on this topic with a grant from the US government and found there is not a single example of a healthy long lived people that are entirely vegan.
All the examples of the most long lived people groups ate animal products.

So eating animal products and eating animals are one and the same for you?

 

[stvdv]

I am not 100% sure, but this yearly sacrifice results in the slaughter of thousands of animals in the name of the religion of peace.

Those who kill the animals in a cruel way, lack compassion for animals. Probably they also did not understand the "Ant story" in the Koran.

Some of the meat is distributed to the poor

Feeding the poor is a good thing.

Some of the meat is distributed to the poor but a whole lot does not.

What happens with the rest? If it's wasted, then it's not good.

 

[stvdv]

I am surprised that PACT or Peta has said very little.

IMO: Islam is relatively a rigid religion, not open for change, evolution/growth. Hence Peta won't have much influence. Change will take generations.

 

[stvdv]

I know that the bible has plenty of sacrifices, but not today. Should this practice be banned?

With force trying to change Religious people might not work.
If all non-Muslims become vegetarian they will maybe inspire Muslims to follow their example.
Nowadays Muslims travel to non-Muslims countries, so easier to adopt other habits
But as far as I know, non-Muslims countries also mainly eat meat (non-veg)

Spoiler: worldwide 8% vegetarians; America 3.4%; India 38%; rest ca. 8-10%

The total number of vegans, vegetarians, and related categories was estimated to be about 8 per cent of the world population in 2018. According to 'The Economist', in America in 2015, only 3.4 per cent of the population were vegetarian. From that number, only 0.4 per cent were vegans.Jun 7, 2019

IMO: Humans have the choice to grow towards Love/Non-Violence or go into the opposite direction. The more compassion, empathy and awareness increase, the less you want to kill other souls. Spirituality is all about sense control. Meat eating is mostly "sense gratification". (of course when meat is the only food available then it's a different story. But nowadays we have plenty of other possibilities; we can live without eating meat).

Changing food habits takes many years. Changing religion based food habits takes many decades. Allah knows change takes ages, so He starts with Islam taking baby steps. So Allah did give Muhammad the "ant story" to increase love towards animals. For me this is the first step to vegetarianism.

 

[stvdv]

Should this practice be banned?

IMO:
The world is full of violence. Animals kill each other also, even when still alive.
But we humans can choose what we want to achieve, we are not like animals following instincts only.

In India the Saints and Sages advise vegetarian food for the spiritual aspirant. Sai Baba said the same, but He added "if you are a soldier then it's better to eat meat, otherwise you can't kill". So He did give a hint, what the effect of meat eating on humans is. You eat the blood of the animal, which is filled with the emotions of the animal. Animals are very sensitive and they sense when they are going to be killed, so fear and anger will rise in them, and when eating this meat, those emotions come in you. In Islam they drain the blood out, because of this I think. But I think the emotions are not only in the blood. We all know that humans have suppressed emotions of many years ago. If they were in the blood, you could give them new blood and all their emotional traumas would be cured. So even blood-drained meat will still give you the animal emotions.

So, it all depends on your Dharma in live. All are free to choose whatever they want. And if you are destined to be a meat eater, then it will be impossible to become a vegetarian (or v.v.) I think. So, we should not blame others for what they believe. In Indian Scriptures they say that 1 life you will be a killer, but next life you might be a Saint. So someone who eats meat this life, might be vegetarian next life, or v.v. Seeing the bigger picture, judging others because of how they feel seems strange to me. Judge cruel actions is of course good. If someone tries to kill a human, the human has every right to defend himself.

 

[icehorse]

Hey @Rise - In response to your loooong post #57:

Nomads: You talk about high altitude grasslands and Scandinavians living off of land unfit to farm. And - again - I agree that that's possible. But only in small numbers. In the last 200 years we've gone from having maybe 700 million people on the planet to have TEN TIMES that, about 7 billion. Do just a little internet searching and you can learn how many acres a cow needs to roam on if the land isn't fit for farming. Oh we do it, we graze animals on such land, but not many. You really have to check your math on this idea of grazing animals on poor quality land.

Veganism: You're debating me on the problems of veganism but I'm not proposing veganism.

Mass homicide? Say what? Where on earth did you get the idea that I was advocating for that??????

Permaculture: I'm a big fan of permaculture. I think of it as mostly geared towards plants and dairy however.

 

[icehorse]

But proper management by humans, according to the way nature was designed to work, is the solution to not only stopping further degradation but also healing broken desertified landscapes to become arable land again.

God designed us to be caretakers of the earth and stewards of it in the Garden of Eden, which is why we have this unique role of being capable of destroying or healing the earth based on our actions that no animal shares.

Satan corrupted mankind so that he no longer followed only the voice of God and His ways, which then introduced the curse of man now mismanaging the land in ways that destroy it, because satan's goal is to kill, steal, and destroy.

I'm all for approaches like permaculture, and small farms, and decentralization. I will join forces with you to stop Big Agra practices that deplete our soil and aquifers.

But getting protein from animal sources will never be as efficient as getting protein from plant sources - full stop. By maybe a factor of 10 to 100.

The problem with bringing god into the discussion is that most popular scripture was written centuries ago by men who knew very little. 2000 years ago the advice to "be fruitful and multiply" was great advice. Today, it's horrible, horrible, horrible advice. We might disagree on what the healthy carrying capacity of the planet is, but you simply must admit that there IS a limit to how many humans can live well - or even live at all - on the planet.

 

[icehorse]

My concern is solely in regard to the killing of sentients beings not some arbitrary human rules justifying it.

I largely agree with you here. This is a tricky one for me.

But I start with the realization that "we ALL get eaten in the end". My take is that animals ought to be raised outdoors, with lots of room to roam and live mostly how they evolved to live. And when it's time to eat them, we need to take great care to make their deaths as humane as possible. Even if you're a "heartless b@st@rd", meat is more healthy if the animal's blood wasn't pumped full of adrenaline when they were killed. Temple Grandin has a lot to say on this matter.

 

[Secret Chief]

My take is that animals ought to be raised outdoors, with lots of room to roam and live mostly how they evolved to live. And when it's time to eat them, we need to take great care to make their deaths as humane as possible.

I agree. It isn't going to happen though. A burgeoning human population of more than 7 billion, with an apparently ever increasing appetite for meat, is never going to lead to the scenario you describe. By and large commercial competition means prices/costs are driven as low as possible. The greatest amount of meat and the lowest prices. Those killed are just a commodity within this highly mechanised industry. Welfare is not much more than PR marketing. A stunned but still semi-conscious cow hanging upside down having its throat slit is never going to be on a burger advert but a happy cow wandering around a grassy meadow is.

 

[icehorse]

I agree. It isn't going to happen though. A burgeoning human population of more than 7 billion, with an apparently ever increasing appetite for meat, is never going to lead to the scenario you describe. By and large commercial competition means prices/costs are driven as low as possible. The greatest amount of meat and the lowest prices. Those killed are just a commodity within this highly mechanised industry. Welfare is not much more than PR marketing. A stunned but still semi-conscious cow hanging upside down having its throat slit is never going to be on a burger advert but a happy cow wandering around a grassy meadow is.

Yup. Add to that that they spend much of their lives in tiny spaces - triple ugh!

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

For the same environmental resources, the poor and hungry could get 10 times (or more), nutritionally complete plant based food.

Do you still eat meat?

I completely agree with @icehorse's comment, and I DO NOT EAT ANY MEAT AT ALL. What do I win?

 

[Rise]

The point or purpose was that the OP is placed in the Religious News sub-forum, not the Food & Beverage or Health & Healing fora.

And I already proved your point was wrong by demonstrating why this line of argumentation became relevant to the issue at hand:

----------

Someone tried to argue that feeding the poor with sacrificed animals was unnecessary because they claimed you could grow 10 times more food for people if you used land for plant growth instead of livestock.

I pointed out why that line of logic is false. Poor people need animal based food to be healthy too. Especially in less economically developed parts of the world.

---------

Which you willfully ignored because you can't defend your claim against it.

As others pointed out, the slaughtered animals aren't wasted. They probably would have been killed for food at some point anyway.

So you can't use the waste of their flesh as a line of argumentation against animal sacrifice.

To which someone tried to argue that it's unnecessary to kill the animals for food in the first place, and/or inefficient. Which was also a false statement, as I demonstrated. So you can't use that as a line of argumentation against animal sacrifice either.

Trying to claim you don't need to eat animals and can just be vegan is not an effective argument against animal sacrifice for the reasons I outlined. Chiefly because it's not a viable way for most of the world to eat a reliably nutritionally balanced diet.

It is, but then I don't think I've said anything about calories, in isolation or otherwise.

You didn't, but someone else did. And I was responding to them, not you.

 

[Rise]

It's telling that much of your posting on this thread focuses on pushing agricultural, economic and nutritional arguments but then bottom line you post stuff like this. The B12 is all very well but the main thing is to fight Satan, because the rest of the animal kingdom isn't able to live in harmony with the biosphere. Marvellous.

Logical fallacy, "Red Herring".
Your comments have nothing to do with either disproving the truth of my claims nor proving anything you previously tried to argue.

Logical fallacy, "Strawman".
You are willfully distorting my arguments and position in order to attack it because you cannot argue against my conclusions by countering the merits of my arguments.

Logical fallacy, "Appeal to Mockery" or "Ad Hominem".
Unable to counter the points I made with valid arguments of your own, you are trying to merely mock my position instead.

 

[Secret Chief]

And I already proved your point was wrong by demonstrating why this line of argumentation became relevant to the issue at hand:

----------

Someone tried to argue that feeding the poor with sacrificed animals was unnecessary because they claimed you could grow 10 times more food for people if you used land for plant growth instead of livestock.

I pointed out why that line of logic is false. Poor people need animal based food to be healthy too. Especially in less economically developed parts of the world.

---------

Which you willfully ignored because you can't defend your claim against it.

As others pointed out, the slaughtered animals aren't wasted. They probably would have been killed for food at some point anyway.

So you can't use the waste of their flesh as a line of argumentation against animal sacrifice.

To which someone tried to argue that it's unnecessary to kill the animals for food in the first place, and/or inefficient. Which was also a false statement, as I demonstrated. So you can't use that as a line of argumentation against animal sacrifice either.

Trying to claim you don't need to eat animals and can just be vegan is not an effective argument against animal sacrifice for the reasons I outlined. Chiefly because it's not a viable way for most of the world to eat a reliably nutritionally balanced diet.



You didn't, but someone else did. And I was responding to them, not you.

You've quoted me at the start of this post but then (again) go on to refer to what other posters have said and comment on those comments. Mixing it up like that isn't really helpful, but that's OK.