One ongoing question I get regards the application of my moral philosophy to animals, and whether we morally ought to be vegetarians owing to compassion being in fact a moral virtue. I replied to Peter Hurford’s apt questions about that, noting why being a vegetarian merely out of compassion for animals is nonrational (it’s often just another kind of phobia based on false associations between animals and people), but Saint Gasoline interjected that though I may be right about that, there are other reasons to be a vegetarian. But the reasons he gave were just as nonrational. So I decided to blog about it. I’ll start by repeating my original reply.
[Note: The following article is only about animals we eat. It thus does not address rare animals like apes, cetaceans, elephants, or corvids. In 2021 I covered scientific experimentation in which I cover such classes of animal. In 2020 I updated the context of the article below. And in 2015 I revised it with qualifiers and replacing assertions of irrationality with nonrationality, to emphasize the difference between doing something illogical and doing something that is merely not motivated by reason, which could be sensible for yourself but does not automatically follow for anyone else. I’ve also been recommended a book that might concur with my position though I haven’t yet read it: Eat This Book.]
Why Compassion for Animals Does Not Necessitate Vegetarianism
Peter asked about the morality of factory farming. But “factory farming” tends to be misreported. When you investigate the actual conditions on most farms, especially those vending major industries like KFC or McDonalds, you find they are not as bad as PETA videos claim. They tend to mix ancient footage with recent (thus representing as current, conditions that have long since been abandoned), overstate the frequency of outlier events (e.g. accidents), and misrepresent farms in violation of existing laws or their own contracts with vendors (farms which then went out of business or underwent severe reforms after being exposed) as being the norm (that’s where a lot of their “horrific” video comes from: gotcha investigations of criminally negligent enterprises, not statistically common farm conditions—and I approve of this gotcha activity).
The industry is actually a lot smarter and cleaner than propagandists represent. In fact many of the conditions rights activists complain about are actually so bad for actual production efficiency and profit margin that no rational business would ever engage in them anyway, even if animals were vegetables. Of course stupid criminal mismanagement still occurs from time to time just as happens in any industry (think Enron or the Titanic), but at the very least that means we should support the enforcement of the laws we already have (instead of defunding the FDA like the Republicans keep gunning to do). And husbandry laws like California’s should be normalized nationwide, even deepened and improved (and even set as requirements for import, thus forcing other nations to comply as well, if they want to do business with us—although frankly we ought to do that for humans first…our foreign trade labor treaties are a bit anemic at present).
I also find that once you delete all the misrepresentations and outliers and then stick with actual, current, normal conditions, animal rights advocates often misconstrue what is “bad” for an animal, thinking animals are just like people and thus whatever we wouldn’t like they wouldn’t like, which is silly. Animals need a lot less than we do in order to be content and to experience normal stress levels or less (normal being the amount of occasional stress, highs and lows, that they would experience in the wild). Chickens, for example, are not miserable when in large crowded communities. There is a limit beyond which comfort declines (California state law, for example, now recognizes this), but their “personal boundary” space is a lot closer than it is for people, and often chickens voluntarily mass together for warmth and comfort. Thus seeing a hanger full of clucking chickens brushing against each other should not evoke tears. Animal quality of life has to be measured in terms of what is comfortable for that animal, and must recognize such facts as that animals aren’t aware of most things, and don’t aspire to be or do anything, and have no prospect of becoming anything, and thus should not be hastily anthropomorphized in these ways.
Accordingly I think being a vegetarian out of “compassion” is nonrational. Having compassion for animals is rational. But deducing vegetarianism from that is not. I mean that in the classic sense: it’s a non sequitur, and thus not a logically valid inference. It’s to treat animals like people, which they are not. I’ve looked and listened far and wide and there is just no logically valid argument that proceeds from “I ought to be compassionate” to “I ought to be a vegetarian.” Farming and eating animals is simply not evil, for the reason I stated: our own overall life satisfaction depends on being compassionate, and compassion compels us not to enjoy or want pointless torment to exist, no matter what or who is experiencing it. It would cause you pain, and thus diminish your life satisfaction, to realize you are being a cruel or wholly indifferent person. But destroying an animal humanely is not cruel. And it is not destroying a person. Again, an animal’s life is indifferent to when it dies, because it does not become anything and has no awareness of being something. Thus eating animals is fine as long as you aren’t torturing them (see my brief on this as the atheist correspondent for GodContention.com).
Vegetarians also seem nonrational to me in their acceptance of non-vegetarians. Either eating meat is not all that immoral, or everyone they know is a villain, horrifically consuming the flesh of concentration camp victims. And yet they befriend us. Strange. It’s as if we were all serial child molesters, while they refused to have sex with children because it’s wrong, but then come to laugh at our dinner parties, have sex with us, and help us move. Perhaps vegetarians think taking animal lives is no more awful than flouting traffic laws or being mean to street urchins, although that makes less sense of why they are so passionate about it. That’s not the rhetoric I hear. The strong drive many of them have to maintain their lifestyle seems attached to a belief that animal lives are “only slightly less valuable” than human lives and that killing them is a revoltingly awful thing to do. And that would make no sense of their tolerating us as if we were nothing more than casual traffic violators. If that’s the case, then it would seem vegetarians don’t really believe in their own convictions. They have a violent emotional reaction to the thought of eating animals that is out of proportion to any factual basis for it, which is what we would ordinarily call a delusion, as I explain in detail in my talk last year at Skepticon III (which I later qualified). Although vegetarianism is certainly a milder delusion than conservative Christianity, since its negative social effects are minimal. But I suppose this depends on the actual reasons you choose this, and the intensity of your feelings about it. But often enough the conclusion seems unavoidable to me. Vegetarianism is just another phobia, one that has its own restaurants.
Why Concern for the Environment Does Not Necessitate Vegetarianism
It’s also not rational to be a vegetarian “to save the planet,” for the same reason it’s not rational to vote for third party candidates in U.S. presidential elections. It’s literally the most useless thing you can do to effect any change or prevent harm. As it happens, relying only on local produce is worse for the environment. Factory farms are vastly more efficient. And there are, excuse me, but a fucking shitload of people on this planet to feed. We could not feed them without factory and industrial farming. But we’re here to talk about meat specifically…
Apart from its production meat is a highly efficient delivery vehicle for a panacea of nutrients and essential fats and proteins, likewise milk, eggs, yoghurt, lard, and cheese, while meat’s byproducts (the parts people don’t actually eat) are essential across the economy: from pet food for our carnivorous cats and dogs, to leather, wool, gelatine, glue, tallow, fatty acids used in the production of plastic and rubber, natural fertilizers (including urine and bone meal), and the ingredients in hundreds of other everyday products, from household detergents and medicines, to paint, carpet, and processed wood. We get 185 products in all just from your average pig. Replacing them all with artificial alternatives would actually produce a worse environmental impact (do you really want to replace pigs with thousands and thousands of chemical-spewing, earth-stripping, water-and-power consuming factories?).
The natural production of all these hundreds of materials is not quite as inefficient as opponents claim. In fact, since it’s an integral part of our overall recycling industry (more on that in a moment), abandoning meat production has consequences that negate most of the benefits supposed to be obtained by it, even apart from the costs created by what we’d have to replace it with (read Simon Fairlie, on whom I rely for much of the following, and Rob Lyons’ review thereof). Even the meat industry’s negatives can be offset with continually improving technologies if we would just care to apply them. In other words, the solution to such problems is to solve the fucking problem, instead of trying to abandon the industry altogether, which will never happen. To be rational is to be realistic, and work for changes that can actually occur. Like increasing the efficiency of an industry, which benefits everyone, business and environment alike. Game Theory, people. Learn it. Live it.
Arguments against meat production tend to be based on bad math and bad science, and confuse the wisdom of eating less meat (food supply diversity is essential to an economy and food supply stability as well as personal health), with the dogma of eating none. When we look at the actual math and facts everything changes. For what follows I’ll rely on Fairlie’s work as well as the excellent report on animal farming impact by WaterFootprint.org, and they have no pro-meat agenda, yet their data corroborates the world meat industry’s report on the Environmental Impact of Meat Production Systems, which likewise includes industry-independent data.
As just one example of bad math: much is made of how much water is used to make meat. Yet almost all of that is actually the water used to grow grain. The grain used to feed cattle, for instance, amounts to 98% of the water consumption involved in beef and dairy production (or more, depending on where we are geographically). And almost all of that is rain water (over 87%) which falls naturally and would have been wasted anyway were it not put to some use—and likely we’d always be putting it to some use (whether growing grain, generating electricity, manufacturing, drinking, showering) so there would be little net effect on water consumption if we abandoned the meat industry. We’d just use that water for something else. Or not use it at all. So even at its worst (and beef production is the worst) meat production is really only negligibly more water intensive than agriculture.
So the argument then shifts to why we waste all that grain, when we could just eat it. Well, first of all, we are converting that grain into more than just meat. When we compare “per ton of product” between cattle and grain, for instance, we’re not talking about just food; and not every item that comes off a cow has the same value or importance. Per ton of fertilizer cows produce? Per ton of bone meal cows produce? Per ton of tallow cows produce? Per ton of leather cows produce? Are these things the same value or even equatable to the food that cows produce, including meat, fat, milk, cheese, whey, and yoghurt? Secondly, most of the grain we feed cows (and other farmed animals), people couldn’t eat. It’s called roughage, a waste product. Over 80% of what even factory farmed animals eat is actually recycled waste product from the production of grain humans are already eating. Whenever you see stats like “22% of [U.S. grown wheat] is used for animal feed and residuals,” that word residuals means agrowaste fed to livestock—so this is not “22% of human edible wheat product” that’s going to animals, but 22% of the wheat product sold, whether humans could eat it or not. In fact most stats you’ll see for tonnage of crops parceled by use don’t distinguish residuals from edible quantity, thus badly skewing what a naive reader might think such numbers mean. Animal farming is not taking grain away from people, but making the grain people eat more efficient, by converting its waste product into more food. And hundreds of other products besides food.
Now, in order to recycle that waste, we do have to supplement it with some quality product as well. In effect some human edible grain must be “burned” to convert grain production waste into food (and corn is worldwide the most popular supplement used), so animal farming does “consume” grains that humans could have eaten instead, but by doing so it creates more food, and many other products. In other words, we are burning a little bit of grain to run these waste recycling-plants we call animals—just as we have to burn resources to recycle plastic, metal, or paper.
When you do all the math for industrial cattle farming, for example, feed conversion efficiency for non-roughage grain input is better than 4:1 (4 kg non-waste input for every 1 kg usable output), which is not bad considering what you get for it (which is again, a lot more than just food—it’s also all those other animal products that grease our economy, literally and figuratively). For industrial dairy farming this efficiency is actually 1:4, i.e. we get 4 kgs of usable product for every 1 kg of usable product we put in. Which makes industrial dairy farming one of the smartest things we ever thought of (so it’s too bad I can’t digest dairy, but even I benefit from this industry, as dairy products are in things even I and many vegetarians eat, like bread). The numbers come out a little differently if you compare food energy input and output (for dairy it’s close to 1:1; yet for beef it’s 1:0.65, which is near 2:1, either way at near parity), but that’s not a wholly apt comparison because energy is not all you get out of food (you also get a whole array of nutrients) and food isn’t all you get out of animals. On balance, we do not appear to be wasting very much food on livestock. It looks like any other efficient system of manufacturing, into which we pour a selection of resources and out of which we get hundreds of usable products of comparable value.
Any other argument you hear ends up like that: start pulling at the threads of its specious math and facts, and it unravels.
For example, take the claim that “factory farming (specifically for meat) is one of the greatest contributors to global warming.” That’s simply not true. It’s based on an FAO report that has led websites and wonks to say things like that the “animal agriculture sector is responsible for 18%, or nearly one-fifth, of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, greater than the share contributed by the transportation sector,” but that’s hopelessly misleading. A third of that figure is based not on the farming, but on the clearing of forests to expand ranches in developing countries, which is a one-time cost and not an actual ongoing effect of the ranch, and is not terminal (forest clearing goes on a decline as countries doing it improve economically and begin to balance their resources—they are just going through the phase we went through a hundred years ago, claiming for industry land that was effectively fallow, and gradually learning to balance that process with national preserves and biodiversity). Nor is this a significant factor in first world animal farming (no one burned down a forest to feed you Iowa beef).
Another one third of that figure consists of fertilizer production and use, most of which actually gets used in the agriculture industry (and would thus simply be replaced with some other emissions-producing fertilizer), and what gets used for animal husbandry (e.g. fertilizing pastures) would still be used if the same land were used for crops (in fact crops are more fertilizer intensive), so this is not in fact anything we’d get back if we stopped animal farming. And when you subtract that element, too, now you end up with just 6% of manmade emissions coming from actual animal farming that would go away if we stopped. But that’s including inefficient animal husbandry in third world countries. How much of total manmade emissions comes from actual modernized industrial animal farming? Less than 2%. And this is all based on that same FAO data. And BTW these numbers reflect impact, not quantity, e.g. that “less than 2%” figure is taking into account that methane is a hundred times worse than carbon dioxide. Hmm. Funny how “less than 2%” becomes “18%” with just a little accounting chicanery. So if you are worried about cow farts (or really, burps) boiling the earth away, worry not. You are ruining the environment just as much when you shower as when you eat a hamburger. In fact, if we set an average shower’s greenhouse impact at about 2 units, a hamburger rates about 3…while the impact for a serving of winter tomatoes is 50. That’s right, vegetarians. Perspective is a bitch.
Our factory farming system can be improved greatly, like any industry can (e.g. the amount of water consumed by electricity generation and manufacturing is far more alarming than what we use to produce animal products). Thus like any industry we ought to aim at improving it. But it’s not rational to say “we should just get rid of it,” and doubly nonrational to think you’re ever going to get rid of it, and triply nonrational to think that a meaningless protest behavior (not eating meat) is ever going to make one whit of difference to anything. Just eat a healthy, affordable diet, that balances the pleasures of life with reasonable concern for your personal health and bank account, as well as the welfare of others, animals and people. People especially. Cabbage and berry pickers have a much shittier life than many a cow, yet vegetarians don’t refuse to eat cabbage and tomatoes because the labor that produces them is a tick above slavery. Those men and women need those jobs to live, so we don’t want to cut off their livelihood with boycotts anyway, but neither should we be indifferent to their plight and the need to improve their wages and treatment, even if that means paying more for a head of cabbage. To me this seems a vastly more important issue than how well cows have it.
And Vegetarianism Is Not “Healthier”
I’ve just gone over a few examples. But I have yet to see any rational reason to be a vegetarian, other than pure aesthetics (“I just like it” or “it makes me feel good”) or medical necessity (“I have heart disease”), which are idiosyncratic (i.e. not true for most people). Even basing it on anecdotes and testimonials (“I felt so much better after I went vegan!”) is nonrational, because that’s just another alternative medicine mumbo placebo. Just sincerely convince yourself that eating meat will have the same effect, and you’ll be saying “I feel so much better now that I went back to eating meat!” As in fact many people do. It’s no different from “I felt so much better after I started wearing magnets on my feet!” Sure. But that’s all in your head. Get control of your perception of reality and you can turn any lifestyle change into a source of improved mood. Until you regress back to your baseline. This is not a sound basis for recommending other people placebo themselves into vegetarianism.
“But it’s healthier!” is also false. Because the data do not consistently establish this. Every diet has pros and cons, the net effect of which is zero, when any healthy diet is compared. Thus the same mathematical and factual unraveling occurs for any claimed benefit you pull at the threads of. Eating less meat is good for your heart, for example, but not as much as is claimed, and even what is claimed is not very impressive. One study is often cited as establishing 24% fewer deaths from ischemic heart disease (but, notably, no differences whatever for any other cause of death). In fact that study only established a 95% chance that the differential was somewhere between 6% and 38%…pay close attention: that means the data do not confirm a benefit any greater than only 6% fewer deaths (it could be greater, but we don’t know). A 6% edge is effectively irrelevant. Even a 24% edge is not that significant. It means for every 10 meat eaters who die of ischemic heart disease, about 8 vegetarians will likewise. Not a huge improvement. Worse, heart disease is a default: because we have cured or can prevent or treat all other diseases so well, yet people must necessarily eventually die of something, and that something is commonly heart disease (and cancer next after that). Thus heart disease remains a top killer not because anything is causing more of it, but because we are living longer and dodging every other bullet. In that light, vegetarianism isn’t giving us any real advantage. We’re just going to die anyway, it will simply be of something else. Like non-ischemic heart disease, which is more common. And vegetarianism confers no benefit against that. Lo and behold, that’s what the study found: when all causes are considered, vegetarians die exactly as often as nonvegetarians do. No net benefit.
That same study also found that the difference between vegetarians and occasional meat eaters is so minimal as to be insignificant. The latter had 20% fewer deaths from ischemic heart disease (with roughly the same interval)—in other words, vegetarianism confers maybe a 4% advantage over reasonable meat consumption, which is so slight a difference it dissolves beneath the study’s own margin of error. Notably, pescetarians and lactoovovegetarians did even better, at 34% reduction in mortality for ischemic heart disease—with the same huge margin of error, but nevertheless, apparently eating fish, eggs and dairy products confers more than twice the advantage over vegetarianism than vegetarianism confers over reasonable meat eating. That this won’t move vegans to take up fish, eggs, and dairy is precisely why it doesn’t move rational meat eaters to give up meat. And well it shouldn’t. The difference is just too trivial to care about. Even at a real 24% edge (which, again, even this study did not actually confirm), attending to such small risk factors across your life would lead to endlessly bizarre behavior, since even things as trivial as what city you live in can have as much of an effect, which is to say, a difference of about 1 or 2 years life expectancy, which just isn’t significant enough a gain to burden yourself with eighty years of pleasure denial for.
To give you a point of comparison, while vegetarianism might give you a benefit of about 1.2 times lower mortality on one single illness, and yet still makes no difference to when you die beyond at most one or two years, not smoking definitely does give you a benefit of 10 times lower mortality rate on numerous diseases, and for some diseases it’s 20 times or more. That’s a huge change in life expectancy, amounting to 14 years on average, almost a whole decade and a half. Moreover, there are many debilitating diseases that to a disturbingly high frequency disproportionately plague a smoker for decades of their life before they die, hugely adding to their financial costs and lost quality of life. Like emphysema: my mother quit smoking in her thirties and twenty years later still came down with permanent emphysema and will live with that for several decades. And if you’ve ever seen someone afflicted with that, it’s not fun. She is on oxygen now, 24-7. And will have been for decades by the time she dies. Do you think smoking is worth that? Really?
Smoking also causes numerous other illnesses and health problems, and not just cancer, but yeah, lots of cancer. But to take emphysema as an example, your odds of getting it do not increase 1.06, 1.2, or 1.4 times if you smoke, but 5 to 10 times if you smoke. Thus smoking is vastly more irrational than vegetarians claim eating meat to be (so vegetarians who smoke: you’re the biggest fools on the planet). Vegetarianism is at least merely an inconvenience, provided you maintain a healthy diet (merely eating vegetarian does not constitute a healthy diet; in fact vegetarians have to be even more informed and careful about managing their diet precisely because they are avoiding a primary delivery vehicle for many of the vitamins and nutrients humans normally need).
Notably, early studies showing improved health and lifespan for vegetarians, when controlled for smoking (because vegetarians tend not to be smokers), showed no remaining advantage to being a vegetarian. In other words, eat a reasonable diet of meat, fish, eggs, dairy, vegetables, nuts, and fruit. And don’t fucking smoke.
About local meat and produce being less efficient: you have a point, but how does transportation factor into this? Wouldn’t the costs of shipping fruit (for example) from California to Toronto in a reasonable amount of time (which means that trucks, not trains, have to be used) outweigh the benefits of large-scale production?
Animals such as pigs and cows have relatively advanced nervous systems. They exhibit emotional responses very similar to our own (joy, grief, fear, et cetera). Therefore it is highly probable that they are capable of feeling pain and suffering in a similar manner as humans.
I prefer not to cause unnecessary suffering to any animal, whether human or pig, that might have the capability to experience it.
By your own argument, laws against animal abuse are a non-sequitur.
Thank you for a well reasoned article. I would like to stress that our human body requires us to eat high protein foods, including meat. Grains can often be empty calories and contribute to obesity as much or more than eating fat. See the books and other articles on the Paleo diet (which is too extreme for me)
I tend to eat little or no grains or their processed products like bread, cereal, cake, cookies, etc. and live quite well on fish, meat, poultry, vegetables, fruits (fresh and dried) and nuts. Removing grains from my diet has made me healthier and helped me lose weight, along with exercise.
It’s official. Richard Carrier is my new hero.
Very interesting. Have you read “Why We Get Fat” by Gary Taubes? He digs into the science behind our current obesity epidemic. I would value any comments you might have on it.
Bob Harmount
I just want to make a point concerning “how can vegetarians possibly accept meat eaters?” segment of this article. I think you must be presuming some sort of Kantian style morality in order to make this point. Because it seems to me rather obvious that most of us are capable of making distinctions between “I think this is how to maximize the good” vs. “this is an absolute wrong” and act accordingly in our relationships.
For example, you mention the labor situation in both agriculture and foreign sweatshops as an example of things that might be more worth our time to investigate. Yet, even if I take care to buy from non-sweatshop outlets, buy fair trade foods, etc. I certainly do not break friendships with people over their disagreement or failure to do what I think maximizes the good, i.e. who buy sweatshop made clothes. The same is true of my friends who think that lowering taxes on the rich is good. I would say such is more harmful than a great many other positions they might take, but I am not about to break my friendships over it.
I also think that if you can show that cutting down tremendously on meat eating relative to the average American’s diet(for an American) would be better for any of the reasons given above that an argument for vegetarianism (for some) can be made. It would be based on a Parfit-like “rational irrationality” that would go along the lines: It is difficult to eat meat in moderation in the United States due to the nature of meals(which heavily favor meat), portion sizes, etc. However, it is easier-psychologically for some- to actually commit to cutting something out of one’s life instead. Hence being a vegetarian, while not rational in and of itself, might be rational for someone for whom moderation is difficult. I think this would apply to a number of people, in the same way that abstaining from alcohol might be strictly speaking worse for one’s health than drinking a glass of wine once in a while. But for one who has a hard time moderating one’s consumption, the consequences of drinking heavily far outweigh the consequences of not drinking so even though the most “rational” thing to do might be to have a glass a day, for a person with a difficult time drinking in moderation, refraining is the best course of action.
(In general, I think that this, along with aesthetic concerns, motivates more vegetarians that you might think. Particularly if one asks about cows raised humanely on marginal land(with a carbon offset for good measure!) and slaughtered humanely. Many vegetarians will still not eat this type of meat, but will (myself included) certainly agree there is no moral injunction not to.
Nonetheless, I am glad that your article does not hit any of the ridiculous complaints that vegetarians are oppressing meat eaters or something by existing, so thanks very much for that!
(As a side note, you say that a meaningless protest like vegetarianism accomplishes nothing. Nonetheless a major point of your article is that the crueler factory farming of the 70’s is diminishing. I have no facts relating to it, but is it not at least possible that the rise of vegetarianism as a part of the animal welfare cause in that period and beyond might at least be partly responsible for such changes, either legally(as in the California law you site) or otherwise, by being a form of awareness raising?)
Thanks again for the food for thought!
As someone pretty disgusted at the idea of being forced to vote for one repubocrat or another, I kinda wonder about that line about it being irrational to vote for 3rd parties. In theory anyway; I’m not sure there’s anything in the way of 3rd parties out there I could support either.
Anyway, as to the actual point of the article, there’s a lot of good stuff there. I think it enlightened me, particularly on the environmental impacts, where I was accepting some of those claims of the methane and water use being excessive and that sort of thing.
I’m no vegetarian, mind. I eat little beef, and that’s mostly preference for chicken and turkey. I’m trying to focus on more vegetables, but that’s mostly about personal health (particularly calorie reduction). I think I already understood the basics of a healthy diet.
I certainly hope that the factory farming is better than we often hear. I knew it was hard to trust PETA reporting. But it’s also often hard to trust the ethics of businesses running the ‘factory farms’.
To summarize my rambling – I like the article and I agree with a lot of it. It would be good to improve some areas here and there, for various reasons, but the industrial scale farming is pretty important for efficiently feeding so many people.
Where do you get this absolutists “One True Way” silliness?
>>our own overall life satisfaction depends on being compassionate,
No, it doesn’t in any absolute sense.
>>compassion compels us not to enjoy or want pointless torment to exist, no matter what or who is experiencing it.
No, it doesn’t in any absolute sense. And especially when it could increase your satisfaction in helping those close to you.
>>an animal’s life is indifferent to when it dies, because it does not become anything and has no awareness of being something.
Odd to conclude animals are indifferent to dying. And especially when we’re just slightly more clever animals than all the rest.
Hitler was a vegetarian!
As far as the infantile acusation “Hitler was a vegetarian/vegan,” apart from this being incorrect, it naturally invites the response “So what?” Hitler could have been a keen chess player, so does this mean that everyone who plays chess is actually a closet psychopath planning to conquer the world? Alternatively, as Stalin ate meat, does this mean that everyone who eats meat has the same personality-type as Stalin? It was rumoured that Hitler was a teetotaller (which he wasn’t), and he also did not smoke, but you never hear anyone draw a parallel by saying “Hitler was a…” when someone stops at one beer, or doesn’t light up a cigarette.
In sum, if we temporarily overlook the fact that Hitler wasn’t vegetarian (see below) and pretend that he was, and we follow the inference that as Hitler was a vegetarian, this means that anyone who is a vegetarian must be like him, this also means that vegetarians, despite their widely different personalities, such as Pythagoras, Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi and Jeremy Corbyn, were/are all closet Nazis. Incredibly, the anti-vegan seems unable to grasp the absurdity of his argument.
As noted “Respected historian, Daniel Goldhagen and vegetarian [his father Erich Goldhagen, a retired Harvard professor and Holocaust survivor was interned with his family in a Jewish ghetto in Czernowitz], says in a Slate article: ‘Hitler liked his followers to wear black clothes. Just because I like to wear black doesn’t lump me in with him’.”
In The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (1973), by Robert Payne, it is stated:
“Hitler’s asceticism played an important part in the image he projected over Germany. According to the widely believed legend, he neither smoked nor drank, nor did he eat meat or have anything to do with women. Only the first was true. He drank beer and diluted wine frequently, had a special fondness for Bavarian sausages and kept a mistress, Eva Braun, who lived with him quietly in the Berghof. There had been other discreet affairs with women. His asceticism was a fiction invented by Goebbels to emphasize his total dedication, his self-control, the distance that separated him from other men.”
Consequently, it is clear that any claim that Hitler was vegetarian was/is false: indeed, as noted in https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/08/11/common-misconception/
“The Führer chowed down, at least every now and again, on roast squab [pigeon] and liver dumplings. His vegetarianism? One of the great myths of history. In an article for VegSource, Rynn [Berry] quotes Dione Lucas, a chef ‘who was an eyewitness to Hitler’s meat-eating.’ ‘I do not mean to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab,’ she wrote in 1964, ‘but you might be interested to know that it was a great favorite with Mr. Hitler, who dined at the hotel often’.”
Apart from the propaganda attempt to present Hitler as a vegetarian so he would be seen as an ascetic, another reason for Hitler limiting (not abstaining from) meat was his severe flatulence which was made worse by any consumption of meat. As noted in https://vegetarian.livejournal.com/874137.html
“While it is true that Hitler’s doctors put him on a vegetarian diet to cure him of flatulence and a chronic stomach disorder, his biographers such as Albert Speer, Robert Payne, John Toland, et al, have attested to his liking for ham sausages and other cured meats.”
Furthermore, “Adolf Hitler, despite those persistent rumours, never was a vegetarian. Dr Richard H Schwartz, author of Judaism and Vegetarianism, pointed out that Hitler would go on the occasional vegetarian binge with the aim of counteracting sweatiness and flatulence. Another contributor turned up the Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook, in which Dione Lucas, a hotel chef in Hamburg before WW2, recalls Hitler several times ordering his favourite dish of stuffed and roasted squab (baby pigeon). She also gives the recipe.”
On the subject of animal welfare/rights, it should be noted that with respect to comments by anti-vegans that the Nazis’ implemented a radical anti-vivisection policy, in reality:
“The rumor that the Nazis passed an anti-vivisection law is also filled with contradictions. No such law was passed, although the Nazis reported that such a law existed. The Nazis allegedly passed an anti-vivisection bill in 1933. Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, reviewed the Nazis’ law in 1934 and warned anti-vivisectionists not to celebrate because the Nazis’ law was no different, in effect, from the British law that had been passed in 1876, which restricted some animal research, but hardly eliminated it. An enormous amount of research on animals continued to be carried out by Nazi doctors.”
https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/myth-check-was-hitler-a-vegetarian/
https://michaelbluejay.com/veg/hitler.html
https://bitesizevegan.org/was-hitler-a-vegetarian/
https://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/why-hitler-wasnt-a-vegetarian-and-the-aryan-vegan-diet-isnt-what-it-seems/fmvtkm2tt
http://www.veganfuturenow.com/hitler-was-a-vegatarian
https://www.all-creatures.org/mfz/myths-hitler-rk.html
https://www.jewishveg.org/schwartz/revHitler.html
https://www.johnrobbins.info/hitler-a-vegetarian/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rzdZqjCDdo&ab_channel=EarthlingEd
Whether Hitler was a vegetarian is a non sequitur here. It has no relevance to anything.
Hello Richard,
I’ll first report that I disagree with much of what you say, though there is a lot to respond to so I won’t bother with most of it.
Philosophers who write on this topic are almost universally agreed that factory farmed meat eating is morally wrong. I’d just suggest Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s excellent new book, which is packed with tons of empirical data:
http://www.amazon.com/Ethics-What-We-Eat-Choices/dp/1594866872/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1323542294&sr=8-6
I could recommend several other books to you which rely on industry data to back up the claim that factory farming is terrible for animal welfare. PETA is not the only anti-factory farming group in existence. Pointing to the irrationality of some vegetarians doesn’t generalize. Certainly some vegetarians may be relying on reading human emotions into animals, but it is hard for me to believe all vegetarians do this.
Animals exhibit many “stress behaviors” (industry term, not animal rights activist term) in factory farming conditions which they do not exhibit under any other conditions.
You make claims like the following, as evidence that animal welfare is not compromised in factory farming conditions:
“often chickens voluntarily mass together for warmth and comfort.”
This is not a good piece of reasoning. It is analogous to saying “often women voluntarily have sex with men for pleasure and comfort” as a justification of rape. (No, I’m not comparing factory farming to rape, I am just using an example to illustrate the fallacy in reasoning.)
Anyway, I was wondering if you could give me some evidence for your claim that factory farming conditions are not poor conditions for animal welfare, because most of that aspect of your argument is just baldly stating claims without back up. I have personally read *industry* accounts of CAFO conditions and regulations, and you can make a good case, based solely on industry reports, that factory farming is bad for animal welfare. (e.g. They have to de-beak chickens, because they are so cramped that otherwise they will injure each other in response to stress–a behavior not exhibited in chickens in non-CAFO conditions. Similarly with docking the tails of pigs to prevent cannibalistic behavior–another behavior not exhibited in pigs in non-CAFO conditions.)
If you’d like, I can point you toward some non-PETA sources to read about factory farming conditions and why you might think that it is not ideal for animal welfare or the environment. (I agree with you that it isn’t essentially healthier, though it is certainly possible to be a healthy vegetarian.) But I’ll only do that if you ask. Knowing your personality, no possible empirical information or argumentation could change your mind, so I won’t waste your time unless you prove me wrong about that.
Carrier’s article is flawed. I wouldn’t bother.
Your post provides a rich feast of ideas to respond to. Oddly, with just a few insertions here and there of terms like “manifest destiny” or “according to God’s Plan”, some of the content could be read as if it were to appear in a Dominionist tract or sermon. Possibly you are playing devil’s advocate with your readers?
OK, so I accept your premise that humans are not animals, on many levels. One thing that does seem to distinguish rational humans from animals is that we have developed some concept of an inter generational continuum which requires that we learn from our cultural history and also take into account the needs of future generations. Except of course for those who hold that the end of times is near and they are the last generation. But we are talking here about rationality, so here is my response.
You say in the context of industrial animal farming that “no one burned down a forest to feed you Iowa beef”. But this ignores other natural resources being lost by production of annual crops of corn on land which previously had sustained both the grasses and the meat animals that grazed on them, adequately serving limited populations of both humans and animals which coexisted with the agricultural environment.
It happens that the perennial grasses seen on lands such as were native to Iowa are just the most visible above ground component of a community of other plants, deep roots of the grasses, and myriad micro organisms that collectively produce and store large quantities of plant nutrients in the soil and deeper into the subsoil.
Because these nutrients can only be released back to the plants in small amounts each year there remained a reserve making it is possible for the perennial grasses to bridge over inevitable years of drought, bad weather, periodic insect infestations, and the occasional over grazing by large roaming herds of meat animals.
Annual row crops such as the feed corn used for industrialized beef production have been selected for entirely different characteristics. They have shallow roots that minimize plant’s own needs in order to favor the needs of the crop, and so do not develop deep roots which protect the soil from erosion or support the complex of micro organisms which store nutrients in the soil. Annual crops require applications of artificial fertilizers to yield crops of sufficient economic value to justify the investment in farm machinery which unlike most capital investments is used only a few weeks of a year. In wet years excess applied fertilizer follows the river drainages producing ocean ‘dead zones’ in ocean areas which previously were important sources of sustainable marine animal protein. Most importantly, annual row crops leave much of the soil surface exposed to wind and water erosion which removes soil particles at a rate higher than new soil can form, in effect mining a finite resource.
So while no forest has been burned in Iowa to produce meat, mining the soil to produce corn will inevitably reduce future food available for humans whether they prefer their food in the form of meat or vegetable. Somewhat counter intuitively, but given the differences in distribution of rainfall between natural forest lands and natural grass lands, burned over forests can be restored to trees long before soil mined grasslands can be restored to perennial grasslands.
In the context of “efficiency” you say “Factory farms are vastly more efficient.” But the concept of “efficiency” of agriculture here seems incompletely stated in a culture where the measure of efficiency of factory farms is by the standard economic model. This economic efficiency really only cares about monetary return on investment, using ideas that all monetized goods are fungible, and employs electronic currencies that have no reality beyond pixels on a screen. And all of which are accounted for on a time scale which says a dollar made today is worth more than a dollar made tomorrow; and where the long future is no farther distant than the next annual, or even quarterly, profit and loss report to the stock holders.
But food supplies are physical, not always fungible, perishable, require transport infrastructure, and operate on a time scale requiring a generation or more to fully measure the external costs which economic accounting does not address at all.
Perhaps you do mean a different idea of efficiency, but in my view there is not any measure of efficiency which would commend using efficiency as a motivation for increasing food production to feed a population of 7 billion people. We simply need some other measure of value beyond efficiency or maximization.
Those who have followed Dawkins are familiar with the recurrent laryngeal nerve which takes an evolutionarily inherited, but entirely inefficient, path in the mammalian body. But while not efficient the route is sufficient for the purpose of getting the nerve from the point where it originates to the point where it ends, and there is no need for evolution to go further to maximize the efficiency of routing. The existing route is satisfactory, and sufficient for the job.
So if evolution does not demand efficiency and maximization, it might be instructive to notice that for most of human life the living population never exceeded a few hundreds of millions. The minimal required population to maintain a robust human gene pool is reported to be only in the tens of thousands. A population of that size has been satisfactory, and sufficient for the job.
So now we come to a time in history where there is a wide spread desire to employ agricultural technologies that maximize food production efficiency in the short term, but are unsustainable on the time frame of just a few additional generations. The purpose of the program is to temporarily feed a population of 7 billion and yet still growing.
Is that desire for maximization and short term economic efficiency of food production the result of a moral imperative, or a rational argument, or merely the product of a pervasive dominionist theology desiring to maximize the number of souls invited to participate in their end of times event?
Thanks for your discussion of food production. It brings to mind Garret Hardin who mentioned two things often left aside in matters of natural resources and people. One was: “Like the Sorcerer’s apprentice, we learn the hard way that we can never do merely one thing.” We humans tend to see things as atomistic, and not so much as systematic.
Another Hardin aphorism was: “In the ecolate view of the world, time has no stop: every well meant proposal must be challenged by the question, “And then what?” “
This just blew my mind. I’m gonna have to fact check it a bit more but if everything checks out it will definitely change the way I think about meat.
Richard, there seems to be something a bit, shall I say, emotional with your argument when you say this:
I would hope you see this statement for what it is. When you are so emotional about an argument it cause you to lose the perception of even-handedness–just a caution my friend.
Now I can’t dispute your facts, nor do I wish to. I will continue studying this issue. I eat meat by the way. But I prefer it be grown organically and killed quickly.
Remember, we’re dealing with sentient animals who can feel pain. It behooves us to be as sure as we can that we are not inflicting upon them needless pain. As such we should be able to agree that abuses should be discouraged.
I agree. I was going to send this to a vegetarian friend of mine, but it’s a bit too emotional and insulting.
John, there is nothing wrong with being emotional. And I’m sure you agree, because you routinely get emotional on subjects you tackle as well. That’s actually entirely human. In fact, I think it is a little disingenuous to put on an air of being unemotional, since you are then only concealing from the reader what is actually motivating you. Even academic work would be better off if its emotion and biases were explicit rather than disguised behind a rhetoric of objectivity.
The aim should not be to eliminate emotion, but to check both sides of an argument first and make sure your facts and logic are correct, and then present that case. Objectivity is then produced by the reliability of the data used and the validity of the logic applied to it. That’s in fact what logic and standards of evidence are for: as a check against emotions and biases. Not as a way to eliminate them (which can never be done), but as a way to eliminate their effects.
“And don’t fucking smoke.”
But I wanna… ;(
I guess I’ll have to settle for smoking meat… 🙂
I’m pretty much OK with the ethics of traditional farming and ranching. The animals generally have a better life and a less painful and stressful death than their wild counterparts would have.
Some of the modern ‘intensive’ ranching methods, of keeping animals in crowded cages their entire lives, seem unnecessarily cruel, though.
There’s no easy solution that would eliminate animal suffering, though. Even raising vegetables and grain necessitates the death of countless small animals.
You make many good points which should cause me to reevaluate my positions and actions. The information about water usage is interesting, as is the issue with smoking being a factor in many early studies.
Of course I don’t agree with everything you say or imply. You express that anyone with compassion has a desire to minimize “pointless torment”, which (assuming you yourself are compassionate) implies a belief that any suffering caused by factory farming is necessary. While I’m willing to accept that factory farms aren’t necessarily as bad as the vegan propaganda suggests, I find it hard to believe that there isn’t a considerable amount of torment that occurs in them.
As for the statement
we do live in a capitalist society. A person’s money is effectively their vote, and while a single’s person’s money or vote is statistically insignificant a large number of people spending/voting the same way can effect change. (As an aside, I wonder why you felt this statement necessary, since it seems to be the only one in the post that attacks people rather than their ideas.)
I’ll end my rambling with a question, which is a serious one even though it may come across as inflammatory: Do you believe non-human animals have any inherent worth or worth beyond how they are useful to humans?
So much bias masquerading as rationality. But I question in particular three assertions.
1) “…destroying an animal humanely is not cruel.”
Tautology. “Humane” actions by definition are not cruel. However lacking in cruelty, destruction that lacks necessity is neither “rational” nor “not cruel.” Vegetarianism, veganism, et al. assert that necessity is a precondition for the humane destruction of animal life. And they don’t just assert the un-necessity of it from an armchair, they show it by living it.
Now you can no doubt find hypocritical, inefficient, and irrational examples of vegetarianism and veganism, but that search would just as biased an activity as vegetarians who cite examples of immoral factory farming.
2) “…an animal’s life…has no awareness of being something.”
Leaving aside the question of “How the hell do you know this?” (which you emphatically do not, by the way), this is a very funny reason to deny compassion to another creature. So you think that you, a contingent creature with some free archair time, can decree that a category to which you believe you belong and imagine others not to is the only criterium for compassion?
Anthropocentrism is just as irrational as anthropomorphism.
3)”I also find vegetarians irrational in their acceptance of non-vegetarians.”
So our only rational and moral choices are joining you for bacon cheeseburger lunches or all out war? Can’t we try some other modes, since we have some common causes and compassion with you meat-eating types. Some of us have spent most of our lives as meat eaters, how could we rationally deny others the courtesy of coming to their senses that we ourselves were allowed?
But since you seem to want asking for it, I will give you a little bombast and name-calling: That is the stupidist freaking false choice I have ever heard, Armcharrier.
Does that help?
Well said, Sierra.
Firstly, I’m glad to hear it. Secondly, PETA is a dogmatic organization anyway, sort of like anti-abortion movements. I can’t take them seriously. Thirdly, I’m kind of glad that I make my food choices based on quality as well as type. I eat some meat but I never eat fast food.
Americans have a huge obesity problem (and Australians do as well – I think we are catching up, but I don’t have the data). This has to do with so many factors that you can’t even start with the notion that meat is the problem. That’s crazy. However, the quality of meat that many Americans eat is not ideal, i.e. it’s grain-fed, not grass-fed.
It’s like choosing the wrong fuel for your engine – yes, it will work for a while, even a long while, but you could either burn an exhaust valve or break a piston ring.
Lifespan is not really the main thing I’m looking at. I’m looking at quality of life as well. The aim is to have the best of both. Hell, some drug addicts and smokers live to an average lifespan! So to talk about lifespan only is misleading (I’m not saying you are being misleading, though).
Over here in Australia I watched on TV a chicken farmer saying, with complete reassurance, that he only feeds his chickens small amounts of antibiotics, therefore we shouldn’t worry! Oh, dear. Well, you can see that there are pragmatic reasons for not eating meat. However, we buy chickens which are not fed antibiotics.
BTW it’s illegal here to feed animals hormones, which is worth noting because a few people take it for granted that meat has added hormones in it. Such is the side-effect of a global village: things which are not relevant to one society are perceived to be so, because we often all get our information from the same channels.
You’re kind of lucky and kind of not lucky. Unlucky because you can’t eat eggs. Lucky because you can’t drink milk. You might know this, but milk is in fact good for you as long as it isn’t processed. Processed milk is bad news (the casein clogs your intestines and your body can’t extract the calcium). You see how common wisdom doesn’t always catch up with modern reality.
It seems to me, especially after reading this piece, that when most people discuss issues like meat eating, all sorts of factors are confused with each other. If meat is unhealthy for a given person: it’s maybe because of the way it has been grown, not because of its inherent qualities; and because that person might be eating too much meat and not enough vegetables.
The indiscriminate use of antibiotics in agriculture is a problem regardless of whether anyone eats the resulting meat or not.
These are unsupported fact claims that you need to justify in order to be taken seriously:
“(the casein clogs your intestines and your body can’t extract the calcium).” Wrong on both points, showing an incredible lack of understanding of simple biology. NO, your intestines don’t get ‘clogged’. Normal peristalsis ensures that what you put in one end, comes out the other, unless you have certain underlying conditions. Processing the milk protects you from pathogens which may be present in the milk despite proper preparation and handling. Consider the high number of disease outbreaks and recalls in the raw milk industry. Processing the milk does nothing to your ability to absorb the calcium. It is the biological function of your intestines to absorb nutrients from your food, and processing the food will not prevent it.
I wonder if you have a reference for that. I’ve heard the claim before, but mostly the people saying it have been nutjobs, so I’m a bit wary of it.
What is it about processed milk that is supposedly bad for you?
Karim, just to clarify, that I can’t consume dairy doesn’t mean I can’t eat eggs. Eggs do not contain lactose (and accordingly they do no harm to me, and I haven’t developed an aversion to them). I realize that’s a confusion one can make, though, since dairy can mean lactose products alone, or eggs as well.
Nice post, some new information to take into account. But I am myself mainly a preference vegetarian. Just as some people are not into naturism I don’t like the thought of eating something that was once part of a quite sophisticated machine. If one could eat books, I wouldn’t devour them either. That seems tasteless to me. And the last time I checked such preferences didn’t count as particularly irrational. Therefore you shouldn’t make it sound like all vegetarians fit into a certain category.
And regarding your remarks about the “destruction” of animals. I think you are overconfident here that animals don’t have any awareness that would be considered morally significant by some people.
Nevertheless, I wish you would spend your time on more important topics. For example the examination of existential risk scenarios and if it is rational to to contribute money to organisations that try to research or mitigate them. I wrote you an email about it to obtain the opinion of someone who is well-read, who has the necessary education and does possess the right mindset to examine some claims that are being made regarding that topic.
As a long-time fan of Dr C, I have to say I’m taken aback by this attempt at rationality…
This article boils down to the following argument:
premise 1: Eating meat and meat products is not so bad
premise 2: Doing other things is just as bad.
Conclusion A: It’s ok to torture and kill animals for pleasure.
Even accepting the premises, the proper conclusion is to 1) not eat meat or meat products, because ‘not so bad’ is still bad. Premise two is a simple non sequitur as those other things are not mutually exclusive to a vegan lifestyle.
This comment isn’t room for a proper item-by-item, but readers should ask themselves if the dichotomies proposed are really valid. Is there really a conflict between showering and eating hamburgers? Would rainwater really be wasted if it weren’t diverted to the meat industry? Would it be impossible to find non-meat substitutes for animal byproducts. Is grain for cattle the only produce (or activity) that land could produce?
Also remember that all those mitigating circumstances, if true, are there only to justify a simple desire to munch on a steak. That’s not “rational” meat-eating, it’s “rationalized” meat-eating.
And contrary to the sensational warning about “endlessly bizarre behavior,” I think opting out of meat-products for food is a pretty simple life change. It’s only made difficult by the influence of culture, tradition, and authority in forcing this ancient practice on a populace that is ready to evolve (sound familiar?).
To answer the specific question of why veg*ns are so tolerant towards others, it’s simply due to the weight of culture and our ability to recognize the limits of personal suggestion. 25,000 kids died in Africa today, and that’s one of many tragedies, but I do what I can to make the world a better place. That’s perspective. No amount of tearing at my eyes when someone eats a hamburger will change their heart. But I might remind them that it’s not the best life we could live, and maybe they’ll think better of it the next time.
Richard, you neglected to mention the number of voles, mice, birds, snakes etc killed in the process of planting crops. The machine in preparing the field, digs down about a foot, killing everything in its way down to that level. If PETA were sincere about their concerns for animal, they would make sure every field is prepared and every crop planted by hand. Until they do, they have animal murder on their hands with every meal they eat…
Eat more venison! I am a hunter and, believe me, we hunters get a lot of grief for what we do. But, one thing is for certain, when I sit down to eat, I know an animal died so that I could have nourishment. No sanitized cello wrapped package that doesn’t remotely bring to mind a living creature. For any creature living on this planet, for you to live, something else has to die. Everyone has blood on their hands, I can just see mine.
Denialism at its most erudite but least informed.
This is a surprising factual claim. Where are the citations? In fact, where are the explanations of what specific claims you’re even refuting here? What you’ve said is something that could take a whole series of articles to document; what series of articles did you read while researching this post?
Can you make this argument without constructing a strawman? Or at least tell us which people advanced this position?
[citation needed] again, even if you happen to have an advanced degree in zoology. Animal behavior is actually a huge field of scientific inquiry, not something people casually assert with a wave of the hand. Also, do they enjoy de-beaking without anesthetic?
An argument from your own willful ignorance is not compelling. Which philosophers have you read? How did you refute their arguments?
Are you not aware that many animals demonstrate various degrees of self-awareness and reaction to each other’s death? Or do you not care whether the words you’re using actually mean anything in particular? Again, this requires far more citations than zero.
Now aside from not having done any research, it’s clear you don’t even know what issue you’re talking about anymore. Local food != vegetarianism. In fact, had you read your own citation (actually it’s just a blog post that links to more respectable sources), you’d realize most of the evidence contained therein concerns vegetables, not meat.
So basically you’re saying animals are a perpetual motion machine. Rather than lose 90% of the energy at each link in the food chain, we can simply hook up the waste from the top to the feeders at the bottom, and suddenly the system is more efficient than if we cut out the middleman. Take that to the patent office.
Ah, I was wondering when the global-warming denial was coming. You really like to make an argument from numbers and then stop using those numbers as soon as they’re inconvenient:
Oh? Which fertilizer are you talking about? How much methane and NOX does it emit? I thought this was about numbers.
Can you back up your armchair analysis, with, you know, a [citation]? Do you think it is inconsistent with the study that found changing from a carnivorous to a vegetarian diet would confer roughly the same reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as switching from an SUV to a Prius? (Eshel & Martin 2005) Or is there something we should know about showers?
I thought you were against local food. Now you’re for it? Pick a side on this irrelevant and distracting separate issue, please.
Are you sure you understand how industries work? They don’t just make meat because they want to; they do it because someone is going to buy it. If demand decreases, production will react. Sure, you’re just one person in a sea of millions; but by that logic, voting in a presidential election is a meaningless protest too. Except you don’t even have to leave your home to eat less meat.
I would like another [citation] for your claim that vegetarians do not consider workers’ rights in their buying decisions.
I don’t want to alarm you, but every statistical finding has a confidence interval and many of them are wide. The data do not confirm a benefit lower than 38% either.
So that was an interesting review of a single study. (Well, not really; you just got tripped up on statistical interpretations of the findings, without even going into the soundness of the methods.) Have you looked at more than one? Have you looked at a meta-analysis? The Wikipedia article on “vegetarian nutrition” has 47 sources.
And how much do your odds improve if you stop eating red herring? (Actually, it’s probably not negligible; fish in general carry a risk of heavy-metal poisoning and smoked fish in particular raise the risk of stomach cancer, because of smoking again.)
…
No conclusion? Well, I’ll write one: it’s amazing that you’re able to write at such length about so many issues having done almost no research (or in the most important cases, zero) on any of them, and with a casual disdain toward even the notion that factual claims ought to be resolved by evidence. What a sad day for skepticism.
I’ll just leave this here. Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler
Also, it’s good to remember ”it is always easier to deny reality than to watch your worldview get shattered”.
Shameful that a site about freethought would waste electrons publishing what amounts to the equivalent of religious apologetics in regards to eating tortured, environment killing, factory farmed meat.
I wonder if it has occurred to Richard Carrier that perhaps vegetarians in general do not treat meat-eaters as pariahs because they do not make the error he attributes to them of regarding non-human animals as people; and although they prefer not to eat meat, and in many cases would prefer others not to eat meat, nonetheless admit that it’s possible to disagree with their views and still be a decent human being. But no; that would be a rational, civilized attitude to a difference in ethical judgment, and Carrier assures us that vegetarians are irrational.
Brief response to your claim about the global warming effects:
1. The initial debate was over whether it is ethical to become a vegetarian. If everyone in the world could and did become a vegetarian, that would significantly improve greenhouse gas emissions. You could not then arbitrarily limit your investigation only to modern factory farms and neglect meat consumption over the entire world.
2. Your entire argument is a red herring. I claimed that eating meat contributes to global warming. You then cite a statistic that the total impact meat has on global warming is 18%, arguing that it is closer to 2% if we only include modern factory farms. Guess what? At 2%, eating meat still contributes to global warming. You have not proven your case!
3. You say:
“…what gets used for animal husbandry (e.g. fertilizing pastures) would still be used if the same land were used for crops (in fact crops are more fertilizer intensive), so this is not in fact anything we’d get back if we stopped animal farming. And when you subtract that element, too, now you end up with just 6% of manmade emissions coming from actual animal farming…”
Why is it you think that if we stopped animal farming, we’d then use that land for crops? I find that a dubious assumption, because the only reason we use so much land for crops is because we use it as feed for animals. Am I misreading your argument here? It doesn’t seem to me you can just subtract this element.
4. Finally, in regards to your point that encouraging vegetarianism and veganism wouldn’t help, and we should therefore seek other solutions that are more likely to work (i.e., when you advise us to learn game theory). You compare it to voting for a third party candidate. (I’d argue that it’s more like voting in general, as your individual vote is quite negligible and the two viable parties are practically clones of each other, but that’s an entirely separate debate!) I think the problem with your argument here is that game theory is not an ethical theory, and I think many ethical theories wouldn’t require an action to have a worldwide, far-ranging positive effect to be considered ethical. The fact is, if vegetarianism or veganism were universalized, the world would probably be a better place in terms of environmental damage, animal suffering, and so on. So yes, you argue that it is “rational” to try actions that would actually be effective. (Although, by your own admission, factory farming contributes 2% to global warming, among other environmental problems, and therefore eating less meat or no meat would be effective!) But that does not mean that the ETHICAL thing to do is something that must be realizable. It would be quite ETHICAL if everyone were to stop killing each other. The fact that this is not realizable doesn’t make it unethical.
“If everyone in the world could and did become a vegetarian, that would significantly improve greenhouse gas emissions.”
No, it wouldn’t. That’s my point. The data simply don’t support that conclusion, not least because not eating meat results in picking up other behaviors to replace it that causes the same or greater emissions. The net effect is simply negligible.
This is the number one most common error committed by environmentalists with an obsession against some particular industry: they don’t stop to consider what the effect will be of ending that industry. Some behavior will replace it. Will that behavior actually produce fewer emissions? By how much?
The number two most common error is a failure to consider the realistic prospect of ending an industry vs. improving its efficiency. Ending an industry is almost always a pipe dream. Not least because now a major consumer driving industry expansion worldwide is China, and sorry, but our influence on the populace of China is a tick above zilch. Whereas an innovation that improves efficiency pricks up everyone’s ears the world over. The Chinese are as interested in spending less and making more money as anyone. So ongoing work to derive usable energy from cattle methane production, which turns shit into cash at great reduction in emissions (compared to using that shit as fertilizer), is something you should support. Vegetarianism, not. You may as well vote for Nader in 2000. Just look what that did to us.
The number three most common error is sucking at math. All activity produces greenhouse gases. Just your breathing does. Animals do. The earth by itself does. The very rocks produce emissions. As well as all the other things we do (from drive to shower to turning on the lights to manufacturing medical instruments to mining metal, to what have you). Thus saying “it produces emissions, therefore it’s bad” is retarded. Even cavemen produced greenhouse gas emissions…before they even invented fire! That’s why a 2% emission share is insignificant. If you want to worry about emission levels, there are far more important industries to focus on, especially the power sector (coal burning) and the transportation sector (cars and trucks and planes and ships and trains).
Although, again, even pedestrians and bicyclists produce emissions: a bicycle is not even ten times more emissions-efficient than a high-mileage car, and a car moves far more weight than a bicycle, e.g. furniture, bags of groceries, emergency equipment, and is far faster and safer to boot, and all-weather, and more suitable for anyone tired, handicapped, injured, or ill, e.g. if you have to take someone to a hospital, you’re screwed if all you have is a bicycle. So within the “car sector” bicycles would produce 10% emissions if we replaced all transport in the U.S. with bicycles and other man-powered vehicles, and since the transport sector produces something like 27% of U.S. emissions, 10% of 27% is 2.7%, it follows that eliminating the transportation industry would produce more emissions than eating meat! Granted, that calculation assumes all transport is high-mileage, but that’s precisely why we should aim to make that so. The point is, everything produces emissions, so perspective is in order.
“I find that a dubious assumption, because the only reason we use so much land for crops is because we use it as feed for animals.”
Not that much land is used “to produce feed for animals” because most “feed for animals” is the waste product from land used to produce “feed for people.” If we got rid of the animals, we’d have all that waste and we’d have to dispose of it somehow and it would just produce emissions in the process (even if we just left it lying around somewhere). Moreover, while we could divert then some of the supplementary food to people, that would barely equal the food needed to replace the meat (and dairy), and yet we need the hundreds of other non-food products we get from animals (especially but not only fertilizer for human-consumption crops), which we’d have to generate agriculturally or synthetically, either way by massive emissions generation, and no doubt land cultivation. And to top it all off, unless you intend to become Stalin and shoot people who don’t comply with your wishes, land owners stuck with land they can’t grow meat on, will use that land for something else. Most likely, a cash crop. All of that is why eliminating the manure does not eliminate the emissions associated with it. By contrast, making manure more efficient (e.g. by taking unused manure and generating electrical power with it using a low emissions process) is something a landowner will readily get behind because it makes money out of stuff he otherwise already has, and in fact could make animals into an emissions sink, i.e. by replacing the high-emissions coal production of electricity, in relative effect a biomass facility subtracts emissions rather than adds them. It’s obvious what is the better plan to promote: the elimination of meat production, or the implementation of biomass power production. One of those has a chance of succeeding. The other has none. Exactly the point I made.
…the two viable parties are practically clones of each other
That’s another irrational myth, which is doubly irrational coming from an atheist (I’m not assuming you are an atheist, I’m just making the point “if you are”). The single most important thing a president does is appoint members to the Supreme Court. There is absolutely no sense whatever in which the two parties are clones of each other when assessing the effect of that one variable, which is huge (once a seat is filled it stays filled for fifty years, thus it’s the most powerful thing a President can ever do and the more he is in office the more he can exercise that power). The Bush administration almost took over the Supreme Court. They are just one justice away from a majority opposition to freedom of religion, separation of church and state, and free speech, among other things. Your rights hang in the balance. The second most important thing a president does is appoint people to run the many departments of the Federal government. Republicans appoint party-dogmatic incompetent cronies, because for them holding office is about power (remember Brownie?), whereas Democrats appoint competent professionals who believing in increasing efficiency and defending American liberties, because for them holding office is about competence and responsibility (although their second criterion is cronyism, they don’t let that supplant the first criterion: are they skilled and knowledgeable and experienced and care about doing a good job and not trampling American liberties). That’s why Clinton balanced the budget and Bush blew it out of the water: Clinton devoted considerable attention to trimming the federal government and decreasing its cost by increasing its efficiency; Obama has been re-implementing those same policies that Bush put a stop to. You don’t hear about this because the press doesn’t report on it. Yet it’s the second most important way a president affects us, and on this measure there is again a huge difference between the two parties. Even their attitude toward war differs substantially: compare Iraq with Libya, just in terms of American lives lost and money spent. Though both are hawks, that doesn’t make them even remotely the same in total effect. You can find similar differences almost across the board, e.g. both politic too much in writing bills and both are in the pocket of moneyed interests, and yet the Democrats still believe in compromise and negotiation, whereas the Republicans do not. The difference is that bills produced by Democrats, for all their faults, are less harmful to society overall, and more gets done by them than by Republicans. I could go on. But the point is, to say a vote doesn’t count because there is no difference between the two parties is rank bullshit.
…game theory is not an ethical theory…
Game theory is the foundation of all true ethical theories. This has been well understood by scientists studying the biological and cultural evolution of morality now for some time. See my selection of books on the subject, as well as (more directly): Game Theory and the Social Contract Vol. 1 (MIT Press, 1994) and Vol. 2 (MIT Press, 1998).
The reason you should heed it is that it works. Proposals that benefit both business and the environment are the proposals most likely to be implemented and widely effected. In fact, by a large margin. The issue is also not analogous to murder, where each murder is a moral evil, because eating meat is not comparable to murder, in fact it is ethically neutral when one attends to humane treatment and efficiency. Thus advocating the elimination of meat does nothing even if realized, and also does nothing because it will never be realized. Whereas advocating improved efficiency and treatment does a lot, and not least because it will be realized, in fact it is already being realized. And we could have a lot more if we turned our advocacy to that instead of useless gestures. The analogy is thus more comparable to this: you can try to stop violence by telling them we should all just believe in peace and love, or you can stop violence by finding behaviors that mutually benefit the perpetrator and victim, e.g. solutions to conflicts that benefit both parties. In other words, actually solving their problem. One of those strategies works and thus is worth pursuing. The other doesn’t, and therefore isn’t.
I was glad to find this, as the morality of my own decision to eat meat has been bothering me for some time now, and it has been a source of some discussion in the Humanist community as to whether to embrace vegetarianism as an institution. I think your analyses of the nature of factory farming and the environmental costs are extremely valuable, and I look forward to using some of the data you present next time I discuss the issue.
Where I think your response is weakest, though, is when you address the potential moral requirement to be compassionate toward animals (which, troubling for me, is the most salient issue in my mind). You argue that we should not anthropomorphize animals in ways which mislead us regarding our moral responsibilities towards them. Agreed. But you then seem to jump from that point to the idea that “being a vegetarian out of “compassion” is irrational”.
This is a non sequitur. We may be morally required to be compassionate toward animals as animals, even understanding that they are not much like human beings. You yourself seem to accept we have some moral responsibilities toward animals when you say “eating animals is fine as long as you aren’t torturing them”. But the question is easily posed, if torturing animals is wrong, why is killing them to eat them, when it is not absolutely necessary, not wrong? Your response to the Christian on godcontention.org also fails to address this potential criticism. It seems to me many intelligent vegetarians understand that killing an animal to consume it, when you could get food from non-animal sources, is not as bad as killing a person, but still wrong (because it causes pain and unnecessary suffering, including death, to the animal).
There are other problems in your argument (such as the establishment of a false dilemma in your discussion of vegetarian’s response to meat eaters, and a rather odd statement on godcontention.org that “unlike humans, pigs have evolved to be consumed” – what moral relevance does that have, and this seems a strange view of evolution). But the main problem I see if this failure to really grapple with the “why cause animals unnecessary suffering?” question.
In short, why is it wrong to torture animals, as you grant, but not wrong to kill them?
First let me say I’m so glad to see you here at FTB, what a welcome addition.
Secondly, thanks for a rational, well thought out article. I gave up some years ago arguing with vegans (a belief that is akin to a religion for many adherents) or vegetarians (who for the most part are simply on a restricted diet) but it is really nice to have a sensible, understandable and compact resource to call upon on the rare instances I find myself in an argument about the benefits of vegetarianism. Much appreciated.
You make it sound like clean floors and some fresh air is enough to make factory farming ethical and moral. But you conveniently leave out everything else. Animals are bred to the point where their anatomy can’t support their weight. 75% of all factory farmed chickens have walking impairment from their grotesque bodies and clearly show that they are in pain. 4% of all chickens die from sudden death syndrome, another 5% from ascites (fluids filling up the body). This doesn’t exist in wild chickens. Factory farmed chickens live their entire 42 day long lives on concrete floors and 24 hour light to maximize their growth. They are pushed to the brink of death without going over the edge and of course with the aide of medicines. Ultimately the corporation ONLY care about the profit. No one has to go on about this topic to realize factory farming is unethical and immoral. If this doesn’t convince you there is a lot more data confirming the cruelty that goes on.
“The grain used to feed cattle, for instance, amounts to 98% of the water consumption involved in beef and dairy production ”
Exactly. It takes a tremendous amount of water, space, and energy to make the feed for the animals we consume. For every pound of beef it takes 2,400 gallons of water. For one pound of vegetables about 2 gallons. It takes 20 times more fossil fuels to make one pound of beef compared to one pound of vegetables.
I have yet to see a single study saying that the consumption of meat have any benefits over a vegan diet. There are tremendously many more benefits than just heart disease prevention. Vegans may only live a few more years than meat eaters, but will enjoy the last two decades of their lives more than meat eaters. It’s not only about length of life, but quality of life.
“1.2 times lower mortality on one single illness”
Considering heart disease is a leading cause of death in America I wouldn’t disregard the 20% lower chance of dying. If everybody were vegans we could have saved 120,000 people last year. And you forgot to mention the numerous studies that say a vegan diet can prevent and reverse many cancers.
Anyways, I disagree with pretty much everything you blogged about.
I like to live my life on the principle of least harm. I prefer not to push old ladies into traffic, torture puppies or eat meat (not that they are in any way equivalent). I view the ethics of eating meat as being largely morally neutral. It is a personal choice. Like having sex with members of the same or a different sex it makes no difference to me but I’m not about to switch my preference.
A lot of the common arguments for meat eating and for vegetarianvegan diets are blown out of all proportion. The fact though (and the evidence supports this) is that most people in the west eat too much meat to have a healthy diet. Eating less meat (eating less in general) would improve their health and longevity. They should also drink plenty of water and exercise a bit more than they are. Oh and give up smoking. It’s a filthy habit.
A lot of veggies and meat eaters spend their time arguing over the absolute value of their own preference, not admitting that it is merely a preference.
My preference may well be irrational though I think that they are. I don’t like the smell of meat, I don’t like the idea of eating something that used to walk around (or swim around) and I don’t like the processing and storage practices even though you say they are much better than they were years ago or how PETA portray them. I figure that my irrational actions (if they are actually irrational) don’t hurt anyone, not even me, so what is the harm?
If we all turned vegetarian almost all farm animals would be killed, they are only alive so we can eat them. So how does turning vegetarian help animals?
As an aside, a friend has a farm on which he keeps 16,000 chickens in a huge shed. They are free to go in or out all day onto a 40 acre area of grassland set aside for them, but almost all choose to stay inside the shed where they feel safe. Animals are not people and have completely different requirements for contentment, most farmers pander to these as it improves productivity.
I think a widely prevalent concept (albeit unspoken) throughout this post is the false equivalence between the PITA crowd and vegetarians in general. Many rational vegetarians for example are proponents for ethical animal research as well as genetically modified crops. Meanwhile, the PITA crowd is anti-science, pro-violence, and has a possible religious fanaticism for animal welfare. Those folks absolutely need to be challenged though claiming they represent all vegetarians is really more of a straw man argument. Yes, pro science vegetarians are a minority but we are likely very much so enriched on this forum and you might do well in future posts to distinguish between the two camps.
You also have other poor rhetorical arguments in your post including red herrings (smoking), cherry picking (ignoring environmental effects of fisheries, and comparing Iowa beef to winter tomatoes), bad statistics (using the 6% lower limit of a 95% confidence range), poor epidemiology (6% of a widely prevalent disease is in fact very important!), bad medicine (heart disease elevation is caused by obesity not other diseases being cured) and overall ambiguity (what exact diet are you proposing?).
Please ground your thread with a real recommendation that can be supported or disproven. There is a world of a difference between eating meat once a week and 2-3 times per day and between Blue Fin Tuna and Iowa beef.
Thanks,
Teddy MD
PS Claiming that eating meat is ethical because animal abuse only happens occasionally may not not be as convincing of an argument as you seem to think.
This was a very interesting post, and I am glad to have something from you that I may disagree with. I’m not going to argue about the ethics since I don’t disagree there, and the environmental impact isn’t a large enough reason to change lifestyles (compared to, say, driving a more efficient car). But there are some things about the health benefits that do not seem quite right.
One thing I noticed from the study you mentioned is a comparison of the body mass indices between vegetarians and omnivores; while the latter were fatter, the average BMI of those omnivores (~25) is significantly lower than it is for the average American (~28). Americans and other affluent nations have been getting fatter, and that is hard to do on a vegan diet.
Nonetheless, the study tried to normalize for the confounding factor of BMI, and vegans/vegetarians are usually leaner. This means that when you ignore the benefits of the leaner diet, there is still that 24% improvement; compare it then to the average American with their higher weight, and it seems vegetarians are looking good.
As for the risks of the vegan/vegetarian diet, the easy solution is variety. If you just eat fruits, you’re doomed; if you just eat carrots, you’re doomed. If you eat a variety, which all diets should include, then you are OK for the most part. The vitamin deficiencies can be a problem, though the only one that vegans cannot really get is B12. However, I have a cheap multi-vitamin that costs 2 cents a pill. Hardly a bad cost. I should note that vegans tend to fall into quackery and think vitamins up the wazoo is great, but I know that, at best, you get expensive pee. Nonetheless, with a variety of foods and a cheap multi-vitamin, the risks are avoided.
There are some other sources I have been going through, and best I can tell it isn’t quackery. There is the diet recommended by Dr. Esselstyn in “Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease” which causes cholesterol numbers to become so low that future heart problems are significantly reduced (he claims you become heart-attack proof, but such a strong word is beyond what the evidence can really justify). Supplementing this is the book “The China Study” which is a summary of a lot of published papers examining diets in China and showing vegan lifestyles conferred notable improvements in cancer risk as well as in heart-related problems. I have not found material in the peer-review literature showing these studies to be bunk, but I am no expert. I have also talked with a dietitian about this lifestyle, and he agrees that, after addressing the risks mentioned above, this is good stuff.
And for those vegetarians that smoke: get your nicotine from eggplants instead (though you need a lot of them).
Gilgamesh, “getting fatter” is a diet-wide problem, not a meat problem. Eating a healthy diet with meat in it is fine. You don’t have to jump all the way to vegetarianism to get the same effect. Indeed, as you are far more likely to maintain a balanced diet than a pleasure-deprived and management-heavy vegetarian one, vegetarianism is actually a bad medical recommendation. You should advise people to take up healthy diets that they have a high probability of maintaining. If you are interested in maximum social benefit, that is. That’s just basic statistics. Moreover, it is crucial to health that you exercise. If you keep the weight off only by eating vegetarian, that is a net bad for your health. If you maintain weight by consuming healthy high energy meat as part of a balanced diet and then exercising in proportion, that is a net good for your health.
As for the “China study” see my earlier comment and the comment it links to. Then read the critiques of China Study, which do not make it look like a credible study to me. It commits all the standard errors that make such work useless to the public, all driven by an obsessive bias against meat. See The Truth about the China Study (which notes, among other things, that the data in the study itself don’t support what it’s authors claim), The China Study: Fact or Fallacy (which is pretty thorough), Harriet Hall on The China Study (she’s a notable skeptic with an M.D.), and The China Study vs. The China Study (pretty devastating, and yet critically checks the critics, too).
I think you admitted the environment is negatively impacted, just not much as someone else said. If so, eating less is better. Not sure you admitted that. It’s not a sin to eat meat in my book, but less would help. I usually try to think of how much land I could take out of agriculture, and how much less fertilizer might be used. Dose is what matters.
Oh, I wondered how much of the effects of cattle grazing on national forest land you have personally seen or heard of.
Similarly for the health effects, less might be better for most people in the U.S.
On the ethics part, I conclude it is ethical to kill and eat humans, and there’s the extra plus of gaining an evolutionary advantage. I suggest eating those less related to you. I eat meat. Three deer inhabit my freezer, along with domestic turkey, ducks, chickens and rabbits, all of which I personally killed.
1)
This writer is simply angered about vegetarians being different. There is very little evidence of what he is saying, it is simply bitching. He makes endless assumptions that come from nowhere
just from his own little head. Vegetarians are delusional because they hang out with meat eaters? It doesn’t take much of a mind to think this one through. People who consume meat don’t directly kill the animals they eat (usually). Its not like hanging out with the “child molester”. It is true that I don’t want to befriend a person who kills animals directly but i understand that our culture and society has a major influence on how each of us eats and I simply treat people who eat meat as individuals who have yet to understand the true awfulness and environmental damage they support.
2)
His sources are simply based on blog posts and simple news articles.
3)
It is also a weak argument to state that corporate farming is more efficient. It might be efficient in the one sense that it distributes the food “demanded” at all times of the year better but efficiency doesn’t account for the damage done to the world, the humans and the ecosystems. Our corporatization of the world has been one of the direct cause of obesity (see Japan as a great example).
4)
Dogs aren’t carnivores
5)
vegetarians don’t necessarily DEMAND localization of food. Being vegetarian and being an environmentalist can be two completely different things, they just happent to work on similar issues at the same time on occasion.
6)
Even from his very own source he uses about water footprint where he said he based almost all of his research and math on….he made this article sound like it supported the consumption and expansion of this consumption of meat around the world when really, in this direct article he used, it literally has an entire paragraph in the conclusion stating: “Managing the demand for animal products by promoting a dietary shift away from a meat-rich diet will be an
inevitable component in the environmental policy of governments”. This report is mostly about the loss of freshwater and the damage meat production has on water supply. haha
7)
I looked at the “study” he uses in the last section on mortality. He used one study and it is a very very flawed study. The “study” he talks about is a compilation of 5 studies from all different groups around the world. You can’t combine them all into one and say “Ta daaaaa”. They are each prospective cohort studies and very specific towards groups of people (7th day Adventists, British Vegetarian Shoppers magazine subscribers etc.) They are each very different from each other and are certainly very different from the general population of vegetarians.
Second, doing studies on mortality disregards the entire point of my argument for vegetarianism. It isn’t about who dies first, who outlasts the other. It is about quality of life or more specifically life-years lost to the consumption of meat over time. Unfortunately, only until recently has their been studies funded by the US government on vegetarianism.
>The strong drive they have to maintain their lifestyle seems attached to a belief that animal lives are “only slightly less valuable” than human lives and that killing them is a revoltingly awful thing to do.<
-That's the impression I've gotten from the few vegetarians I've met. Personally, I see animal consumption as neither good nor evil (inhumane treatment and torture of animals is a far different story and I abhor both). Using logic that maintains animals having value slightly less than humans, shouldn't vegetarians argue to stop animals from consuming one another? What's the difference between my consumption of a salmon fillet and a bear consuming the same fish? Both are done for survival. Should I not eat the fish simply b/c I can consider the implications of eating an animal?
I’ve had this same sort of discussion so many times, and I’ve done my own entry on my blog on the subject. I’m actually one of those people who is thoroughly unimpressed by appeals to emotion and appeals to environmental concerns with regards to vegetarianism and veganism. I took a slightly different approach than you did and specifically focused more on the fact that there are ways to address those issues without having to give up those foods. For instance, even if you’re concerned about the cruelty of factory farms (and such things do exist), that’s fine… that’s reason to support better regulation thereof, purchase meat from farms which do not engage in such practices. Yes, it means having to do a lot of homework and probably having to spend a great deal more money, but it is actually a movement which could gain better traction because you’re not forcing people out of their comfort zone into an entirely new diet, but into some shift in the balance thereof.
Most of the “health” arguments I hear are about people comparing the stereotypical American diet with vegetarian/vegan diets, and the problem here is that the stereotypical American diet would qualify as *excessive* meat consumption, which is a very good way to skew the results. If you try to do the same comparison for a variety of populations in other countries which tend to have a more balanced load of proteins, I don’t think you’d find the same trend.
The thing that kind of surprises people whenever I get into these arguments is that they don’t expect me, of all people, to weigh in in this fashion… mainly because I’m a vegetarian myself. And my own reason for vegetarianism is pretty simple — I eat what I happen to like. I grew up in a part of the world and in a culture which has been vegetarian for a very long time, and as a result I, like most people, am pretty well conditioned to like that kind of food.
About the only solid argument that I can’t really refute, only because I can attest to it myself is that vegetarianism is generally lower on the cost of living scale. Of course, this is only true within some boundaries. It is not as likely to be true if you go as far in your activism to include all sorts of organically or locally grown goods, or you feel the need to buy all sorts of exotic ingredients from health food shops and so on. At that point, you’re going into the realm of the unsupportable. There are better ways to handle it.
I agree that there is nothing immoral about eating meat. I believe it was national geographic that did a documentary on what happens when predators are taken out of an environment: the herbivores over eat and ruin ecosystems. This happened at Yellowstone: what was once lush in the early 20th century had become barren by the 90s. Wolves were reintroduced. They killed the excessive deer, and the ecosystem recovered. Hence, meat eaters are necessary and herbivores shouldn’t be made into idealized animals.
I disagree with the morality of industrial farming: it uses far too many antibiotics (increasing the number of drug resistance bacteria), it uses too many hormones (which get excreted and get into water supplies, and because of antibiotic ineffectiveness, non organic meat is flushed with ammonia to kill disease. The conditions, contrary to the post, are immoral too. Commercial farms get as many animals as possible next to one another. You know, the profit motive that drive all corporations. Overcrowding is a problem. That is why antibiotics have to be used in chicken farming. Crowding leads to epidemic disease.
I suggest that everyone enjoy their meat. I do. But, I buy meat from pasture raised animals. It cost more, but tastes better and is more nutritious. (More nutritious because cows evolved eating grass; chickens evolved eating bugs.) For me, the quality of life of the animal is just as important. Life in a pasture is better than life in a cage. Eating pasture raised is kind of a no brainer.
@Richard: The pooled analysis by Key et al that you cited suffers from the inclusion of the Health Food Shoppers Study, which was of such poor quality that I’m not sure it deserves to be called a “study.” I thought that there has been a more recent pooled analysis that excluded this study, and included a recent large European cohort study, but I can’t seem to find it right now in Pubmed.
Although not a study of vegetarians per se, Sinha et al [1] recently studied the effect of consuming red, processed, and white meat on all-cause and cause-specific mortality in a huge US cohort. Men and women in the highest vs the lowest quintile of red meat intake had, respectively, 31% and 36% percent higher risk of death from all causes combined, with a highly significant monotonic trend across quintiles. There were modest increases in risk for processed meats and modest decreases in risk for white meat.
@Gilgamesh: The China Health Study was of dubious quality as well, being a cross-sectional ecologic study. Google “ecologic(al) fallacy” for details.
Jay
1. Sinha R, et al. Meat Intake and Mortality: A Prospective Study of Over Half a Million People. Arch Intern Med. 2009; 169(6):562–571.
@jt512
I cannot comment on your comments about one of the vegetarian studies, so I’ll skip to your quick statement about the China Study. However, I think the study you were looking for that excluded the Health Food Shoppers Study is Keys et al. Mortality in vegetarians and nonvegetarians: detailed findings from a collaborative analysis of 5 prospective studies. Am J Clin Nutr. 1999 Sep;70(3 Suppl):516S-524S.
I agree that an ecological study is not sufficient to prove causation. It can strongly show correlations, however, and if a cause can be provided then it gains support. And in particular, before this study was done one of the researchers, T. Colin Campbell, had done rat and mice research showing a correlation between certain cancers and the protein casein (from milk) and also showed the mechanism for why it could be a promoter of the disease. Since there is a mechanism and there are the correlations from the China Study, then it does not commit the ecological fallacy.
So, I think you are dismissing the research on this point rather hastily.
Also, the study you cite about differences in types of meat consumption, there is the issue that high meat protein diets can also increase disease risks, so switching from higher fat to higher protein meat diets could cause a net wash, and the rather modest differences in the mortality rates of these diets would seem to suggest that that is the case.
The problem with all these kinds of arguments is that there are disease and cancer risks associated with nearly every food. Thus shifting diet around often has no net effect, which is my point. Hence this is exactly the result we find when we look at lifetime diet effects on mortality: most studies show no effect at all, and even the most promising show only a negligible effect. Obsessing over single variables like “milk” is therefore a waste of time. Or “red meat” even. When compared to real disease factors, like smoking, it just looks ridiculous. When normal milk or moderate red meat consumption increases mortality by more than three years, be concerned. Until then, face reality: it’s just insignificant. That’s why looking at a 33% increased risk of a disease is to obsess too much. If it’s 200%, then you have a serious problem. 100%, something to ponder. But 33% washes out in the sea of random variables affecting mortality.
That’s the result of the studies on heart attack: a 33% increase in heart attack might sound bad until you look at actual mortality and find people who avoid that factor die at basically the same age on average anyway, so the fact that their deaths are 33% more often from that kind of heart attack actually means nothing. Were it not that, it just would have been something else. Cancer risks are similar: get rid of one kind, and you just get another. That’s why you can’t obsess over single diseases like that (unless the factor is huge, hence the point of my smoking comparison). You have to look at total mortality (and life quality, although that is usually always comparable unless you are suffering from a much more severe causal agent, like processed tobacco or plutonium). When you see mortality is not significantly altered, then it just doesn’t matter whether there is a 33% increase in a certain kind of heart attack or a certain kind of cancer, because clearly removing one agent just introduces another (thus causing zero net effect in mortality).
Jt512, see my related comment. The Sinha study only got those results for “high intake” of red meat (and processed meat, e.g. hot dogs), not moderate (normal) consumption. The latter had no appreciable effect on mortality. Which is exactly my point. Eat healthy. Then meat is irrelevant.
Richard Carrier wrote (December 13, 2011):
Update: A new large-scale prospective cohort study has found that there is a significant linear positive relationship between the amount of red meat consumed and death rates from heart disease, cancer, and all causes. Compared with the lowest quintile of red meat intake, each higher quintile had a significantly higher risk of death.
This study suggests that there is no good level of red meat intake. The less red meat one eats, the better.
Can you cite the study so I can go read it?
(Make sure you aren’t talking about the same study already addressed in previous comments.)
Sorry, I meant to. Must have spaced it out.
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/archinternmed.2011.2287
Regarding what you just cited, “Red Meat Consumption and Mortality: Results From 2 Prospective Cohort Studies” by Pan et al. (Archives of Internal Medicine, March 12, 2012):
This only covers red meat, not all meat or animal products (in fact, the study says consumption of other meats reduced mortality, i.e. it made people live longer), and it only found a 1.07-1.20 difference in overall mortality. This is a variance I find suspicious; that looks like they are tweaking things–they chose a 95% confidence interval, which is oddly low; it means there is a 1 in 20 chance their results are false, which with a cohort in the tens of thousands is a suspicious choice for them to make. With a data-set that large, you should be able to do a 99% or higher CI. So why didn’t they? And what are the results at that CI? I suspect the answer is that no arguable difference in mortality was shown at 99% CI, so they chose 95% in order to get the number they wanted.
At 95% they found the difference could be as low as 7%, which means, for example, if average life expectancy is 78, someone who eats a serving of red meat every day of their life (which is not advisable anyway; that is excessive), or more, will die on average at 72. That’s not exactly a huge difference. And remember, this was at 95% CI. Mathematically, this difference will shrink at 99% CI (I suspect it will shrink to near zero, or to only a one or two year difference in mortality, just as all other studies have shown).
Worse, their control was not vegetarians, but low-red-meat consumers (people who ate one red meat serving every two days, or less). Which means in fact this study does not even attempt to show any difference in mortality between non-red-meat eaters and reasonable red-meat-eaters. That difference was probably zero.
This is why it is important to actually read these studies, before drawing conclusions from them. Which was one of the very points in my original post.
Regarding “Red Meat Consumption and Mortality: Results From 2 Prospective Cohort Studies” by Pan et al. (Archives of Internal Medicine, March 12, 2012), you (Richard) wrote:
Correct. As I stated, I was updating my earlier post about the findings about red meat from the Sinha study, which found a significant monotonic trend between quintile of red meat intake and mortality. Although the trend was significant, you objected that mortality was only significantly different for the 5th quintile of red meat intake vs. the first. In contrast, in the new study (Pan et al), mortality was found to be greater for every quintile of intake compared with the first. Also, the investigators convincingly demonstrated a linear does-response relationship between red meat intake and mortality.
To be clear, the study showed that replacing red meat in the diet with other sources of protein would reduce total mortality. Although not a finding about vegetarian diets per se, it is intriguing that the greatest reduction in mortality was found for nuts. Replacing one serving per day of red meat with one serving of nuts reduces mortality by 19%, compared with 7% for fish, and 14% for poultry.
It’s not odd at all, nor suspicious. The .05 level of significance has become a convention in the field. It’s extremely rare to find any other level of significance used in the biomedical or epidemiologic literature. And it has become standard procedure in nutritional epidemiology to present 95% confidence intervals.
It means that there is a 1 in 20 chance that their results are false if the null hypothesis is true. On the other hand, the probability that their results are false; that is, the probability that the null hypothesis is true, given their results, depends on the prior probability of the null hypothesis and the Bayes factor. We can compute this! All we need is the Bayes factor, which can be computed from data in the paper: the point estimate of the hazard ratio, the width of the 95% confidence interval, and the total number of deaths in the cohort.
Using the appropriate values from the paper, the Bayes factor in favor of the null hypothesis (that there is no association between the amount of unprocessed red meat consumed and total mortality) is .025. The updated odds of the null hypothesis being true are thus .025 × (prior odds), or equivalently (prior odds)/40. Whatever your prior opinion about the likelihood of red meat consumption not increasing mortality, you should now reduce that likelihood by a factor of 40.
The Bayes factor in favor of the null hypothesis for processed red meat is a remarkable 2 × 10^(-13). For any reasonable prior odds, the posterior odds that the null hypothesis is true is almost homeopathically small. If we could be confident that the results of the paper are free from systematic error, then this result would be conclusive, and ought to put an end to any further conversation on the subject.
Of course the problem with observational studies of diet is that it is difficult to have that degree of confidence in the results, since systematic errors, such as residual confounding, are likely to be present.
I can provide details of my calculations of the Bayes factor elsewhere, if you’re really interested.
First of all, based on nothing more than a naive hunch, you’re impugning the integrity of the most highly regarded research group in the field of nutritional epidemiology. Sheesh, search Pubmed for “Willett w c OR Hu f b”. Willett, himself, literally wrote the book on nutritional epidemiology.
Secondly, your suspicion is not supported by the data. We can easily calculate the 99% CI from the 95% CI. The 99% CI for unprocessed red meat is (1.05, 1.22), which is not much wider than the 95% CI, (1.07, 1.20), presented in the paper. Another simple calculation reveals that the p-value for the hazard ratio for unprocessed red meat is 0.00003, which is highly significant at the 99% level. Thus, the hazard ratio for unprocessed red meat is not a borderline significant finding by any stretch of the imagination.
Try telling that to someone who is 71.
As I showed above, you were wrong about the hazard ratio shrinking to near zero at the 99% confidence level (and higher). I’m not sure how to translate that to an effect on life expectancy, but it shouldn’t shrink to “near zero” either.
Also, when comparing this study to previous ones, you should keep in mind that this study is the highest-quality study on the subject produced to date, including Sinha et al. In the present study, the investigators updated subjects’ dietary data every four years. In contrast, all prior studies relied on a single dietary assessment at baseline. Since people’s diets change over the course of a lengthy follow-up study, repeated dietary assessment is more accurate, and hence so are the observed relationships between dietary factors and disease or mortality.
I agree that we cannot draw conclusions from this study about the effect on mortality of eating less than a half-serving of red meat per day compared with eating no red meat at all. However, similarly, you have no good evidence to believe that a half-serving (or less) of red meat is “reasonable” consumption or that there would be no benefit to reducing intake further.
Reliable comparisons between vegetarians and your hypothesized “reasonable” red meat eaters should be possible once the Adventist Health Study II begins to report results. This is a prospective follow-up study of a cohort of about 1 million Seventh Day Adventists, about one-third of whom are vegetarians. It has all the strengths of the present study, including repeated dietary assessment, plus the statistical advantages of a much larger cohort and, for purposes of this hypothesis, a wider range of meat intake, especially at the low end.
Jay
jt512:
Except that the first corresponds to moderate red meat consumption (for example, it matches my average rate of consumption of red meat). It therefore does not show all red meat consumption increases mortality. The study therefore has no relevance to vegetarianism.
Conclusion: we should eat more balanced diets. Exactly what I said in my article. And here, nuts and chicken/turkey/duck are shown to be important elements of that; likewise, our average red meat consumption should be under two thirds of a pound a week (that’s a steak a week). I quite agree.
Which has been widely criticized because it entails 1 in every 20 of these studies will be false (or in our case, what we are interested in is over-estimation, and it is 1 in 40 that will show a greater effect than actually exists).
Compare, again, the effects of smoking. It blows these results far out of the water. That is a clear mortality agent. Red meat, by comparison is not that significant; indeed, it’s comparatively minor even when consumed in excess (and yes, in excess, there is an effect, to a very high probability; but compared to smoking, again, even that effect is small, although not insignificant; conclusion: moderate your red meat intake to reasonable levels).
Which, again, is producing hundreds of false results. Because thousands of papers are being published every year, 1 in 20 of which are false–or 1 in 40 when we’re counting only those that over-report an effect–so we get hundreds of false papers a year…so is this meat study one of them? That’s why when the CI is this close to 1, a 95% standard is no longer so reliable. It might pass the minimum bar of publication–but we already know that that bar publishes hundreds of false results every year. So it’s not exactly a standard to hold in high regard.
Whereas, if the effect were robust, it would remain strong even on a 99% or 99.9% CI. (You do show, however, that it still holds a little at those levels, or at least the first.)
Please show me which values you are using to derive this result (with page numbers, so I can check what you mean).
And explain what you mean by “not increasing mortality”; are you including even a single day or minute lost, or are you only counting a certain number of years lost as significant? And if so, at what number of years are you drawing the line of significance?
I would be delighted. You can post a link here. I will find that very helpful.
A 5% difference in effect is not borderline?
And if we showed you could live a couple extra years if you starve yourself every day by eating an undercount of calories, we should do that, too? There are countless things we could do to add a mere few years to our lifespans, all of which would substantially degrade our quality of life. This includes avoiding occupational hazards (some jobs make a difference of a few years to average lifespan; therefore no one should do them?), geographic hazards (should we all move out of cities if it were shown that our lifespans there are a few years shorter owing to small amounts of inescapable air pollution?), and so on. Vegetarianism is simply not advisable if all you get out of it is a couple of years. And of course, again, this study didn’t show even that–all it shows is that you get those years (or more, depending on how dietarily immoderate you otherwise were) if you eat a healthy balanced diet of moderate levels of red meat and more fish and poultry (and veggies etc.). It didn’t even measure the effect of not eating red meat, much less the effect of eating no meat.
You’re right, the numbers you calculated (reducing 1.07 to 1.05) were better than I expected they’d come out to be. Although this is still not a huge effect. Just four years or so. And that’s only from immoderate consumption of only red meat (so reducing this to one steak a weak is what gets you those four years; and reduction of other meats, no benefit, or possibly even a net harm; thus this paper presents no argument for vegetarianism).
No studies show any significant difference in mortality between vegetarians and moderate meat consumers. Their mortality always comes out near the same (differing by a couple of years at best). That’s evidence enough (and the burden is always on the claimant anyway: if you claim to have an amazing new life extension drug [“not eating meat”], the burden is on you to present evidence of its powers, the burden is not on me to show it doesn’t.]
Likewise, if reducing high red meat consumption to one steak a weak gains you only 4 years, eliminating that one steak is unlikely to gain you even that much (due to diminishing returns). Moreover, consuming other meats actually gains you years. Thus, again, the evidence shows that vegetarianism is not better for you by any significant measure made in this study.
Definitely report that here if you notice its publication. I’d appreciate it.
Regarding the Red Meat and Mortality study* by Pan et al, Richard Carrier wrote:
The figures I used to compute the Bayes factor come from Table 2 of the paper, which is on page E4 of the online version, except for the number of deaths, which is on the previous page.
You wrote:
Sorry it took me so long, but I have finally written up the methodology I used to calculate the Bayes factor, and I have posted it here. The bulk of the write-up explains the statistical rationale underlying the calculation. The specific calculation itself is at the end under the heading “Example: Red Meat and Mortality.”
I want to address your other questions and the issues you raised, too, but, at least here’s the Bayes factor stuff for a start.
Jay
*It appears that the paper is now behind a paywall, but you can download a pdf of the original online version from here.
That was very helpful, thank you.
Meh, I find Peter Singer more compelling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHzwqf_JkrA
Richard – there’s an unfortunate and unnecessary condescension in your otherwise interesting post.
As a scientifically minded vegan, I want to hone in on your rather cavalier treatment of animal subjectivity. Reducing all empathy with non-human animals to anthropomorphism, as you seem to do, is a bit too quick. Taking the fact of common descent seriously means taking seriously the rough similarities between human and other mammal psychology. Pigs and cows aren’t human, of course, but neither are they machines. And so while it may be possible to kill non-human animals painlessly, the question a thoughtful vegan asks is whether or not, in an ideal world, empathetic individuals would want to invest in material and economic structures that necessarily commodify sentient beings. The way I see it, if we want to build a society of decent, humane individuals, that will be harder if the very means of our ongoing subsistence involve the intentional destruction of sentient beings.
Cows bellow for days when separated from their calves (and they have to be separated to get milk production up). My father-in-law was a dairy farmer (on an organic farm) back in the day, and he tells me that was the hardest part of his job. Why? Because he’s a decent human being.
So it seems to me a thoughtful, empirically grounded vegan might be justified in joining a growing movement to put human treatment of non-human animals on the front burner of moral questioning, simply because it seems possible to build an empathetic society that doesn’t not rely on the systematic ‘production’ and destruction of living, breathing, feeling non-human animals.
At least, that’s how I see it.
Cheers.
Deag, what are you doing swearing so much? It’s pretty funny because it seems childish and out of place especially in your lectures. I’m saying this as a 27 year old with no real quarrel with swearing in general. I just want the broadest possible audience to be reached by the content of your arguments, and not get distracted by goofy swear words =]
<3
Is it not also irrational to assume some perfectly compassionate state of the livestock industry? Isn’t an individual’s more moral choice the one in which they choose not to support/allow unnecessary suffering? You said it well: “…our own overall life satisfaction depends on being compassionate, and compassion compels us not to enjoy or want pointless torment to exist, no matter what or who is experiencing it.”
“(it’s just another kind of phobia based on false associations between animals and people)” You mean like the strange association that people (humans) *are* animals, and that commonly farmed species are relatively closely related mammals? Anthropomorphism need not take place. They are sentient, and have a capacity to experience suffering. I noticed you exempt chimpanzees. Wouldn’t that be based on your false association? They’re just animals, right? They won’t grow up to become humans…
“If pigs could expect to develop human-level consciousness, then eating them would be wrong.” Why? You never get around to explaining it, but your whole argument hinges on humans being magically “special” because of our specific, averaged cognitive abilities. At what IQ does this go into effect, and what does it have to do with digestion? This is a non-sequitur, and thus illogical.
RolliniaDeliciosa: Is it not also irrational to assume some perfectly compassionate state of the livestock industry?
I don’t assume, I check. What is irrational is assuming without checking. And I found that it tends to be vegetarians who are doing the latter, rather a lot.
Isn’t an individual’s more moral choice the one in which they choose not to support/allow unnecessary suffering?
There is no more unnecessary animal suffering under first world husbandry than there is unnecessary human suffering. In fact, a great deal less. Yet we do our best to police both. But not all suffering can be avoided, nor need it be. Just compare the suffering of people who pick the fruits and vegetables you eat, with the suffering of first world livestock, and you’ll find the animals generally better off. And yet unlike the animals, the humans can understand and appreciate what they are going through. Which makes it more of a moral concern to improve their lives than that of livestock. Yet we also have valid concern to do the latter–as I explained in my original blog entry: California husbandry law should become normative, and it is morally appropriate to advocate for that. But just because conditions can be improved does not mean we should boycott the food the current conditions produce, any more in the case of the fruit and vegetables humans labor to bring us than the meat and other products animals labor to bring us (and in relative terms they do not do much laboring at that). Rationality also requires realistic goals. Improving the status quo is a realistic goal. Ending it is not. And refraining from eating meat accomplishes neither.
I noticed you exempt chimpanzees. Wouldn’t that be based on your false association? They’re just animals, right? They won’t grow up to become humans…
They grow up to be self-aware and possess conceptual knowledge of their circumstances and of life and death. This is not a false association. It’s an objective, physical fact about chimpanzees that is not true of livestock. Hence it’s not about what species you are. It’s about what you can cognitively aspire to: the existence of self-awareness and conceptual knowledge of your plight, or not. (Elephants and dolphins and other apes also exhibit evidence of similar cognitive ability, in both brain anatomy and behavior.)
At what IQ does this go into effect, and what does it have to do with digestion? This is a non-sequitur, and thus illogical.
No, it’s fundamental. Unless your morality is wholly arbitrary, it must build on objective facts of the world. And I am talking about objective facts of the world. That is not only logical, it’s the only logical way to ascertain moral truth at all.
First, it’s not about IQ. Desktop computers can be programmed to have higher IQs than humans, yet lack self-awareness and conceptual consciousness (though eventually that will change). Thus it’s about self-awareness and conceptual consciousness: an entity that is self-aware has personal properties (they think of themselves and others and understand the nature of their circumstances) and thus is a valuing agent and therefore valuable: it loses something valuable when it dies, something it understands as valuable. An entity that lacks self-awareness does not appreciate or understand its existence at all. Thus it does not lose anything by losing its existence. All you do by killing it is end a pain-pleasure software routine that’s running for no one’s appreciation or understanding. There is no “person” from whom you are taking life away. Though there is real pain and pleasure being experienced (which is thus a proper object of our concern). It’s just not being experienced by a person. See my earlier remarks.
I did get a chuckle when reading a book (actually written by a scientist, not a dietitian) that strongly recommended a mostly vegetarian diet (mostly advocated in the book for benefits of getting more micro-nutrients (mostly potassium which is statistically correlated to increased hypertension if you get too little). Interestingly enough, there was a table near the end of the book which showed what the actual effect of various personal habits would be on your life expectancy.
Since I don’t drink (just can’t stand the taste) and don’t smoke (allergies are bad enough already), my increased life expectancy from switching from my supposedly poor diet to the “superior” diet is all of…(wait for it)…3 to 6 months. Yes, I would increase my life expectancy a few months by eating the supposedly “superior” diet.
In other words, what you are eating (as long as it isn’t drastic like eating only candy) is just fine for you.
Richard,
Could you please explain your position on humans animals vs other animals? What is different about humans that grants us the right to take other animals’ lives gratuitously? Is this it?
“must recognize such facts as that animals aren’t aware of most things, and don’t aspire to be or do anything, and have no prospect of becoming anything, and thus should not be hastily anthropomorphized in these ways.”
thanks,
-dave
DaveD: the short answer to your question is “yes.” The long answer is in my previous comment on the same subject (and to a lesser extent the one after that).
The balances you list for food production (food in for food produced) need to be looked at in terms of protein or nitrogen balance. Phosphorus balance would be useful to look at too. Carbon (what makes up most of the weight of any crop) is cheap. Nitrogen is not. While I agree with many of the points in this article, and believe that meat is an important part of our diets, I have had the opportunity to work with crops and, to a lesser extent, livestock. It takes a lot of nitrogen to grow a crop, much of which is lost soon after it is applied. Much more is lost when the crop is delivered to the animal. With today’s animal production methodology much animal waste is lost — even when it is applied as fertilizer it is subject to runoff and leaching. Nitrogen efficiency is simply better (by various factors — I’ve seen as high as 12 — but I wouldn’t argue with something a bit lower since I’m sure that was from a slanted article) with a vegetarian diet. To me that is the most important reason to be a vegetarian….though I’m not one.
Also, the argument about local food being more energy intensive is highly dependent upon the type of production being done. As an extreme example, sweet corn grown in your backyard is highly efficient, but sweet corn grown on two acres at a farm down the street isn’t efficient at all for the reasons you mention.
Jeff: the balances you list for food production (food in for food produced) need to be looked at in terms of protein or nitrogen balance
Except it’s not just food being output. It’s hundreds of other products besides. Don’t lose sight of that.
Protein balance is achieved at the level of diet. So: advocate for a healthy diet, and demand will create equilibrium in the production of protein sources. That’s the most you could hope for whether anyone eats animals or not.
The main problem with nitrogen is with human-consumed crops, in the form of fertilizer runoff. That would not change if we stopped eating animals, since then we’d just manufacture and deploy synthetic nitrate fertilizers in the same or similar quantities. Plus we’d have vast amounts of agricultural waste we’d have to figure out what to do with (once we aren’t feeding it to animals). But as to runoff, that’s a problem that won’t be affected by whether we eat animals or not, because we will always be fertilizing vast quantities of irrigated land. Thus it’s a problem we just need to solve.
Phosphorus balance would be useful to look at too.
One of the leading methods by which we return phosphorous to soils for growing human-consumed crops is animal bone meal fertilizer.
Wow. I find the section at the beginning about the various irrationalities of vegetarians (like me) to be remarkably silly. I should explain, since that’s a pretty caustic remark. First, let me say that I think you are wrong about the methods of factory farming and their impact on animal welfare. But, I want to set that aside, and concentrate on the idea of rationality.
Different people are vegetarians for different reasons, some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t. Some hold that animals are of more or less equal moral status as human beings, and that killing an animal for food violates that animal’s right to life. I don’t agree with this kind of line, but it is this view that would lead to intolerance of those who eat meat. And, at least in my experience, it does lead to intolerance of non-vegetarians; or, more likely, of non-vegans.
On the other hand, there are those, like me, who think that while non-human animals do not have the same moral status that human beings do, still their ability to experience, to feel pain, pleasure, and more complex things like affection, fear, and so on, depending on the animal, must be taken into account. Their pain matters. So, the reason that I am a vegetarian is because I believe that the way most animals are raised causes them suffering, and I do not want to contribute to a system that has this effect.
There’s really no argument that our farming practices cause suffering. We can argue about how much, and you seem to want to compare the suffering an equivalent animal would experience under factory farming conditions with the suffering it would experience in the wild. Note that for most farm animals, this comparison doesn’t make sense, because these animals have been bred to be food animals and there is no wild equivalent. But moreover, this comparison is silly, because regardless of what the animal would suffer in the wild, it is suffering something now at the hands of human beings, who are capable of the moral evaluation of their actions. Just because somebody else would hit a dog if I don’t doesn’t make it ok for me to hit the dog. I choose not to contribute, because of the value that I assign to the pain and pleasure o animals.
As far as “tolerating” non-vegetarians, this is a non-issue for vegetarians like me. I think that this is a difficult issue, and that it isn’t entirely clear what moral weight to give to the experiences of non-persons. I recognize that people can reasonably disagree. Some people have unreasonable views, and, for instance, think that it would be ok to cause to any amount of pain and suffering to a non-human animal. I think this is obviously wrong. But there’s a lot of middle ground between that person and me, and one can occupy a reasonable position without agreeing with me. This is not uncommon with complex moral issues.
Last comment, and sorry for the ultra-long post: what strikes me as really silly is to call someone like me irrational. My preference is to avoid as much as possible contributing to the suffering of animals and one way to do that is by avoiding consumption of meat. Given that this is my preference, it is of course rational for me to be a vegetarian. Now, I must balance the weight of that preference against others, and if I were starving I would eat meat. For someone with different preferences, it would be rational to be a vegan, or to eat meat, or whatever. But, irrational? Come on, that’s just silly.
Pete M.: There are those, like me, who think that while non-human animals do not have the same moral status that human beings do, still their ability to experience, to feel pain, pleasure, and more complex things like affection, fear, and so on, depending on the animal, must be taken into account. Their pain matters. So, the reason that I am a vegetarian is because I believe that the way most animals are raised causes them suffering, and I do not want to contribute to a system that has this effect.
The reason this is irrational is that the underlying belief is false, and it would easily be known to be false if you cared to investigate the true facts of the matter. Farmed animals do not experience any more suffering than they would experience in the wild.
Otherwise I agree with the corollary premise that their pain matters. But death ends all pain and thus is unaffected by that standard of care. You cannot argue death is bad based on an opposition to pain. Death can only be bad for some other reason. That reason happens to be what is lost. But animals don’t lose anything. Because they never have a concept of life or of self to lose. This is precisely the issue: to anthropomorphize them just because they have emotions and make decisions and look like little people is not logically correct, because it is to attribute to them the same knowledge and reasons for having those emotions and making those decisions that we do. But they don’t. They have no cognitive awareness of such things. They have drives to avoid pain and fright, but they don’t “value life.” They have no concept of value or of life or what it means to be alive. Nor will they ever. Killing them thus does not subtract anything from the universe that would ever have been appreciated (except by us, hence it is not irrational to assign value to an animal and then refrain from killing it, hence there is nothing illogical about pets). It’s not like Being John Malkovich and there’s this little man stuck inside an animal’s mind who understands everything that’s going on but can’t communicate with us. There is no little man. There is no cognition of itself or its existence. Thus its death does not destroy anything of value, any more than the death of a plant does. In fact death ends pain in an animal and thus should be a net good to you: you should want animals to be eaten as quickly as possible, if really all you care about is pain.
Your equation of animals in the wild with “hitting a dog” is inapt. It is not legal to beat livestock (beyond the limited discipline one might apply even to a dog, e.g. to train it or stop it hurting someone). Nor do you grasp the relevance of the equation of livestock to wildlife: if it is okay for wildlife to be killed and eaten (as it routinely is), it is okay for them to be killed and eaten by us. Otherwise you would have to believe that we ought to intervene in nature and prevent all animal predation because we are morally obligated to care about its hapless victims. If we are instead allowed to be indifferent to those victims, there is no logical argument that we should be any less indifferent to animals ourselves. Likewise for any argument about the pain wildlife suffer.
Notably we do intervene to prevent egregious wildlife pain (e.g. we will give vet care to a wounded deer and re-release it, clean the oil off a bird, etc., indifferent to whether they are eaten or die from injury in the wild thereafter), but we do exactly the same for livestock. Thus that behavior is consistent. By contrast, it is unreasonable to believe we should pamper all animals as if they deserved to be free of all pain. That would entail bizarre interventionist behavior in the wild. But it also has no logical basis. For what reason should we regard animals as deserving to be free of all pain whatever? And if some is okay, how much? Now we’re just quibbling over what conditions we should keep them in. We still have no argument against eating them, not least because you can procure meat from any reasonable conditions you please: most U.S. cities provide access to free range meat, and by responsible hunting you could even cull the most free range animals of all: actual wild animals.
Thus it seems to me vegetarians don’t really believe the things you are saying, because I doubt you’d eat hunted meat or free range meat either (I don’t know where you are on fish). So I suspect that what you are saying now are just rationalizations for your phobia, in response to my arguments and evidence. The same thing all phobics do when challenged. But your rationalizations ultimately don’t make sense. Or else require doubling down on your commitment to false beliefs.
[But no need to apologize for your long post. I found your post very efficient in communicating a targeted series of well articulated thoughts. That’s exactly the sort of comment I appreciate the most. Even when I completely disagree with it.:-)]
How do we know animals we eat don’t value their life? How in the world we can prove something like that? It’s near the impossible if you ask me. They can’t tell us directly. We can’t ask them directly.
I already explained this in the article you claim to be responding to. Please actually read the article before commenting on it.
If you need more detail on all the abundant scientific evidence we have confirming animals aren’t even capable of comprehending life much less valuing it in any relevant sense, see, again, my debate with Paul Bali.
Gilgamesh:
It would be more accurate to say that an ecologic study can show strong correlations. However, those correlations are between population-level averages. To infer that they apply at the level of the individual is to commit the ecologic fallacy.
Furthermore, the rodent experiments you mention do not imply that milk intake in humans causes cancer, and do not validate the ecologic-level results. Nothing can validate the ecologic-level results except for a study at the individual level in the same study population. Considered together, the China Study and the rodent experiments do not imply a relation between milk intake and cancer in humans; all they do is start a stupid internet rumor.
The men and women in that study did have higher risk of death from all causes combined for red and processed meat intake, on the order of 33% higher for high vs low red meat intake. That’s not what I would call a “rather modest difference.”
@jt512
Tests on mice and rats are rather common in medical practice, and in may cases they are a good proxy for effects on humans. There are exceptions, and sometimes this has led agencies to issue warning labels on products that are later shown to be relatively safe. However, the mechanism found in the rat and mouse studies are not specific to these animals; the problem was a byproduct of digestion of casein that affected DNA. It’s more than an internet rumor, I would say. Now, obviously mice are not as good a proxy for humans as, well, humans, but if we go as strict as you seem to suggest we would loose the pharmaceutical industry.
Again on the ecological fallacy: the fallacy is committed only if no mechanism is identified to show why the effect is seen. You seem to be taking a stance to strict that anything short of 10,000 case studies does not count as evidence. If we were to be so strict, again large-scale studies of any sort would be useless. But, if large-scale studies are combined with case studies and tests of mechanisms, then we are doing good science.
On the meat study, I think you misread me. The differences between low and high consumption are significant; what I was noting was that different meats being consumed have much more modest effects. So, red vs. white meat has a small affect, and portion makes a much greater difference.
@#10 Richard Carrier wrote:
If you’re referring to the Singha study, you’re misinterpreting the results. The reported hazard ratios are adjusted for numerous dietary variables (as well as lifestyle variables) that could confound the results. For instance, the model for red meat included covariates for white meat, fruit, vegetables, and total energy. So a hazard ratio of 1.36, say, for the 5th vs the 1st quintile of red meat intake, means that reduction of red meat intake from the level of consumption of the 5th quintile to that of the 1st quintile, accompanied by equicaloric substitution of whatever foods aren’t in the model (eg, fish, carbohydrates) is associated with a 36% reduction in risk of death from any cause. In other words “shifting diet around” in this specific manner is associated with a lower risk of death (per unit time).
That’s a blatant fallacy of irrelevance. The existence of a more dangerous behavior, like smoking, does not diminish the importance of less dangerous dietary behaviors.
I disagree. I am more than willing to make lifestyle changes that would decrease my risk of death by 36% per year. You’re what, in your 30s? It may not make much difference to you now, since your risk of death per year is low. What will you think when you’re in, say, your 60s?
Only in badly designed studies.
@11:
Again, you are misinterpreting the results. What the study found was a highly statistically significant, nearly linear relationship between quintile of meat intake and risk of all-cause mortality: the more red meat that was consumed, the greater the risk of death.
I’m curious what studies of red meat intake you think are higher quality than this one. There are, to my knowledge, no large controlled trials of red meat intake. All the evidence is from observational studies. As such studies go, Sinha et al is pretty strong. It is prospective, has a huge cohort, and a lengthy follow-up period. Although diet was assessed by food frequency questionnaire, the questionnaire has been validated; that is, shown to adequately reflect actual dietary intake. The analysis employed a rigorous adjustment for dietary and lifestyle variables, comparable in quality to the highest quality studies in nutritional epidemiology. Just saying it did not employ adequate controls doesn’t make it so. What studies of the effect of meat intake on risk of cause-specific or all-cause mortality do you think are better controlled than this one?
Jay
Jay, if you think any study is telling you that vegetarianism “would decrease my risk of death by 36% per year” then you are the one who is not reading it correctly. If you knew any math at all you’d realize that statement is wildly absurd.
I’ll also remind you that we’re talking about moderate meat eating, not “top quintile” meat consumption. Stop conflating the two.
When we look at moderate meat consumption the Sinha study does not get results much different from the Key study which combines five different prospective studies.
And as for the China Study I’ve already linked to critics taking that apart. I consider that moot.
Well, it’s an interesting read, and in the face of all the above statistics, rationale, references, arguments, etc., maybe it isn’t much, and admittedly, it is only anecdotal, but here goes:
I eat meat, chicken, and fish, starches, vegetables, fruit, drink milk and wine among others, whenever and how much I please, have never been on a diet, have no disease, and I have a puff or two 3-4 times a day… I am 81 years old.
So, it seems that when quoting statistics, one has to understand that they may (or may not) apply to some statistical average, but not necessarily to all individuals.
Oldebabe: Well, true, but the danger of such reasoning is that you cannot recommend behavior based on your own luck. If the odds are better than 90% that you will live 14 more years by not ever smoking, it is foolish to bet on being in the other 10%. To end up in that lucky tenth and say “see, it’s perfectly fine!” is to give very bad advice. That’s why we need to look at broad averages and overall risks. Otherwise we’re acting like someone who drives drunk and recommends driving drunk because “they” have never happened to crash or hit anyone.
Emotional? Me? What the hell are you talking about? 😉
Point taken.
Again, an animal’s life is indifferent to when it dies, because it does not become anything and has no awareness of being something.
I don’t, for the time being, accept the assertion that an animal’s life is indifferent to when it dies. Are you sure about this?
Animal quality of life has to be measured in terms of what is comfortable for that animal, and must recognize such facts as that animals aren’t aware of most things, and don’t aspire to be or do anything, and have no prospect of becoming anything, and thus should not be hastily anthropomorphized in these ways.
Hypothetically speaking, if there were a species whose comprehension and understanding were far superior to ours would that permit them, morally, to kill us? I don’t mean this question to be a troll. And perhaps philosophically speaking it could be articulated better.
Pep: I don’t, for the time being, accept the assertion that an animal’s life is indifferent to when it dies. Are you sure about this?
Yes. As long as we’re talking about livestock. Because being aware of the concepts of death and a future and having plans for one’s life and valuing time to live one’s life in and even having a concept of a self that would be lost by dying all requires cognitive machinery that livestock animals don’t physically posses. That some animals, which we don’t eat, might, I recognize and discuss in Sense and Goodness without God V.2.2.2-4, pp. 328-31. But the present blog only concerns livestock animals.
Hypothetically speaking, if there were a species whose comprehension and understanding were far superior to ours would that permit them, morally, to kill us? I don’t mean this question to be a troll. And perhaps philosophically speaking it could be articulated better.
It’s a question raised by Sam Harris in his book The Moral Landscape. So it’s not out of left field. The answer is no (unless they are psychopathic monsters: see my discussion of this in The End of Christianity, pp. 354-56 and Sense and Goodness without God V.2.3.2, pp. 342-45).
Because moral value is not about superior cognitive ability, but only the baseline ability to know of oneself and of others as selves and to understand the concepts of living and dying and of experience, knowledge, and the consequences of one’s actions (or the state of cognitively developing into such a thing). Once you reach a certain level of cognition, you have personal knowledge and thus exist as a person. Moral recognition of that fact then follows. For every entity capable of such knowledge, no matter how intelligent.
There is a state of being in between (i.e. between that and being a mindless body in a state of assembly), when you are a cognating animal who is mentally becoming an animal capable of moral cognition, and in that state it is their future that they are building into that we recognize as of value. Thus we refrain from killing infants because of what they will become, not what they are–apart from the fact that someone already values them even as they are and thus they have assigned value as well (the same way our pets do, or an antique car or other unique object we assign value)–but in terms of value an entity possesses universally, it is an infant’s future that gives its present existence universal value. In other words an infant combines two properties: cognition (thus, like animals, they are not to be needlessly tormented) and a future of moral significance (thus, unlike animals, they are not to be needlessly killed).
Landon Hedrick asked a different but related question in another thread: I wonder whether it would be acceptable, on your view, to cage, kill, and eat a human being who is severely mentally handicapped (to such a degree that they have the cognitive capacities of, say, an adult pig).
The question is misconceived because even an infant has more cognitive ability than a pig. Thus you are asking how we should treat someone who had less cognitive ability than even a newborn baby, and (by your own stipulation) would never develop any further. For example, infants have an innate theory of mind (a physical system present in a brain already by its third trimester of intrauterine development) and with it can infer another’s intentions from their actions. Pigs don’t have that. Infants also have an innate brain center devoted to learning to identify tools and assigning names and functions to them. Pigs don’t have that either. In short order infants learn and recognize their own names (without having to be trained). It requires considerable effort to teach a pig to respond to a name. As soon as an infant’s brain has access to data (i.e. birth at the latest), they begin learning conceptual knowledge (and probably already had been before birth, which is why I oppose elective third trimester abortion). Pigs don’t do that. Infants have the brain instrumentation to accumulate conclusions from data that no pig ever could. As a result they become self-aware before reaching their first birthday. Something pigs definitely never do.
So let’s play the game and assume a human is born whose brain is so physically emaciated and damaged that it never even acquires the cognitive abilities of a newborn infant and we can somehow verify it never will (those are some bizarre stipulations, so you should expect the consequences of them to be equally bizarre: one of the first rules to learn about crafting ridiculous moral thought experiments). To begin with, I believe such a baby should be euthanized. Aborted before the third trimester even, if its fate is predictable. But if for some reason its condition could only be confirmed after birth, humanely killing it would be a mercy. Otherwise all you will have is a pet, not a person. Indeed less than a pet, since they won’t even be able to take care of themselves. Ever. Nor will they ever have knowledge of being a person, or of life or death, or any of the things that give human cognition moral value. Could we cage them? We already do that even to fully developed infants (we call them cribs). Could we kill them? If they have no prospects of ever becoming more than a mental sub-infant, we not only could, we probably should. Could we eat them? It would not be immoral (any more than eating a fetus: and if you believe abortion at any stage is moral, then you must believe it is moral to eat what gets aborted), but it would be very unhealthy (human flesh is poisonous), and even apart from that I would question why anyone would want to. Someone keen to eat a baby (or a fetus for that matter) would have to be so positively ghoulish that they might not stop at sub-infants with no cognitive future. Nevertheless, humans have eaten each other in extreme survival conditions, and if a baby expired naturally and it was all you had to eat to survive, I doubt you would feel it right for us to condemn you for it. And no one should.
But none of this has anything to do with actual human infants, for whom none of your stipulations hold.
Hmmmm — animals produce fertilizer for human foods? Sure, that’s true, but that fertilizer begins its life with the Haber Bosch reaction — the synthetic process which takes nitrogen from the air, and mixes it with hydrogen (usually from natural gas) under high temperatures and pressures to make ammonium. The nitrogen used for animal feed (which is mostly corn) comes, for the most part, from nitrogen fixed using the Haber Bosch reaction, and nitrogen placed back into fields via manure (which you are overestimating) still began with the Haber Bosch Reaction. You should look up the book Enriching the Earth by Smil. Agriculture loses nitrogen, and agriculture which has, as its end product, meat loses more nitrogen. Because of this it takes fewer acres of land to feed someone with a vegetarian diet than someone who eats meat.
Jeff: You should look up the book Enriching the Earth by Smil.
I just skimmed that and it didn’t make your point any clearer. I just don’t see its relevance. Obviously more land is used to maintain a crop-and-animal system than is used to maintain a crop-only system. I even said so in my blog. The only issue of importance is greenhouse gas emissions (land isn’t our problem), and fertilizer processes are already accounted for in the numbers I used. Likewise what happens to agrowaste when animals aren’t eating it must be accounted for, and what industry we ramp up to replace the hundreds of other products we get out of animals if we weren’t getting them out of animals must also be accounted for. In the end, I see no significant gain to be likely. But feel free to show me some math on that if you have it.
Note: I have changed the order in which the comments display. See here for why and how to compensate.
All I was trying to say was that meat production costs more land and more nitrogen. I recommended the Smil book because it describes how nitrogen is obtained and used — you’re right, it doesn’t have much to do with meat production as such — sorry.
The additional nitrogen is a problem because of sustainability issues (nitrogen is produced using natural gas). Additionally, the extra nitrogen is a pollutant — it usually finds its way to the Gulf of Mexico or other locale where it creates a dead zone — or into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas http://www.epa.gov/nitrousoxide/sources.html. On average only about 33% of applied nitrogen worldwide ever makes it to a crop — the rest is waste.
>I also find vegetarians irrational in their acceptance of non-vegetarians.
This tangent is a bit troubling. I am going to give a patently ridiculous surface analogy now, so I hope nobody thinks I am presenting a straw-man of non-vegetarianism.
Ahem. Imagine you live on a planet of mostly cannibals. Aside from this one difference, it is identical to our planet. Almost everyone is a cannibal, and you’ve been raised to think cannibalism is okay, but now you’re having second thoughts. “Maybe killing people to eat their flesh isn’t okay,” you think. You join the minority of people who don’t cannibalize, ever unnerved ever so slightly by this practice.
Eventually, you come to the conclusion that cannibalism is barbaric and horrible, and that everybody should definitely stop doing it RIGHT NOW. What do you do? Do you form a bizarre fringe movement, telling people they’re monsters for being cannibals as they were taught? Maybe you do that, but then they will eat you. Far more effective, and far less damaging to yourself, would be to lightly criticize the practice of cannibalism just enough that you don’t get eaten and can maybe change the society from within. You also have to live on the planet, so you have to at least pretend accept the cannibalism for the time being, so you don’t get eaten, and so you can actually be effective.
Morals of the fable:
* Convincing people of your Noble Cause is much easier if you do not portray the people you want to convince as monsters. They will simply ostracize you. Look at PETA’s reputation! They’d surely get eaten. So for consequentialist reasons, it’s better to not go out shaming everyone whom you think is doing wrong; this is only provocative.
* It is psychologically damaging to realize that the whole world is continually committing an atrocity (in the one’s opinion), so it’s easier to form some cognitive dissonance to “kind of” justify the behavior of others.
* One does have to live in the society at large, regardless of whether one approves of it. That is why vegetarians will come to laugh at dinner parties, have sex with meat-eaters, and help them move.
@21 Richard wrote,
That, in fact, is not what I said. What I said was:
Which doesn’t bear much resemblance to those words you put in my mouth, does it.
You wrote:
Well, I have degrees in both nutritional epidemiology and biostatistics, so I think I actually do no a little about math, and, actually, a lot about the type of math that is being done in that analysis. Aside from the fact that I wrote “36% reduction” when in fact I should have written “26% reduction” (1–1/1.36), perhaps you could explain the error in my math, or alternatively, just admit that you were attacking a straw man.
I’m not conflating anything, and I’m not making any direct statements about vegetarianism per se. High-quality studies with good statistical power that directly compare vegetarians and non-vegetarians are scarce to non-existent. I’m also not sure how useful they would be since those diet styles are heterogeneous. Therefore, I’m discussing the results of a study on meat consumption as a surrogate (and arguably better) dietary factor that showed red meat consumption to be associated with higher risk of mortality on a dose-response basis (after control for numerous potentially confounding variables).
Furthermore, I’m not just talking about 5th quintile. I was just trying to minimize the number of statistics in the post. I would have thought that “5th vs 1st quintile” plus “highly significant linear trend across quintiles” would have adequately communicated the point. I guess not. What the study suggests is the less red meat you eat—at least down to the first quintile—the better off you are. I don’t know what you mean by “moderate” meat consumption. Third quintile red meat consumption is better than fifth quintile, but first quintile is better than third. Is there any further benefit to reducing red meat consumption to zero, or eliminating meat consumption entirely? We can’t say, at least not from this study.
Moderate meat consumption compared with what? In Sinha, 3rd vs 5th quintile red meat consumption was associated with an 11% and a 14% reduction in risk of death for males and females, respectively. 1st vs 3rd quintiles was associated with an additional 15% reduction in of risk of death in both males and females. In contrast, Key et al compared vegetarians and non-vegetarians and found no significant difference in total mortality.
However, as I previously said, the validity of Key et al is in question because it included the Health Food Shoppers Study, whose validity is not in question—it was an extremely poor study. Furthermore Key et al, despite being a pooled analysis, was a much smaller, less-powerful study than Sinha. Key included 76,000 subjects and 800,000 person-years of follow-up. Sinha included 546,000 subjects for 5.5 million person-years of follow-up. By either measure, Sinha et al was approximately 7 times larger than the Key study, and it wasn’t contaminated by data from junk studies.
Yeah, I wasn’t planning to respond further to gilgamesh about that either.
Jay
I wrote:
But grammar, not so much.
Richard,
I don’t think I am sold on the ethics part. I would agree that a lot of the stuff about the horrors of factory farming are probably isolated incidents and dealt with accordingly but…
This is true to a degree but there are instances in which I don’t think it is silly. Animals can quite obviously feel pain, I think you would concede that yourself given your comment that killing animals is okay as long as they are not tortured. If pain and suffering did not enter the equation then torture should be permissible as well. (in theory) Humane killing doesn’t really seem relevant here as we wouldn’t be too sympathetic to a murderer who happened to kill his victims in a humane way. The crucial point isn’t how humane the killing was but that he was taking the life of someone against their will which leads us into this statement:
For starters, I don’t know what you mean by it “does not become anything”. Animals like ourselves break down into our contingent elements upon death so neither ‘become’ anything, or everything depending on how you want to view things. I think it is also questionable to claim that animals are indifferent to when they die. Animals have survival instincts. They avoid situations that cause pain or threaten death. This does not seem like indifference to me. You could claim that it is merely instinct and not some sort of higher cognitive awareness of wanting to avoid death but not knowing the inner mental life of cats (or whatever) this can’t be much more than speculation. Secondly would that even be relevant? Surely we would not condone the humane killing of a mentally disabled person purely on the criteria that they are unable to articulate their desire to live? The crucial criteria here seems to be a desire to live, not an ability to articulate it, which animals by all appearances possess.
Also given your position as a naturalistic materialist I would think that you would concede that our own interest in avoiding death is simply biological adaptations no different than that of other animals. Also I think it is fair to say that death would diminish an animal’s life satisfaction. My logical reason for not wanting to die (other than purely instinctual) is that it would do exactly this, that I would no longer be able to enjoy things that give me pleasure. An animal may not be able to communicate this feeling the way we can but I think it is mistaken to say that is not their desire. Just via observation I can see that my cat seeks out pleasure, it does things that it thinks will lead to it getting a treat or a rub behind the ears. It obviously is displaying the same attempts at self-satisfaction that people engage in and to deny it of that opportunity would seem wrong in the same way that killing is deemed immoral because it thwarts the desires of a living person.
I had some more, but I’ll just leave it at that for now, since the comment is getting kind of long.
Just a few problems with your answer.
Synthetic nitrate fertilizers — producers tend to use urea and ammonium as much as or more than they use nitrate.
Figuring out what to do with agricultural waste isn’t nearly as much of a problem as you make it appear. In fact it isn’t a problem at all. This waste is full of organic material which can be used for a wide variety of things, not the least of which is to place it back into a field to enrich the soil. This is quite common and in some regions a preferred practice.
Most of the corn crop in the US is used to feed animals — well over 50 percent. The bulk of the feed given to animals is corn – not agricultural waste (which you didn’t say explicitly, but seem to be implying).
If we ate fewer animals there would be less demand for the type of corn that is currently grown — so we would expect it to be produced less on less land with less fertilizer which would be be good. Of course some government subsidies would need to go away, but that’s a different story — and is entirely possible with a sustained reduction in demand. The idea that a reduction in the use of animals for meat wouldn’t eventually cause a reduction in the use of feed corn makes no sense.
You keep talking about other products from animals, and I understand that, but once you get past fertilizer products like poop, bone meal and blood meal you’re not left with much — and I would contend that we could get what we needed for these other things while killing a much smaller number of animals.
To take it a step further, the nutrition in most of the fertilizer products, like the phosphorus in bone meal, comes from phosphorus mines in Florida originally — bone meal is just an inefficient way of repackaging it. We will deplete our phosphorus mines within the next 100 years if we don’t slow down.
Extra nutrition is not just run-off, it’s also N2O which can have global warming effects similar to or worse than methane depending on how you measure effects (it lasts longer).
In short — less animals for meat, less fertilizer used, less land used, less environmental problems. Period
“…refraining from eating meat accomplishes neither.”
Except that it does. Millions of vegetarians (in the US alone) equals less suffering than zero vegetarians. That is an improved status quo. You might just find a vegetarian or two among husbandry legislation advocates as well. A perfect industry (which would aspire to resemble no industry at all, with regard to suffering) is also an unrealistic goal. But you seem to think it’s worth working towards. Kind of like a perfectly secular society, free of theocratic threat.
What sources would you cite to back up the claim that “[f]armed animals do not experience any more suffering than they would experience in the wild”?
Or, put more clearly, what is it you check?
Also, what do you make of the claims made by Vegan Outreach? I’m personally waffling on the vegetarianism/veganism issue which is why I was curious about your opinion, but it is really odd that there is such a sharp dispute over animals’ quality of life.
In a humorously ironic restatement of one of my previous points, you’re essentially saying that an invisible 3-omni system is more reasonable than the the absence of a system 🙂
These all seem to be rather vaguely defined terms. Lacking the ability to communicate how do we determine one’s self awareness? If for instance I lacked speech and writing, how would I go about displaying my self-awareness to you? If an animal recognizes itself, say in a mirror, rather than thinking it is another animal would that qualify as self-awareness? If it is not, then what is it? I am just trying to pin down the criteria here since it is supposed to be the defining demarcation where killing becomes unacceptable. And what does it mean to ‘understand their circumstances’? Does a severely mentally handicapped person understand their circumstances? This seems extremely fuzzy, as I have a hard time seeing how a new born baby would display an ‘understanding of their circumstances’ at any level higher than your average dog, yet killing of babies because of this fact is certainly not condoned.
Often the debate about eating meat is defined in black and white, it is either okay or not okay but if we use things like we have discussing then I think the line of demarcation clearly falls somewhere in between. Like killing of for example pigs, or most mammals would not be okay but the killing of a trout probably would be. It is not so much about meat/not meat, but whether the animals being killed possesses certain characteristics.
Honestly it just seems like a sort of species-ism. Killing people is not okay, anything else is fair game. The wrangling about self-awareness and so on just seems to be cover. Like the idea that a business should be allowed to serve (or not) whomever they please. This can be a legitimate cause, but despite it’s legitimacy it was often used as cover by racists to justify them not wanting to serve people that weren’t white. Here notions of the ability to fulfill desires and consciousness and such are all legitimate but I wonder if they are not simply being used as cover for a position of pure species-ism.
@Richard
Thank you for the links to the criticisms for the China Study in post 18. I had seen the one from Dr. Hall before, and the very long post as well. However, from some review of the third and fourth links do not reach the conclusion you seem to hold strongly.
The first link is half-dedicated to the very extensive critique by Denise Minger and his thought process before reading the book, so I will jump over that to talk about the authors review of the book. Unfortunately, every single point looks like psychological projection. For example, he claims Campbell (author of the book, “The China Study”) is deceptive in making people think that the experiments Campbell ran were on people rather than rats. This is simply wrong as both before and after the passage in question Campbell is clear that his experiment was on rats. The context of the study was placed well in the chapter, and this is even admitted by the blogger. So his statements that Campbell was committing obfuscation was itself an example of the very thing. The blogger also speculations about how rats may have to special evolutionary advantage concerning their diet and cancer, but not only is it speculative but it fails to account for the data from the China Study and the human cancer study from the Philippines also conducted by Campbell. Add to this the obvious quote-mine from p. 107 of Campbell’s book, a few personal insults, and more obfuscation and the post is worthless.
The post by Dr. Hall is very balanced, and her work is in other places is excellent and extensive (like most all posts at Science Based Medicine). However, here she brings up things that undercut her points. For example, she talks about a bad source used by Campbell, but not only is Campbell not sourcing the author in question for his bad protocol; after all, if I cite your work on Hitler’s Table Talk, and they criticize me because you got something wrong unrelated to the matter, then my citation is crap, you would agree that that is not proper method but the “baggage fallacy” (this is your 12th axiom of historical investigations, after all). Besides, Hall points to other studies that give the same conclusion Campbell had, so this “poor citation” didn’t even undercut the argument at all. Dr. Hall also points out that other studies contradict Campbell’s conclusions, but Hall also agrees with Campbell on how these other studies (such as the Nurses’ Study) are problematic. Again, the only studies Hall provided she agrees does not have the strength to overturn Campbell’s studies. Dr. Hall does point to interesting exceptions, but could this be committing a logical fallacy, of having an anomaly override a larger trend? I agree that the China Study does not prove the case for veganism/vegetarianism, but the evidence is not so undermined by Dr. Hall’s post.
Now, I have not reviewed the amazingly long post by Minger, and it’s longer than a critique of a Kent Hovind lecture, so I will not say if it is weak or not. All the more to explore. Nonetheless, from what I have seen in the other posts, it seems unwise to throw Campbell’s book under the bus. It’s also telling that the fourth blog post you linked to said that he accepted Minger’s out of confirmation bias, but that hardly means anything. I have more to explore. I just think these posts that I have gone over deserve more critical appraisal than you seem to have given them.
@jt512
You said you would not respond further to me about the China Study. I don’t understand why; if I am deluded, please help me! If I am making a decent point, please acknowledge it. I don’t pretend to be a medical expert, and you have a strong background in this area. Please hit me with knowledge!
Thanks for those links Richard. I’m still trying to catch up here. Doesn’t another animal, regardless of its awareness of its own life, still value that life even if not anthropomorphically?
Instinctively avoiding threats and recoiling from pain is not the same thing as having a concept of ‘life’ that is contrasted with the concept of ‘death.’ Farm animals do not conceptualize like this. Imagining that farm animals understand morality and prefer to live long lives rather than short lives is anthropomorphism.
It’s a function of the human brain that we have developed concepts of the self, that we project ourselves into hypothetical futures, and have preferences relating to these futures. Animals don’t do this: they simply aren’t capable of understanding that their lives are going to be shorter than they might have been, and of finding that objectionable.
Honestly, as non-human animals go, being fed and sheltered, kept free of parasites, and given quick deaths is a relatively comfortable life. It’s not quite on par with our pets–but it’s certainly better than wild animals.
Richard:
Where do you draw the line? I can say for sure that I wouldn’t eat a chimpanzee (unless circumstances were pretty dire), and that I would eat a cow. I understand pigs are relatively intelligent–possibly more intelligent than dogs: should that factor in?
DaveD (#46):
I suppose you could assert that any living thing “values” its life if you considered the basic, instinctual drive to survive and reproduce to be the “valuing” of their own life.
But even that doesn’t necessarily hold water. Some species (lemmings, for example) engage in self-destructive behavior, and many species engage in mass migration and spawning through areas where predators exist (salmon swimming upstream past bears) and play a numbers game, disdaining to ensure the survival of any particular individual (including themselves) in favor of making sure enough of their number reproduce and perpetuate the species.
It seems to me that most animals exhibit none of the care for life (both their own and that of the fellows) that even a human being suffering from mental retardation (used here in the clinical sense)would.
Speaking of, I do have to take issue with Mr. Carrier’s use of “retarded” as a perjorative in these comments. It’s a clinical diagnoses with some clearly negative stigma attached to it, describing an argument as “retarded” rather than more descriptive and (potentially) accurate terms like “illogical” or “irrational” (words Mr. Carrier clearly has no issue with using) is unnecessary and, frankly, somewhat offensive.
@gilgamesh, regarding the ecologic fallacy, I’ll try one more time.
It is impossible to draw conclusions about an association between two variables at the individual level from the association between the average level of those variables at the population level. This is because there is no mathematical relationship between the two. For example, a strong positive correlation at the population level is consistent with any conceivable correlation at the individual level; the individual-level correlation could be anything from a strong positive correlation to zero correlation to a strong negative correlation. The population-level correlation is simply uninformative about the individual-level correlation.
This is not a specific criticism of the China Health Study. It applies to every ecologic study that attempts to attribute the ecologic-level correlation to individuals in the population. Once you understand this fact, you don’t have to read lengthy criticisms of the China Study. In fact, I suspect, that anyone who has written a lengthy criticism of the China Study doesn’t, themselves, understand this, because, if they did, then then would only have written a criticism as long as this post.
All you need to understand, in order to throw the China Study and every other ecologic study that attempts to apply its findings at the individual level, under the bus is this graph.
What that graph shows is the actual prevalence of obesity in the US vs. the actual per capita chicken consumption in the US using official USDA data from 1971 to 2006. These data are represented by the black triangles. These are ecologic (ie, population-level) data, similar to typical China study data in the sense that they are data on prevalence of some disease or condition vs per capita consumption of a dietary factor. As the graph suggests, the ecologic-level correlation is strongly positive. In fact, it is 0.99.
However, no one really thinks that chicken is the cause of the US obesity epidemic. White meats, like chicken, are generally lower in fat than red meats, and tend to be preferred by health-conscious individuals; so it is plausible that, on the individual level, chicken consumption could be negatively correlated with BMI, perhaps even strongly.
To illustrate that such a strong negative correlation is perfectly compatible with a strong positive population-level correlation, I superimposed on the graph hypothetical data representing chicken intake and BMI of a random sample of individuals from the population at each time point. The mean chicken intake of the individuals at each time point is exactly equal to the per capita intake (ie, the black triangle) at that time point. Therefore these individual data are completely compatible with the population-level data.
Of course, the true correlation between individual-level chicken intake and BMI could be different; although it could be negative, as pictured, it could also be positive or neutral. The point is that the population-level correlation is completely uninformative about what is going on at the individual level.
Once you understand this, then you can safely ignore the results of any ecologic study that claims that the results can be applied to the individuals in the study. Modern epidemiologists understand this well, and essentially never make this sort of claim. Campbell, whose background is nutrition, not epidemiology, does not understand this—at least he didn’t 10 years ago when I had a rather heated argument with him about it. It’s too bad for him and his unfortunate students, because they could have invested their energies into investigating their hypotheses by using valid methodologies, and actually learned something from their data.
Jay
Richard
My friend recently became a vegan, and being something of a philosopher myself, I tested her newfound evangelism and found it wanting, since she started with a conclusion and assumed the arguments towards it. I tried to put her right on a few points.
However, on reflection, and since i am a meat eater and have studied morality, I have a feeling meat eaters ARE less ethical than vegetarians. I think on consequentialist and utilitarian ethics, meat-eaters cause more issues than vegetarians, and I am fairly sure this is quite easy to support philosophically. i know Peter Singer is hot on this.
Interestingly, I have come to the conclusion that when I argued against vegetarianism, it was a knee-jerk reaction of cognitive dissonance. I think recognising one’s own cognitive dissonance is really important, since we spend an awful lot of time accusing Christians of committing to it on a regular basis!
So, and with the greatest respect, I wonder whether the foundation for your defence of meat eating is cognitive dissonance and the disharmony of your enjoyment of eating meat, the effort of changing over, and your not wanting to admit you are morally less ethical than you could be.
When I understood my position, I reconciled this with simply admitting that I am lazy and not perfect, though my partner and I have switched to being vege two days a week: flexitarian!
Obviously it depends on your ethics, but given what you espouse in SAGWG (an excellent book, mind), it seems odd that you would not extend much of the philosophy to animals. Surely a world with animal pain is worse than one without? And the environmental arguments seem to be very strongly in favour of vegetarianism.
Do you adhere to any kind of pluralistic consequentialism, such as there might be some other kind of end goal that as well as happiness?
To put it in a more simplistic sense:
Do you really and honestly think that a world which was vegetarian be no better than the present world / a world which ate meat?
Ie, a world where billions of animals died to feed us, but that is not necessary that they die (ie we can live as vegetarians).
You can even break that down from the world to your local state to avoid confusing the matter with practical logistics.
Note on comment posting and response delays: please see my recent post on current status. If your comment hasn’t posted yet, and you can’t think why it wouldn’t, that’s probably why: I just haven’t gotten to it yet. There are at least sixty now still waiting my approval, for this thread alone. It will take me time to get to them, for the reasons explained in the above link.
I just added this blog to my rss today, and this first post I see is so contradictory to my understanding of environmental science (this issue has been my chief concern for almost 20 years) that it’s hard to read without feeling a little ill. I’ll have to come back to this later, when time permits.
Richard,
Following up on my quick message this afternoon, I have a few comments. It was meant to be in order, but I took quick notes on stickies and they got mixed up.
1. The essay begins with accusations of fraud by animal welfare interests, but you provide no evidence whatsoever. If your idea is true, one might expect agribusiness operators to be happy to show their farm practices to reporters instead of pushing for recording of images and sound on farms to become illegal without consent of the agribusiness operator. http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/florida-photography-undercover-investigator-bill-chris-lagergren/5383/
2. I just noticed the graphic you posted comparing cow methane emissions to grass methane emissions. The grass emissions are produced by anaerobic digester. Is that realistic? How often do you think grass decomposition in nature is anaerobic? I’m sorry but that’s just stupid.
3. Your portrayal of animals in extreme confinement as not suffering is ridiculous. I recall reading a study of hermit crabs a few years ago that demonstrated that they exhibit signs of feeling pain, suffering, and retaining a memory of the event.
4. Another confinement issue, even if you deny animals’ ability to suffer, is antibiotic resistance evolving in pathogens, which is becoming a serious problem for human health. Did you know about that?
5. Since you accuse vegetarians of being inconsistent by having friendships with meat eaters while seeing it as evil, I’ll just come out and say that I am have been so upset and disgusted for so long with people eating so much meat despite its horrors, that if I did not have responsibility to my wife and children I would have killed myself already and offered my dead body for the “population is the problem” meat eaters to feast upon. If I could move to a reasonably habitable vegetarian planet, I would do it immediately.
6. The method of pretending that water used to grow livestock feed is not under the livestock sector but under the agricultural crops sector is like saying that we humans are only responsible for the water that we drink and use to wash, etc., but not what we use to grow food. This magical wand-waving, if applied consistently, can make the whole problem go away, on paper. In reality, since you can’t grow animals without water used to grow their food, the water to produce their food must be counted under the livestock sector. It’s also worth mention that the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides nearly 1/3 of the nation’s irrigation water will become unproductive over the next few more decades, so water is going to be a big problem.
7. The virtually permanent loss of forest to feed production is a one-time cost? Seriously, WTF? You’re writing off the loss of Brazilian rain forest as insignificant.
8. You call avoiding meat useless, and it looks like you studied this issue for about a day or so. I’ve been studying it for 19 years and am convinced that it is the best thing an ordinary individual can do for the environment, by a long shot. Still I’m practically nobody, but what authority do you have to challenge the FAO with your amateur estimations and obvious bias?
9. You call it irrational to work for change that cannot occur. I assert that it is irrational to not work for change that must occur to avoid catastrophe, regardless of the non-zero odds of success. I do not expect everyone to become vegetarian, and I even admit that meat consumption under specific circumstances is helpful for the environment (such as eating fresh roadkill). I expect I would be just about satisfied with the changes that would quickly occur if the USA stopped subsidizing agricultural meat production, though I cannot imagine how this can be done politically.
10. You call meat production highly efficient, which is an extreme stretch. It is efficient at concentrating nutrients and pollutants, but very inefficient at conserving energy. I don’t know if you took anything resembling Ecology 101, but I seem to remember that about 90% of the energy stored in plants consumed by animals is used by the animal or lost to the environment.
11. You claim that water is not wasted by meat production, but a poster I have (not in front of me at the moment) from National Geographic, I believe from this year, indicates that to produce a pound of beef requires about 1845 gallons of water, whereas to produce a pound of corn (for example) for human consumption requires only about 109 gallons of water. Most vegetable foods on the chart require less water than corn.
12. Cows on factory farms don’t produce fertilizer in the sense of it being useful. Their overabundance of manure is a waste, which often becomes a serious pollutant. I actually have a small farm sanctuary with one cow, a few sheep and goats, etc., and they produce fertilizer. It’s radically different, practically, depending on the ratio of manure to the land available for spreading it upon.
I’m out of time for now, but that’s most of what I wanted to say.
@jt512
That was very informative. Thank you for taking the time to explain this.
However, I already did believe you that an ecological study alone is not sufficient to make the sorts of conclusions Campbell et al. have. In fact even Campbell knows that (see Carrier’s fourth critical link about the China Study which has a quote from him on this very point). All an ecological study should be able to do is direct research–you see a promising correlation, try to see if there is something causing that correlation. Nonetheless, Campbell had done the sorts of studies that finds mechanisms for this, that, and the other. If those lines of research are not done, then the ecological fallacy is committed, but at least in his book Campbell tries finding reasons for the correlations.
Now, I cannot say yet how good Campbell’s other studies are, and I will need to see the critique of Minger and others to see what undercuts his hypotheses. Nonetheless, it seems that Campbell does avoid at least this one fallacy.
LykeX:
I first read it in Fit for Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond. I have had it affirmed by several other persons, at least one of which was on friendly terms with a physiologist.
The problem is that processing does two things: it causes the casein protein to effectively clog the inner surface of the intestines. IIRC this prevents the villi (which are found only in the small intestine I think – gosh, my anatomical knowledge needs improvement) from operating efficiently. And it prevents the absorption of calcium – which is still present, but it can’t be accessed.
In sum: processing makes milk a junk food. (Got Milk? Like hell I do.)
I do have it sometimes in coffee though. And sometimes I have cheese simply because it tastes good, not because of pretensions of nutrition.
In Australia you can by non-homogenized milk. In the USA you can buy raw milk in some places.
Thanks for that. I’ll have to look into it.
@Gilgamesh #49:
Well, for the third time you don’t get and just repeat your same argument.
Since the correlation at the ecologic level is mathematically unrelated to the correlation at the individual level, then how can the correlation at the ecologic level be promising? And even if you think it is promising, since it is mathematically unrelated to the correlation at the individual level, then the only way to verify it would be to do research at the individual level in that population. Rat studies cannot confirm the results of an ecologic correlation study.
There’s also some confusion about what the term “The China Study” refers. The actual China Study was an ecologic correlation study among 65 counties in China conducted in the 1980s. It’s relevance was blown all out of proportion by the media (NYT, I think), which dubbed it “The Grand Prix of Nutritional Epidemiology.” Well, the “Grand Prix” generated 31 papers in peer review journals, per a search for “China and Campbell TC” in Pubmed. To put the “Grand Prix” in perspective, a Pubmed search for “Nurses Health Study and Willett WC” returns 445 papers. In other words, compared to a high-quality nutritional epidemiology study, very little deemed worth publishing in a peer review journal came out of the China Study.
Physicist Sean Carroll has said (paraphrasing) that “when physicists learn something important, they publish a paper on it and get it peer reviewed; when they don’t, they write a whole book about it.” Apparently, the same can be said of nutritionists, since Campbell wrote an 800+ page book called Diet, Life-Style, and Mortality in China detailing the methodology and the findings of the China Study.
Now, apparently, Campbell has written a popular-level book also called The China Study that isn’t specifically about the original China Study, but rather, according to Micheal Eades, MD, is nothing more than “a book-length argument for a personal opinion masquerading as hard science.”
So, when I talk about the China Study, I’m talking about the actual China Study, not the popular book with the misleading title, or other research that Campbell may have done.
Jay
“[…]vegetarians die exactly as often as nonvegetarians do”
so… once, right?
Granted. I think we all agree that PETA is a bunch of lying whiny bitches with warped views of morality. But clean killing is still killing. I don’t murder my son and then say “I had a right to, I treated him nice his whole life”. To kill humanely is still to kill, which brings us right unto the topic of suffering:
That claim is, as far as I know, completely without scientific basis. Neuroscience is at it, and one of the things they did confirm is that a grown cow has more awareness of self and surroundings than a two year old human child.
Awareness is a difference of degree, not of kind. I don’t have a problem with the killing of a fly, but I do see an ethical problem with killing a being as far up the complexity scale of life as a grown mammal. Cows are definitely capable of suffering, and that’s the entire point. Sure, they suffer less than a human would being subjected to the same treatment, but that can also be said of many mentally handicapped people, as well as comatose patients.
I don’t see how you can uphold that argument without destroying the basis to the right for life for anything else than a fully capable human being.
No, it is not. Classic Utilitarianism as much as all its variations uphold SUFFERING as the key element by which to judge the morality of an action. You simply claim that animals have no interest in living (and since no right not to be killed), which is baseless at best, and proven to be outright wrong in the case of complex mammals.
Concerning the various environmental claims you make, I am not knowledgable enough to debunk them. I’ll do my best to check, though. One thing I can tell for sure is complete bullshit (pun intended?):
Right, because of course we have no other options of but to let grass grow wild and “screw” us all. How could we possibly utilize unused pasture? It’s not like land was one of the scarcest commodities there is.
Also, the environmental argument argument does not rely on cow-farts as the primary source of meat-caused greenhouse gases. The enormous infrastructure behind the meat industry is a much more important point. Vast transport routes between all the intermediate points in the production, all for an industry that does not serve our survival, but merely our taste.
I doubt that you can deny that growing plants (and fertilzer and and and) and transporting them to humans for consumption is more efficient than growing all that shit, transporting it to animals, killing them, transporting them, processing them, THEN transport them to the humans.
I’m not sure your “it’s all waste!” claim is up to date, either. Modern factories like to feed their stock high protein food: Soy and fish flour. The latter is a waste product, but also needs to be processed and transported. And there is an entire industry farming high-yield-low-quality grains specifically for cattle feed, failing to utilize the land for the production of plants fit for human nourishment.
I agree that there are a number of bullshit claims out there. Many of yours are as bad and as misleading as those made by PETA.
In the end, we live on a planet with a huge population of starving humans, but chose to feed, shelter and maintain an obscenely huge population of kattle instead, which only exists in the first place because we bred them for the sole reason that we like the taste of steak. I find that grotesque to the highest degree.
You read it in a crank book and had it affirmed via chinese whispers from an unspecified physiologist at two removes? This is not a reliable source.
This has been an informative debate to read about and is a important issue to discuss, with many implications and consequences. I have yet to see a comprehensive counter argument from an individual advocating vegetarianism addressing Richard’s many points. With the exception of Jay, who explaining his credentials as a nutritional epidemiologist, and biostatistician, and clearly breaking down the importance of the Sinha study compared to the flaws in Richard’s Key study, presents a more sound argument why meat consumption is associated with an increase in mortality on a dose- response basis. So unless Richard can explain why Jay in his last post addressing these issues he brought up, I will would tentatively say, until more good quality studies are produced, the scientific evidence seems to show vegetarianism does have health benefits.
As much as I would like to add my own thoughts to this debate, after reading the most comprehensive article in favor of vegetarianism I have read yet, I think it best to just give link to the article. And save myself years of research to produce an argument that may barley resemble the article I will reference. This article covers all of Richard’s main points and gives counter arguments in detail with references. It is written by a scholar, Dr. William O. Stephens, who has a P.h.D in philosophy. Here is the link: http://puffin.creighton.edu/phil/stephens/fiveargumentsforvegetarianism.htm
It would be pointless to for me to find research and arguments in favor of vegetarianism, when there is already in existence a detailed, and referenced paper on the topic. Which articulates the counter-argument far better than I could create, to be honest. So I think it is best to have a real debate on the topic to go to sources, like the one it just mentioned, written by scholars who are some the leading “experts” or voices on the topic. Then we can get to the heart of the main issues like Richard has covered so comprehensively. I hope this paper when read, will lead to cover topics and perspectives not yet discussed, and thereby further the debate, and others understanding on this important issue.
A lot of bullshit in the comments. I want to explain one thing:
If cows are corn-fed, they are not grain-fed. If you grow corn for feeding cows, you cut and feed the whole plant. And corn is a type grass. So you are actually feeding them grass, it’s just grass that grows higher, which makes it possible to feed more cows with less soil.
And that’s another aspect you have to have in mind if you compare human-consumable grain with corn feed, because if you would grow crops for human food, you would let the plant grow until you have only a little grain and tons of (unfeedable) straw instead of tons of feedable corn feed.
This is an excellent post and discussion thread. Thank you for opening up this discussion to rational debate.
I would like to comment, not from a researchers point of view, but from the point of view of an “insider” observer. I am myself a pasture-based livestock farmer. I read a lot, but am a scientific layperson and stand to be corrected on points of fact or of logical fallacy.
I have long been frustrated with the easy assumption that vegetarianism will lead to more sustainability and less environmental degradation. It is my view, based on my practical understanding of farming and food production, that the opposite may be true.
Firstly, true long-term sustainability in agriculture requires the intelligent replication of complex, biodiverse ecosystems. We humans cannot exist in a vacuum of our own making, and we deplete the soil that is essential to growing our food, and destroy the biodiversity that is essential to the biological resilience of all living things, including ourselves, at our peril.
Here’s what I know, in this context, about the sustainability of pastured livestock keeping vs. grain-growing (whether for human or animal consumption).
Pasturing livestock replicates an ancient, sustainable and complex ecosystem – that between grazers and perennial multispecies grasses – seen, for example in the teeming herds that once roamed the grasslands of Europe, Asia, Africa and America (copiously burping and farting, I might add, the gases produced by their cohabiting methanogens, some of the most ancient inhabitants of this planet). These herds ate richly of, and tramped their manure into, a form of plantlife that had evolved not only to withstand, but to thrive under this treatment. High level predators were always a part of this ecosystem also, keeping herds bunched together for safety (which maximised footfall impact), and keeping the on the move (which maximised rest periods between “treatments”). Our modern livestock herds lack predators and freedom of movement, but, using methods that replicate the effects of these can improve the quality of soil, grass, water, local biodiversity, local crop fertility, human health and wealth, and the size of the herd itself, as has been demonstrated by 2010 Buckminster Fuller winner, Allan Savory.
In contrast, growing grain requires biocide on a large scale. Land must be cleared of all “weeds” and “vermin” (many of which are as cute and furry as any lamb) before planting a mono-crop of an annual grass – whose natural ecosystem function was to be a forerunner in the re-population of species in the aftermath of any natural disaster – fire, flood, earthquake – that left the earth bare and sterile. Instead of allowing these annual grasses to perform that function and be quickly followed in succession by more diverse perennial species (“weeds”) and exploited by animals (“vermin”), which would heal and rebuild the soil substrate, we replicate the emergency, and ensure the ongoing sterility such a crop requires, year on year. The extent of soil destruction this entails can be witnessed in the current state of the original “Fertile Crescent” – still largely sterile five to ten thousand years after the first domestication of annual grasses.
It should be noted in passing, that it simply would not be an option for this farm to switch to growing crops of any vegetable kind, apart from some horticultural crops, such as fruit trees, fruit bushes, and potatoes (which have a place on our farm already), because of the hilliness of the land, which precludes the use of tractors. Thus, our livestock could not, by any stretch, be accused of using land or crops that would otherwise be “people food.” Instead, they are able to make efficient use of marginal land, which easily grows grass and stones in plenty, eat this inedible grass, and recycle it into “people food.” However, in a bigger picture, our farm also builds soils year on year (itself a huge carbon sink – I wonder is this accounted for in the carbon footprint figures cited?), supports a diversity of wildlife – all sorts of trees, shrubs and other herbage in hedgerows, etc. Badgers, foxes, herons, etc all make their homes here undisturbed.
Also, we recently bore witness to the side effects of the EU’s long term farm policies aimed at reducing livestock numbers. Large parts of our neighbouring lands are carrying less than 10% of the livestock numbers that formerly roamed rather freely, under an ancient “commonage” system. Undergrazing has its own hazards – among others the failure of dead grasses to be trodden into the soil to decay – instead standing proud in the field, dead and weathering and becoming a fire hazard. Also the overgrowth of inflammable gorse and other species. The inevitable happened early this year when the weather conspired to be dry and breezy – massive gorse fires, which also destroyed adjacent forests on hundreds of acres.
There are many more points that could be made, but the central point is that you cannot have a sustainable ecosystem without animals, plants and microbes, all working together. And no food supply that depends on ecosystem and soil destruction can be sustainable in the long term.
PS. There should be no such thing as surplus manure. Manure (including our own) is the number one resource we have for replenishing and rebuilding the soil. And soil is our only guarantee of food security into the future. (Petroleum derived fertilizers supply nutrients that make plant growth possible on depleted soils, but do litte to replenish or rebuild those soils. Also, as petroleum is a finite resource, they are unlikely to be available to us in the long-term.)
Manure is most efficiently applied directly to the soild by the animals themselves, but when this is not possible, then manure should be immediately captured into an organic bedding/biolitter system (straw, old hay, etc). I am not familiar with the detail of the chemical processes described above which can turn some of the nitrogen in urine into ammonia, but I do know that the urine of properly bedded animals does not ever produce ammonia smells. My understanding is that urine and feces which are immediately absorbed and incorporated into an organic bedding begin to aerobically compost by means of the activity of thermophilic bacteria (farmers round here call this process “heatin'”) and by-pass the ammonia-producing step). Animals that are housed with a proper thickness of organic bedding/biolitter never produce any unpleasant smells, and their manure immediately stops being waste (something useless and potentially polluting), as it begins to become compost (something useful and non-polluting) immediately.
@jt512
I fear we may be talking past each other to some degree, but let me say that I do see your point. To be clearer, an ecological study can be useful for further research such as by conduct of a cohort study. I see your point that rats studies are not sufficient to explain an ecological analysis, and you are certainly correct.
I also want to clarify that the “China Study” I had been referring to is the book by Campbell from 2005. Your criticisms of the actual China Study are spot-on, so I will also take them into consideration when they are used to prop up dietary claims. I read the blog by Dr. Eades you mentioned, and Carrier had linked to it before. I also noted that his criticisms of the book seemed sub-par at best. Nonetheless, I wish to continue to explore the subject matter and not dismiss it because it is in a book. (Besides, Campbell has written journal articles for his position as well.)
http://ziztur.com/2011/12/so-meat-good-then.html
Response post on my own blog. Any input welcome!
Richard, forgive me, but your arguments are completely ludicrous, and they assume a false dichotomy between supporting vegetarianism/veganism and supporting other environmental efforts. When I say that if everyone were to become vegan/vegetarian it would improve emissions, that is 100% truth, and you know it. The ONLY way you can argue otherwise is to then tack on some bullshit that I would also disagree with. That is, you have to argue that, provided everyone adopted a diet without meat, they’d take up other behaviors that harm the environment. But you know what? I’d say we should regulate THOSE behaviors as well! You seem to think that those of us who incorporate environmental reasons into our veganism/vegetarianism think that this diet choice is the SOLE and ONLY answer to environmental problems, and your entire criticism is rooted in that quite false belief. So if you want to talk about who’s being irrational here, let’s remember who is the one straw-manning the other position here! In effect, what I’m saying is “Eating less meat results in fewer emissions,” and your response is “Eating less meat DOESN’T result in fewer emissions, assuming that the meat-eating behavior is replaced with behaviors like driving Hummers 200 miles every day, shooting puppies with gas-guzzling flamethrowers, and raping grandmothers with winter tomatoes.” Guess what? Most people who are vegetarian/vegan for environmental reasons would ALSO be working to prevent emissions that would come from those additional sources you’d tack on as “replacement behaviors.” It’s obviously a straw man and I’m amazed you commit to it so strongly all the while insinuating that it is the other side being irrational and making false assumptions…
In regards to animal feed, sure, some of it may be from waste from human crops, but A LOT of it is from feed crops, which uses a lot of land and creates a lot of unnecessary emissions. And like I said, the ONLY way you can argue that universalizing vegetarianism wouldn’t produce fewer emissions would be to tack on a completely baseless assumption that other behaviors would be worse for the environment. Do you really think those who change their diet for environmental reasons would then advocate and support practices that harm the environment more? Do you really think we also advocate abandoning technological research into energy alternatives and other ways to mitigate climate change? Don’t be silly. You are assuming that vegetarianism equates with an all-or-nothing worldview that sees reducing meat intake as the ONLY source to a better world. That’s not the case.
My point is simple, and it isn’t about what is practical or what would work in a prisoner’s dilemma. It’s about what is ethical. And no one can deny that it is more ethical to eat less meat or to try to mitigate harm to the environment. If we lived in a world where people did not eat so much meat and where we took those steps as well as others to reduce environmental impacts, the world would be a better place. There would be less animal suffering. There would be less environmental damage. The only point in which you can make your case is whether seeking these goals is realizable or practical. But simply because something isn’t practical doesn’t mean it isn’t ethical. Again, I think you are completely wrong to equate whether something would work with whether it would be ethical. Someone who advocates not killing is ethical. Someone who advocates killing a few minorities because some authoritarian power will only be appeased in that way is not ethical. They may be the most practical in that scenario, but certainly not the most ethical.
(As for your digression about politics, while I agree that Supreme Court justice selection is important, certainly it hasn’t escaped your notice that Executive powers are continually increasing, rendering the “checks” of the courts and other legislative bodies increasingly superficial, especially when it comes to foreign policy. Obama has a record almost as bad as Bush’s, and worse in some respects, when it comes to abuses of Executive powers [his abuse of the state secrets privilege has been especially frightening and telling]. Give it more time. I fear the Executive branch will one day be able to detain or imprison anyone they like without having to give any reason, and the courts and legislative bodies will dutifully defer to the President because we’re in a war with a concept rather than an actual nation. For the record, I do not think the answer is voting for a third party. I am not sure what the answer is, to be frank, but I certainly don’t see voting for Democrats ending this problem, only prolonging our descent into this sort of insane police state rather than plunging us into it quickly. I’d almost prefer a quick plunge, as that at least would wake up people who are indifferent. At any rate, my greater point with that comment, though, was that an individual vote is quite pointless and worthless, and hence you’d think a game theorist would have no problem advocating against voting and instead opting for a more direct route to change, like say lobbying your representatives or throwing a molotov cocktail through their windows.)
Here’s another reason to eat animals. Many various of animals are currently in danger of extinction because we stopped eating them. Here is a list http://albc-usa.org/cpl/wtchlist.html from the the american livestock breeds conservancy.
I have to wonder what PETA and the rest propose we do with all these animals once we stop eating them. And how, exactly, we go about persevering the genetic diversity of the breeds. Though, I suspect some people who simply not care if all long horns (for example) went extinct because they aren’t ‘real’ animals. (As a side note, I realize that a breed is not the same thing as a species.)
On top of that, I often seriously wonder if any vegetarian has actually seen the mass harvest of crops before. Those 100+ birds aren’t following the tractor to catch seeds. I grew up in Texas, which has rice fields. The sheer mass of small animals on the land is staggering. And anything not fast enough or lucky enough gets chopped and spit out with the other waste.
It also seems that we have been farming for so long that there are many species of animal (birds, mice, ect) that depend on farming animals. Especially in Europe. I can’t find this paper atm, but it was awhile back and that was what struck me as interesting. Mostly because it seems with some people they care about the big animals. The cow, the horse, the pig. And totally forget the smaller ones.
And then, we would have to clear out more land, cut down more forest, to plant more crops (as you pointed out, we are feeding the animals waste product from food production), in order to feed all the people we are now. And we’re not even talking third world.. who don’t exactly have a megamart with five different kinds of tomato to pick from year round.
It does not make logical sense to demand that everyone not eat meat. The negative impact on diversity, land, and people would be great.
First of all you have made a mistake, Ovo-Lacto Vegetarians do no eat fish. Perhaps the study you used defines it differently but either way it is incorrect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovo-lacto_vegetarianism
Infact conventional vegetarianism is Ovo-lacto, beyond that is Vegan.
While I understand you offhandedly addressed personal preference you did so in a manner that ignored a few words I would like to share.
I do not eat meat because my subjective experience of eating meat is not worth the value of animal life to me.
Yes this is aesthetic, and on a broad scale unrealistic, meaning I wish to impose it on no one. Because of this I have no problem helping your lactose intolerant ass move your couch to your new house, or sharing dinner with those who eat meat, Their subjective experience is different than mine
Apparently their equation for net gain for life lost is different than mine, maybe meat is just that tasty to them.
There is nothing irrational about this, and it does not require I judge them as having devalued animal life, nor does it require an inflated value of animal life on my part.
I realize this is not an argument to convert people to Vegetarianism, thus requires no counter argument, however it is a rational and moral lifestyle / dietary preference.
And its certainly more polite than calling people stupid.
Richard it seems like you’ve cherry-picked your data a bit. You claim that animals aren’t treated as cruelly as PETA claims, but that doesn’t mean they don’t suffer more than in the wild. Limiting pig and cattle mobility surely do cause suffering because larger animals like those do have a preference for more mobility. Chickens may demonstrate crowding behavior, but that does not show that keeping them crowded for the duration they are in farms does not cause them suffering. In fact, crowded chickens show a high propensity for cannibalism and thus have to be de-beaked. De-beaking has shown to cause chronic pain in a significant percentage of chickens. Even if you concede this point and advocate laws like California Prop 2, it leads to less efficiency. Less efficiency means more land use, more land degradation, and more deforestation for farms.
Even if it were sustainable to do this; efficiency still costs much more and you are setting up a system in which corporations make more money breaking laws and torturing animals. Criminal mismanagement DOES happen in every industry, but in livestock it leads to the torture of animals IN ADDITION to the human costs of sub standard product quality and working conditions for farm workers. Regulation can’t eliminate mismanagement, other industries are necessary; whereas eating animals instead of plants isn’t. Also, mismanagement in livestock industries cause harm in both the process of raising animals and the consequences of sub-standard products.
Your citation of the book “How Bad Are Bananas” doesn’t match up with the article it leads to. I’m assuming the book itself contains the claim that the greenhouse impacts of a burger and shower are 3 and 2 respectively. That sounds like accounting chicanery. Given how much heated water is used to process meat, how much water is used for animals to drink, the energy required to maintain a slaughterhouse, etc. It seems unlikely that the same factors were considered to reach those two numbers. You also gloss over the fact that Berners-Lee’s conclusion is that eating less meat and dairy is an effective way to lower your footprint. Either his analysis is accurate and you are overlooking other factors that make meat inefficient, or his analysis is incorrect and your points about greenhouse impact are false.
You claim that we have to consider how the water would be used if not for livestock, but ignore how inedible crop yields could be used for bio-fuels. The point is water used for other things could have a greater benefit (like generating electricity so we could use less coal).
You’re right that the industry could be made less harmful to the environment, but more efficiency makes animal conditions worse.
It doesn’t take the consideration of animals as equivalent to humans to be a vegetarian. Thus it is not irrational to still associate with meat eaters. Stop straw-manning
It was very disappointing to see this disastrous post on Freethought blogs – it’s almost as if you’re deliberately trying to drive a wedge between vegetarian humanists and the rest of the atheist community. Some people can’t stand animal cruelty for very sound philosophical reasons that you don’t bother to mention, and very simply put, the best way to avoid harming animals is not to eat them.
You seem to deny the fact that animals suffer in factory farms, which an extraordinary thing to say! Perhaps you should visit a hog factory in Ohio and watch piglets getting their testicles pulled out without anaesthetics, or watch the sows who are unable to move in any direction chewing miserably on the bars of their ‘gestation’ crates. Animal abuse a is systematic and routine part of factory farming (I’ve worked on a battery egg farm, so I know) and if you want to apologize for that then that’s your business, but don’t castigate vegetarians for making the humane decision to abstain from eating animal products.
You don’t even mention slaughterhouses (probably because you don’t know anything about them), and proceed to project the most bizarrely offensive motives onto vegetarians – whom, you suggest, all regard meat-eaters as paedophiles?? You say that the welfare of animals is a top priority for agribusiness, when in fact the welfare of any individual animal makes no difference to the economics of the operation as a whole. They are only concerned about suffering to the extent that it affects their profits and agribusinesses lobby the govenment every year to hold back reforms in animal welfare. In fact, every reputable scientist who studies animal health agrees that factory farming is far from ideal for the well-being of those animals. If everyone, let’s say, replaced two meals out of ten with a vegetarian alternative then we’d need to produce a fifth less meat, which would undeniably have an impact. Please do some serious research next time.
I am a vegetarian. I have been for 15 years now. I stopped eating meat because I learned how meat was produced (mass production, in europe animals are transported for 30h before killed incl. broken limps and dehydration along the way)I wouldn’t mind eating meat if..I could afford locally produced free range and I didn’t have to explain every time I refuse meat (because I don’t know where the meat is coming from) and potentially offend the chef.So it’s money and lazyness. The market is driven by demand so I am demanding free range or nothing. If you feel ok with eating mass farmed unethical meat, go for it. I made my choice, you made yours. (I don’t like proselytizing, I can’t stand militant vegans or vegetarians)
I’m amazed that someone declaring the “irrationality” of all of his opponents would settle for making broad, sweeping claims about how factory farming “doesn’t really cause much suffering,” without providing a shred of evidence. What is the factual basis for this grand declaration? Why are you so convinced that the propaganda of the meat industry (whose livelihood depends on their public image) is wholly true but the propaganda of animal welfare activists is false?
You suggest that most of the claims that factory farms are inhumane comes from “gotcha” videos. Do you know why this is the case? I would say that it has a lot to do with the fact that the meat industry fights tooth and nail to *prevent* the public from seeing the actual conditions at the plants. They actively fight for laws that would turn taking a photo of a factory farm from a public road into an act of “ecoterrorism.” In the absence of any public access to the farms other than staged press events, how is the public able to come to an informed opinion about whether or not they are inhumane?
If you are serious about people actually being informed on the issue, and I assume you are since you are so enthusiastic about declaring who is and isn’t “rational,” then you should be advocating for full transparency about what the conditions of factory farms actually are. And no, mere statistics about “compliance with the law” are not enough because (even assuming that the inspectors are doing their jobs perfectly and without bias), the laws are not designed to prevent cruelty; they’re designed to protect human health.
Do you mean textbook biology or real-world biology? I have seen a few comments on web forums etc. which assume that the real world follows textbooks. But you are right to object – there isn’t a consensus on some of these details.
Are you perhaps suggesting that intestinal congestion does not occur, or are you limiting your response to my comment about milk?
I get the feeling that you are implying that refined foods are just as healthy as unrefined foods; or that processing conserves all the nutrients in the raw food. In any case I refer you to a physiologist if you want further details.
Richard Carrier wrote that:
There is a lot of food for thought in this blog entry, and I changed my mind about many things. I found it a great defense of meat eating, and I intend to use these arguments in the future to defend my meat eating.
However, I think it is important to keep in mind that in the absence emission of GHGs from human activities, the amount of carbon dioxide that gets into the atmosphere balances the amount that is taken out by other natural processes, such as plants and the oceans. This is simply due to the establishment of a rough equilibrium.
However, when we additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from human activities, the concentration increases(and reaches equilibrium again, but only in a geological time-scale), which is why we are concerned with an increase if the emission of GHGs.
So we want to focus on net emission, not the total amount (because this does not address the process that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere). It is this net emission that is problematic from the perspective of climate change.
Compare this with being on a diet. If you take in more than you eat, you cannot say that this will not lead to weight gain because the net intake is negligible compared with what you take in in total. Clearly, the net intake will have a large influence of weight gain/loss.
For a reference, please see the critique of the “argument 33” at skepticalscience(dot)com(slash)argument(dot)php called “Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions”.
Now, I do not mean to imply that Dr. Carrier rejects the science of climate change; it is just an unfortunate formulation of the argument in the comment I cite because he is right in the original argument in the blog entry that it could very well be replaced by production and use of fertilizers that contribute equally or more to GHGs emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. So Dr. Carrier is right in this version of the argument. The error is in the problematic comparison between man-made and natural emissions.
Dr. Carrier is also right in the comparison of the relative low emissions of GHGs from the meat industry compared with other industries such as coal burning and transport. Here he is correctly comparing apples to apples.
Maybe I am misrepresenting Dr. Carrier’s position here. Perhaps the emphasis is only on the fact that it constitutes a small percentage of human emission of GHGs, therefore not a significant contribution to the problem. This, I think, is reasonable correct.
It is unfortunate that Dr. Carrier made the invalid comparison between human and non-human emissions of GHGs in the comment i quote above.
I have trouble finding words adequate for this post. Rather than buying the silly comparison of vegetarianism to evangelical religion, yet again I take something else away from it, namely that meat eaters invariably tend to display an unthinking defense mechanism for their behaviors that is much more akin to religions apologetics than vegetarianism, as the OP casually claims. Red herrings, sloppy accusations, straw men, carefully keeping the own level of discourse just shallow enough to comfortably justify ones own behavior, while throwing many values under the bus that I consider imperative. Laughing at compassion for other animals? Splendid. The chauvinist distinction between us and other animals which is celebrated in this text is so 19th century, so unworthy of a modern ethical discussion of animal and human rights, that it leaves me dumbfounded. It harkens back to darker days, as it has been written before many times to justify cruelty of another sort.