Vegetarians! Why aren't you vegan?
- Thread starter pootle
- Start date
ethel
Well-Known Member
ethel
Well-Known Member
and that's a lot of bollocks. milk is tested regularly. milk from cows which have had antibiotics isn't allowed to pass for human consumption.
ps. i would be vegan if i wasn't so lazy, but my parents are dairy farmers and some of the nonsense that gets spouted really annoys me.
ouchmonkey
Singe Gainsbourg
this thread seems to have gone on a while but it was all wrapped up in post 2
CHEESE
it's pretty easy to square eggs if you buy free range, and they provide a decent amount of minerals and protein. Milk is more of a bitch, but I don't take it in hot drinks so I don't use much anyway.
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
How old (on average) are your parents' dairy cows before they are slaughtered?
ethel
Well-Known Member
i'd hazard a guess at 7 or 8.
i really can't say though. my dad is more likely to sell them on to other farmers than to sell them for meat.
interesting little article here:http://www.heraldscotland.com/busin...me-under-spotlight-at-national-event-1.932594
i've seen my dad get up in the middle of the night to go and rub mustard into a cow's belly (don't ask). he also fed one of them my mum's brandy (again, don't ask).
Fedayn
Well-Known Member
If you added, because of cheese and decent leathjer shoes that's me that is.
ethel
Well-Known Member
PS: more intersting reading.
http://www.farmersguardian.com/news...must-do-more-to-improve-welfare/28526.article
if the supermarkets hadn't driven the prices down, then welfarer could be improved drastically. my dad's best cows will give him £8-£10 of milk a day. his electricity bill is £600 a month and that's just for starters.
http://www.farmersguardian.com/news...must-do-more-to-improve-welfare/28526.article
if the supermarkets hadn't driven the prices down, then welfarer could be improved drastically. my dad's best cows will give him £8-£10 of milk a day. his electricity bill is £600 a month and that's just for starters.
subversplat
writer of wrongs
No comment on the permitted 400,000 cells of mastitis pus per millilitre of milk though?
Yummy yummy, pus in my tummy
subversplat
writer of wrongs
Regarding eggs, over 200 million male chicks are fed live into a grinder each year to keep up the production of laying hens (male "laying breed" chicks having no financial use to anybody) - even free range hens come from the same hatcheries.
Clair De Lune
Apocalypse cocktails
No comment on the permitted 400,000 cells of mastitis pus per millilitre of milk though?
Yummy yummy, pus in my tummy
I feel sick
Who cares? Never work near a council's environmental health department. You'll get to hear about the permitted number of fly eggs per cubic litre of pizza (tomato) topping and how much fecal contamination is allowed on veg until you'll never want to eat again.
Our bodies are sophisticated tools at processing foods and removing impurities. I'm sure they're more able to deal with a teeny bit of naturally occuring pus than a Dairylea cheese string fwiw.
Our bodies are sophisticated tools at processing foods and removing impurities. I'm sure they're more able to deal with a teeny bit of naturally occuring pus than a Dairylea cheese string fwiw.
ethel
Well-Known Member
indeed.
Do vegans really think that drinking milk is de facto cruelty? I can understand that as far as practicality goes it is off limits - but surely we can imagine a scenario in which a calf dies at birth, as no doubt happens. I can't see why it would be cruel to drink the milk from the mother (or make cheese from it) - it might even be a compassionate act. Just wondering, really, and like I said such a scenario has no effect on whether or not you would buy a pint from your local shop.
Treehugger76
I'm also a Hobbit
yes because you're contributing to the demand which is keeping the animals being exploited.
If you're vegan due to disagreement with the dairy/meat industry then it's essentially a boycott through choosing to not buy these products just like people wouldn't eat fois gras because of what the geese are put through to make it.
I'm sure in a perfect world, enough calves would die at birth for everyone to get a wee pint of milk every day. However, there is no point trying to appease your guilt by imaging your milk came from such a happy coincidence when we live in a world where cows are kept pregnant, some forced to produce way more than what is natural a day and again, with the pus and the blood....realitywise, its all a bit eww no matter how you spin it
Yes, I understand that, and I certainly wasn't trying to assuage my guilt - I was just trying to reduce the relationship between the human and the animal, so that larger, lest direct issues like fueling demand don't enter into it. For this hypothetical, imagine there is no dairy industry, or you are wandering in some vast empty grassy plain and discover a cow in the situation stated above. My point, I guess is that drinking milk seems to me to be very different to eating meat (or at least butchering and eating meat - scavenging might erase this distinction). If there was no meat industry, most vegetarians and vegans would still find it unacceptable to kill and eat a cow they find. But I don't think that the nature of drinking milk is by definition tied to cruelty - the practicality of large scale industrial measures, of course, do tie it to cruelty.
This is surely nonsense. Keeping milk flowing depends on the animals breeding.
How do the ethics of mass breeding to sustain milk production stay guilt free. What happens to all the male calves? Is a lifetime of compelled breeding and milking 'natural' for a cow? And many other questions.
How do the ethics of mass breeding to sustain milk production stay guilt free. What happens to all the male calves? Is a lifetime of compelled breeding and milking 'natural' for a cow? And many other questions.
crustychick
doo-woop-de-doo
can you back this up? just generally interested.... i watched the film baraka once and they have a scene where live chicks are being sorted in a factory and thrown down shoots... but really? grinding live chicks? I mean, why??? and what do they do with the remains?
I think people are misunderstanding me - and I think that's because the question is irrelevant to the realities of the milk industry. I do think philosophical analysis is a good thing for any group though.
So in this hypothetical - no meat/dairy industry, maybe not even any other cows - there is just you, and one cow. The cow has had a calf (virgin birth if you're picking the no other cows route) and that cow has died. So the cow has milk, and you didn't force it to have milk - no hormones etc. Why would it be immoral to drink some of this milk? The cow might even be relieved of some discomfort.
I think plenty of people consider killing a cow to be immoral regardleses of circumstances, or in very few circumstances, and that makes sense to me. I don't quite understand why anyone would think that the act of drinking milk is, in itself, wrong. Like I said, back in the real world there will have to be , in order to create adequate volumes of milk, the added cruelties of industrialisation - forced pregnancies, removal of calves, selective breeding which leads to painful/uncomfortable lives for cows - basically being treated as a factory machine part. These things make it cruel and justify the boycott or other political actions.
ddraig
kicking against the pricks...
The theoretical/philosophical view is next to useless in this case though. A key issue of food supply is sustainability, which can't be achieved by fantasies of one cow having a virgin birth and someone supping guiltlessly on it. What happens when the lactating stops and you're left with a largely useless lump of farting protein?
Well, nothing, the cow wonders off and you go your own way.
The point of this train of thought is that it explains how someone could be a vegetarian and not a vegan. A person could believe that killing and eating animals is always wrong, and that the milk industry is a nightmarish and cruel corruption of nature, yet still drink milk. If their milk came from a source outside of the milk industry (ie a domestic cow - we're going to assume this person has no problem with pets) then there is no contradiction between those two ideas.
Here's a question for someone who knows about cows and stuff - the Anglo-Saxon word for May was 'thrimilce', because in May you could milk a cow three times. Does anyone know if this is an unnatural amount of milk? It seems like a lot, but then it's spring. I don't know, just wondering.
ouchmonkey
Singe Gainsbourg
I also buy clothes that were probably made by kids in the third world, run a car and waste electricity talking shit on t'internet - there comes a point were you come to an accomodation between your qualms and letting it take over your whole life. it's only for yourself anyway - if you really think you're going to stop the meat and dairy industries you'll have a long wait
madzone
Physically unfavourable
But the issue is with the dairy 'industry'
subversplat
writer of wrongs
Oh I know, but if I can carry on doing what I think's right, and maybe having the right word in the right ear to possibly encourage them to consider a more animal-friendly life, then it's probably worth it
I'm much more dogmatic on here than in real life, as most people would probably testify.subversplat
writer of wrongs
Buying a cow and a bull and recreating the whole thing yourself wouldn't be any better, even though there's no industry involved. It's suffering and exploitation which are at the heart of the vegan argument, not industry or capitalist profit (although these are often co-opted into supplementary beliefs)
madzone
Physically unfavourable
But how realistic is it for every family to have a nice pampered house cow?
