Vegans view of the World post livestock.

Veganguy

Member
its the killing of animals that vegans are really against, the environmental aspect is just used to persuade non vegans to join their cause

Some people are vegan because of environmental reasons. Though most probably are vegan because of the animal side of things.
 

Veganguy

Member
just ask, what are your clothes made of, synthetic, wool or cotton.
Are your shoes made of synthetic, leather or wood.
Where do you go on holiday.
What car do you drive, fossil fuel, or electric.
What milk do you use, cow/ goat, or almond or soy based, if not animal milk, how do you justify the deforestation to grow soya, or the desertification California, where almond growers are using more than the available water.
Then go to the subject of palm oil, thus killing off the orangutangs.
And see what they have to say !

How many of the products you buy have negative effects for many humans in the world?

Going by your logic you can't be against humans getting killed because many of the products you have bought in your life would have had a negative effect on humans in the long run.
 

Veganguy

Member
just ask, what are your clothes made of, synthetic, wool or cotton.
Are your shoes made of synthetic, leather or wood.
Where do you go on holiday.
What car do you drive, fossil fuel, or electric.
What milk do you use, cow/ goat, or almond or soy based, if not animal milk, how do you justify the deforestation to grow soya, or the desertification California, where almond growers are using more than the available water.
Then go to the subject of palm oil, thus killing off the orangutangs.
And see what they have to say !

Also funny you have the brass neck to talk about the environmental problems when it's the meat & dairy industry that is the leading cause of global warming.

Let me guess 'global warming isn't real' or 'duh duh nothing but vegan propaganda duh duh'
 

Veganguy

Member
I've had debates with a few of them
Get rid of the animals you lose the flies
Lose the flies & you lose the birds
Before you know it you've lost the balance of nature
They can't answer that
Another point. The vast majority of these animals have not even been produced naturally. Stop force breeding and nature will be able to cope just fine.
 

Blaithin

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Alberta
I don't force my animals to breed. Most of the time it's the opposite. I'm trying to stop them from breeding so that they don't have offspring at silly times of the year. Like January.

If men are horndogs, they still have nothing in comparison to my cattle!

Although if I stepped back I'm sure nature would cope just fine. Calves would freeze to death when they were born at the wrong time of the year and cattle would starve as I didn't feed them because naturally they should just be able to find enough on their own.

What would you recommend I do with them instead? Maybe I should pay to export them to a warmer climate so they could live out their lives in the tropics :unsure:
 

Veganguy

Member
Although if I stepped back I'm sure nature would cope just fine. Calves would freeze to death when they were born at the wrong time of the year and cattle would starve as I didn't feed them because naturally they should just be able to find enough on their own.

What would you recommend I do with them instead? Maybe I should pay to export them to a warmer climate so they could live out their lives in the tropics :unsure:

Shame they can't do that because their ancestors were taking from nature and enslaved.

Wonder how well you would be able to fend for yourself if your ancestors were enslaved all their lives and you were also born into that system?

Anyway humans could start training these animals to fend for themselves if they wanted. It would be a long process but so is any kind of change.
 

Blaithin

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Alberta
Shame they can't do that because their ancestors were taking from nature and enslaved.

Wonder how well you would be able to fend for yourself if your ancestors were enslaved all their lives and you were also born into that system?

Anyway humans could start training these animals to fend for themselves if they wanted. It would be a long process but so is any kind of change.
How do you know my ancestors weren't enslaved all their lives? It's hardly something that's never occurred in the history of humanity. Dollars to donuts I could fare a lot better for myself than 90% of the Western population. Chances are high I could fare better than you as well. Mainly because I do what my ancestors did tens of thousands of years ago. There's probably irony in that somewhere.

What's your proposal to train the animals to fend for themselves? Teach them how to dig through deep snow to find food? Train them to migrate to different areas for new food sources maybe. Perhaps they'll learn how to navigate fences, highways and urban centres on those migrations to those food sources. It's not like urbanization has affected the migration of wild animals... much. Then I can train them to only breed at certain times of the year so that they'll only give birth when it's nice out. I'll also train them to properly defend themselves against predators because they aren't allowed to eat meat either. And I'll teach them how to never, ever get sick or injured because there will be no vet care for them and if they do then I really can't guarantee that the predators won't actually end up eating them.

Yes domestic animals have given up some... liberties I suppose is an adequate word, when compared to their wild ancestors. But those have been in trade for other things that most lifeforms do appreciate. Things like steady and reliable food, shelter, medical aid...

Veganguy, would you be willing to give up your home, your grocery stores, your income, your access to medical aid, all so that you can be just like prehistoric humans before domestication?
 

Swarfmonkey

Member
Location
Hampshire
Also funny you have the brass neck to talk about the environmental problems when it's the meat & dairy industry that is the leading cause of global warming.

Let me guess 'global warming isn't real' or 'duh duh nothing but vegan propaganda duh duh'

Here's a break down of sectoral emissions for GHGe (data from EU Directorate-General for Climate Action, DG-CLIMA)

Energy Supply - 29.3%
Transport 19.5%
Industry - 19%
Residential and commercial property - 11.5%
Agriculture - 11.3%
Waste management - 3.2%
International aviation - 3%
International navigation - 3%
Other - 0.2%

Kind of blows your "meat & dairy industry that is the leading cause of global warming" idea out the window, does it not? Still, what do the experts at DG-CLIMA know, compared to a vegan with an axe to grind?
 

Veganguy

Member
How do you know my ancestors weren't enslaved all their lives? It's hardly something that's never occurred in the history of humanity. Dollars to donuts I could fare a lot better for myself than 90% of the Western population. Chances are high I could fare better than you as well. Mainly because I do what my ancestors did tens of thousands of years ago. There's probably irony in that somewhere.
I don't know about your ancestors but I assumed you haven't been as enslavement happens to very few humans in the western world today. There are exceptions of course- maybe you are one of them?

What's your proposal to train the animals to fend for themselves? Teach them how to dig through deep snow to find food? Train them to migrate to different areas for new food sources maybe. Perhaps they'll learn how to navigate fences, highways and urban centres on those migrations to those food sources. It's not like urbanization has affected the migration of wild animals... much. Then I can train them to only breed at certain times of the year so that they'll only give birth when it's nice out. I'll also train them to properly defend themselves against predators because they aren't allowed to eat meat either. And I'll teach them how to never, ever get sick or injured because there will be no vet care for them and if they do then I really can't guarantee that the predators won't actually end up eating them.
There are many ways that these animals could be trained to better fend themselves in the wild. There are also people who will buy them and treat them like pets for non-commercial purposes.

Imagine how some animals that are labelled as pets would cope without having care from humans? They certainly would be up against it. Animals like cats would find it hard to defend themselves against an animal like a fox. Imagine a cat getting injured and not having a vet to help them. Going by your logic it's ok for the owner of an animal to kill that animal as they may struggle to survive without being under human control

Yes domestic animals have given up some... liberties I suppose is an adequate word, when compared to their wild ancestors. But those have been in trade for other things that most lifeforms do appreciate. Things like steady and reliable food, shelter, medical aid...

Veganguy, would you be willing to give up your home, your grocery stores, your income, your access to medical aid, all so that you can be just like prehistoric humans before domestication?

If I was going to be killed within anything between 3 weeks-2 years you damn right I would.

And don't even try and make out these farms are paradise to animals. Most meat comes from places like factory farms and animals are held in appalling conditions in that industry.

Don't know about the animals on your farm but many other farms aren't much better than factory farms for animals either.

I would much rather live in the wild that being stuck in a small cage in a factory farm. At least I would have a chance of survival in the wild.
 

Veganguy

Member
Here's a break down of sectoral emissions for GHGe (data from EU Directorate-General for Climate Action, DG-CLIMA)

Energy Supply - 29.3%
Transport 19.5%
Industry - 19%
Residential and commercial property - 11.5%
Agriculture - 11.3%
Waste management - 3.2%
International aviation - 3%
International navigation - 3%
Other - 0.2%

Kind of blows your "meat & dairy industry that is the leading cause of global warming" idea out the window, does it not? Still, what do the experts at DG-CLIMA know, compared to a vegan with an axe to grind?

'Meat and dairy companies to surpass oil industry as world’s biggest polluters, report finds'

Let me guess 'duh duh the report was obviously carried out by the vegan nazis duh duh. NoThInG BuT VeEgAan PrOpAgAnDa'
 

Blaithin

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Alberta
And don't even try and make out these farms are paradise to animals. Most meat comes from places like factory farms and animals are held in appalling conditions in that industry.

Don't know about the animals on your farm but many other farms aren't much better than factory farms for animals either.

I would much rather live in the wild that being stuck in a small cage in a factory farm. At least I would have a chance of survival in the wild.
You're right, there are some types of management systems that are far from ideal. CAFO's is the term. But don't presume that the majority of farms operate that way or that even the majority of farmers support such systems.

CAFO's exist for one reason only. To meet current market demands. And the reason is not that the market demands meat, there is nothing wrong with meat in a diet, meat is what allowed humans to evolve to what we are today. CAFO's exist to supply cheap meat, quickly, in large quantities.

Veganism is too extreme. The population will never switch to a majority vegan diet, and nor do I think they should. If you're truly concerned about animal welfare then instead of promoting an extremist diet, lifestyle and religion all combo packed in one, then might I suggest promoting educational sourcing of ones food. It's a poor, invalid and very misleading assumption to think that eating a vegetarian or vegan diet is not harmful to flora or fauna or environment. It's just as critical to properly source your fruit and veggies as it is to source meat. If someone is not comfortable eating meat then fine, but there is no reason they should try to guilt and bludgeon others into feeling the same way.

Source your food from places that you feel meet your standards for high food production and encourage others to do the same. Quinoa flown across the world is not necessarily the better option when compared to a steak that's from up the road. Food is a complex issue in today's globalization. The global market has allowed access to produce that otherwise wouldn't be available but it doesn't come at no cost. There is a high cost to many ecosystems that wouldn't be there if locally sourced and well raised meat was included in the diet instead.

Just because the animal casualties from crop, veggie and fruit production are secondary and tertiary casualties doesn't mean they don't occur and shouldn't make them any less important than animals slaughtered specifically for their meat. Responsible farming involving livestock for meat is better than the irresponsible farming of plants.
 

Veganguy

Member
CAFO's exist for one reason only. To meet current market demands. And the reason is not that the market demands meat, there is nothing wrong with meat in a diet, meat is what allowed humans to evolve to what we are today. CAFO's exist to supply cheap meat, quickly, in large quantities.

What a load of bs. It exist because the market demands large, cheap quantities of meat so it is because the market demands meat.

Veganism is too extreme. The population will never switch to a majority vegan diet, and nor do I think they should. If you're truly concerned about animal welfare then instead of promoting an extremist diet, lifestyle and religion all combo packed in one, then might I suggest promoting educational sourcing of ones food. It's a poor, invalid and very misleading assumption to think that eating a vegetarian or vegan diet is not harmful to flora or fauna or environment. It's just as critical to properly source your fruit and veggies as it is to source meat. If someone is not comfortable eating meat then fine, but there is no reason they should try to guilt and bludgeon others into feeling the same way.
How is veganism too extreme? out of all your whole rambling you failed to explain why you think that being a specific vegan is extreme. You also go onto to say that not eating meat is fine - so you saying it's ok to be vegetarian but if you're a vegan you are all of a sudden an extremists?

Source your food from places that you feel meet your standards for high food production and encourage others to do the same. Quinoa flown across the world is not necessarily the better option when compared to a steak that's from up the road. Food is a complex issue in today's globalization. The global market has allowed access to produce that otherwise wouldn't be available but it doesn't come at no cost. There is a high cost to many ecosystems that wouldn't be there if locally sourced and well raised meat was included in the diet instead.

Source my food from places that meet my standards? You mean from places like your farm.

I am convinced when local farmers criticise factory farming they only reason for doing it is because factory farms take away capital from them. They couldn't care about the environmental impacts or animal welfare within these farms.

Just because the animal casualties from crop, veggie and fruit production are secondary and tertiary casualties doesn't mean they don't occur and shouldn't make them any less important than animals slaughtered specifically for their meat. Responsible farming involving livestock for meat is better than the irresponsible farming of plants.
[/QUOTE]

And what exactly is responsible farming to you?
 

Farmer Roy

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
NSW, Newstralya
You're right, there are some types of management systems that are far from ideal. CAFO's is the term. But don't presume that the majority of farms operate that way or that even the majority of farmers support such systems.

CAFO's exist for one reason only. To meet current market demands. And the reason is not that the market demands meat, there is nothing wrong with meat in a diet, meat is what allowed humans to evolve to what we are today. CAFO's exist to supply cheap meat, quickly, in large quantities.

Veganism is too extreme. The population will never switch to a majority vegan diet, and nor do I think they should. If you're truly concerned about animal welfare then instead of promoting an extremist diet, lifestyle and religion all combo packed in one, then might I suggest promoting educational sourcing of ones food. It's a poor, invalid and very misleading assumption to think that eating a vegetarian or vegan diet is not harmful to flora or fauna or environment. It's just as critical to properly source your fruit and veggies as it is to source meat. If someone is not comfortable eating meat then fine, but there is no reason they should try to guilt and bludgeon others into feeling the same way.

Source your food from places that you feel meet your standards for high food production and encourage others to do the same. Quinoa flown across the world is not necessarily the better option when compared to a steak that's from up the road. Food is a complex issue in today's globalization. The global market has allowed access to produce that otherwise wouldn't be available but it doesn't come at no cost. There is a high cost to many ecosystems that wouldn't be there if locally sourced and well raised meat was included in the diet instead.

Just because the animal casualties from crop, veggie and fruit production are secondary and tertiary casualties doesn't mean they don't occur and shouldn't make them any less important than animals slaughtered specifically for their meat. Responsible farming involving livestock for meat is better than the irresponsible farming of plants.


So you’re a vegan ... but are you, really?
The number of animals that die each and every day to produce vegan food is astonishing.
By Matthew Evans
Matthew Evans. Picture: Alan Benson
Matthew Evans. Picture: Alan Benson
  • From The Weekend Australian Magazine
    June 29, 2019
  • June 29, 2019
    9 minute read
    440 Comments
Share this article
There’s a lot to be said for veganism. For the thinking eater, it gets around a whole bunch of ethical grey areas. If you care about what you put in your mouth, it is probably the most black and white way to approach the whole meat thing. There are no grey areas about so-called “ethical” meat, or questions over exactly how “free range” are the hens when there are 10,000 chickens to the hectare. Not eating meat, not buying products that come from animals — surely that means you’re doing better not only for those animals directly affected, but also the environment, and your health? But while veganism is on the rise in Western nations, it’s still far from mainstream. Why, then, is it so hard to convince people of its worth if it really is a win all round? The vegan philosophy is, at its heart, quite often about reducing suffering. By not eating animals, you — by definition — reduce suffering. It’s a lovely idea. And I wish it were that simple.
Let’s start with peas. Collydean (not its real name, but a real farm) is a 2700ha mixed farm in northern Tasmania. They grow beef cattle, some sheep, do agroforestry, have barley and some years grow peas. A lot of peas: about 400 tonnes a season. And to protect the peas, they have some wildlife fences, but also have to shoot a lot of animals. When I was there, they had a licence to kill about 150 deer. They routinely kill about 800-1000 possums and 500 wallabies every year, along with a few ducks. (To its credit, Collydean only invites hunters onto its farm who will use the animals they kill — for human food, or for pet food — and not leave them in the paddock, as most animals killed for crop protection are.) So, more than 1500 animals die each year to grow about 75ha of peas for our freezers. That’s not 1500 rodents, which also die, and which some may see as collateral damage. That’s mostly warm-blooded animals of the cute kind, with a few birds thrown in.
Collydean’s owners assure me it wouldn’t befinancially viable for them to grow peas without killing animals. Which means that every time we eat peas, farmers have controlled the “pest” species on our behalf, and animals have died in our name.
Read Next
The number of animals that die to produce vegan food is astonishing. Consider wheat, a common crop in Australia. And let’s look at the nutrient density of the food in question, because not all foods are created equal. According to an article by Mike Archer, Professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of NSW, roughly 25 times more sentient beings die to produce a kilo of protein from wheat than a kilo of protein from beef. Thanks to monocultures, mice plagues and our modern farming systems, a hell of a lot of small animals die to produce wheat. Yes, most of them are rodents, but surely in the vegan world all warm-blooded life should be honoured equally?
On average, 1 billion mice are poisoned every year in Western Australia alone. According to a 2005 Senate report, if we didn’t kill mice the cost of food would rise drastically; even with heavy baiting programs, mice cost the Australian economy about a $36 million a year.
Let’s look at birds. Over a five-year period up to 2013, rice farmers in NSW killed nearly 200,000 native ducks to protect their fields. That’s right, to grow rice. That’s in addition to the animals indirectly affected, such as those that once thrived in the waterways drained by such a heavily irrigated crop on a dry continent. That’s how farming works. To grow something, other things are affected. Sometimes it’s an animal, sometimes it’s a helluva lot of animals. The most animals that die on Fat Pig Farm, our property in the Huon Valley south of Hobart, are the snails and slugs that would destroy our garden if left unchecked. We kill close to 5000 moths, slugs and snails each year to grow vegetables, and thousands and thousands of aphids.
Picture: Getty Images Picture: Getty Images
Insects bear the brunt of all annual vegetable production. And the most exploited insect of all is the European honeybee. True vegans don’t eat honey because it’s the result of the domestication, and utilisation, of the European honeybee. They don’t eat it because eating honey is “stealing” honey from the hive, and because bees die in the process of beekeepers managing the hives and extracting the honey. And they’re right, bees do die in that process. Problem is, honeybees are very, very good pollinators, and a whole heap of crops are pretty much reliant on these bees to produce fruit — and even more crops would suffer from far lower production due to poor fertility if we didn’t have bees. About one-third of all crops globally benefit from direct interaction with pollinators, of which European honeybees are by far the most efficient. Whether we eat honey or not, we are the beneficiaries of the work of the domesticated European honeybee. In their absence, some crops would come close to failure, and others increase substantially in cost. Gobs of bees die every year doing the work of pollination for us. According to Scientific American, up to 80 billion domestic honeybees are estimated to have a hand in the Californian almond industry each year, up to half of which die during the management process and the long journeys to and from the large almond orchards. And that’s the carnage from just one crop.
What about vegan wine, you say? It doesn’t use fish bladders, or milk extracts, or egg as a fining agent (ingredients used to clarify many wines, beers and ciders). But don’t forget the harvest. Come with me to watch grapes being picked, watch as huge tubs of plump grapes are tipped into the crusher along with mice, spiders, lizards, snakes and frogs. Sadly, vegan wine is a furphy.
Picture: Getty Images Picture: Getty Images
Let’s move on to peanut butter, that wonderful practical protein staple. Do you know how many parts of an insect are in each jar? According to Scientific American, each of us eats about 0.5-1kg of flies, maggots and other bugs a year, hidden in the chocolate we eat, the grains we consume, the peanut butter we spread on toast. According to US regulations (which are easier to access than Australian data), 125g of pasta (a single portion) may contain an average of 125 insect fragments or more, and a cup of raisins can have a maximum of 33 fruit fly eggs. A kilogram of flour probably has 15g of animal product in it, from rodent excreta to weevils to cockroach legs.
I don’t bring this up for the “ick” factor, but simply to show the true impact and cost of food production. When you eat, you’re never truly vegan. When humans grow and process food, any food, other things die — and often we eat them.
It does seem that food production gets unfairly singled out for killing animals, when every human activity has an effect on other living things. We kill animals when we drive. We kill animals when we fly, or transport goods by plane. We kill when we build railway tracks, when we farm grain, grow apples and mine sand. We alter ecosystems when we put up new housing developments, build bicycle factories and ship lentils. We push native animals out of their environments all the time, with the resultant pain and suffering you’d expect.
Perhaps, for those not interested in eating meat, or who choose not to eat meat, it’s about context. All the creatures killed in the raising of crops — the rodents, the insects, the birds — are just collateral damage. This line of thinking is based on the fact that meat eaters (or their agents, the farmers, slaughtermen, butchers and chefs) “choose” a victim, so this is different to an animal dying as a result of random chance. But a death is a death. Suffering is suffering, regardless of whether a human was involved, directly or not. All impacts of our actions need to be considered. And this I think goes to the heart of the matter.
What actions produce the least suffering? Some commentators believe that annual crops produce more suffering for more animals. The view is that life is life, that life begets life, and to live we must consume something that has lived, with impacts on other forms of life well beyond our circle of thinking. You eat a plant, and that affects an animal — one that was going to eat that plant (say a nut from a tree in the wild), one that dies because it was going to eat that plant (perhaps grasshoppers or caterpillars on farm crops), or one that might’ve lived in the wild if we didn’t farm that plant at all.
Killing an animal for food or fibre is a small effect. Bigger is the ecological footprint of livestock on the land. Bigger still, and more destructive, is the growing of plants for food, thanks to topsoil loss, the legions of animals killed to maintain monocultures, and the use of artificial fertilisers and chemicals available to the modern farmer. All of us, vegans and omnivores, are the beneficiaries of the fertiliser and compost that come from either animal waste or fossil fuels. Organic farmers use compost made from animal by-products, whereas conventional farmers use nitrogen fertilisers, which are produced using large amounts of fossil fuels. About 2-3 per cent of the fossil fuels burned each year is for making nitrogen fertilisers — accounting for roughly 3 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, including emissions from nitrogen released to the atmosphere. And then there’s the global transport system, which uses fossil fuels to ship your Brazilian soy beans and Californian almonds across the world.
If you don’t use fertilisers made from fossil fuels, you need animal by-products. There’s barely an organic fruit and vegetable farmer out there who doesn’t use some kind of animal by-product (manure, blood and bone) or the compost that contains it. And there’s barely a farm that isn’t reliant on gas and oil to make the fertiliser, run the tractors and ship the goods. Most estimates put it that the amount of fossil fuel needed to grow a calorie of food and get it to the table is 10 times more than the food calorie itself. It’s a negative-sum game. Grains and monoculture crops are worst among them — whereas grass-reared animals, killed and sold locally, are among the more efficient producers of food energy for fossil fuel use.
Take away the use of animal waste in the farming system and things will swing further to one side. If you want truly vegan agriculture, you’re going to have more fossil fuel emissions and in the process end up with more expensive food, poorer pollination and reduced variety thanks to the removal of domesticated bees.
Matthew Evans on his farm in southern Tasmania. Picture: Alan Benson Matthew Evans on his farm in southern Tasmania. Picture: Alan Benson
I have been fortunate enough to be on all sides of this debate. I’ve experimented with vegetarianism. I’ve thought about becoming vegan. I’ve been to intensive chicken and pig farms. I’ve “smelt money” and seen despair. I’ve also raised animals, killed animals (wild and domesticated) and cooked animals. What I’ve found is that the animal world isn’t isolated from the world of plants, and the place for nuanced, sensible debate about meat consumption should sit firmly with all, including with the omnivores of this world — a debate in which condemnation, aggression and intolerance should play no part.
Vegans are welcome to voice their opinion that raising and eating meat has consequences. Indeed, some of those consequences, from the personal to the animal to the environment, are worth serious thinking about. It’s quite possible that eating less meat might mean less suffering. But don’t be fooled into thinking that being vegan hurts no animal.
Edited extract from On Eating Meat by Matthew Evans (Murdoch Books, $32.99), out
 

Veganguy

Member
So you’re a vegan ... but are you, really?
The number of animals that die each and every day to produce vegan food is astonishing.
By Matthew Evans
Matthew Evans. Picture: Alan Benson
Matthew Evans. Picture: Alan Benson
  • From The Weekend Australian Magazine
    June 29, 2019
  • June 29, 2019
    9 minute read
    440 Comments
Share this article
There’s a lot to be said for veganism. For the thinking eater, it gets around a whole bunch of ethical grey areas. If you care about what you put in your mouth, it is probably the most black and white way to approach the whole meat thing. There are no grey areas about so-called “ethical” meat, or questions over exactly how “free range” are the hens when there are 10,000 chickens to the hectare. Not eating meat, not buying products that come from animals — surely that means you’re doing better not only for those animals directly affected, but also the environment, and your health? But while veganism is on the rise in Western nations, it’s still far from mainstream. Why, then, is it so hard to convince people of its worth if it really is a win all round? The vegan philosophy is, at its heart, quite often about reducing suffering. By not eating animals, you — by definition — reduce suffering. It’s a lovely idea. And I wish it were that simple.
Let’s start with peas. Collydean (not its real name, but a real farm) is a 2700ha mixed farm in northern Tasmania. They grow beef cattle, some sheep, do agroforestry, have barley and some years grow peas. A lot of peas: about 400 tonnes a season. And to protect the peas, they have some wildlife fences, but also have to shoot a lot of animals. When I was there, they had a licence to kill about 150 deer. They routinely kill about 800-1000 possums and 500 wallabies every year, along with a few ducks. (To its credit, Collydean only invites hunters onto its farm who will use the animals they kill — for human food, or for pet food — and not leave them in the paddock, as most animals killed for crop protection are.) So, more than 1500 animals die each year to grow about 75ha of peas for our freezers. That’s not 1500 rodents, which also die, and which some may see as collateral damage. That’s mostly warm-blooded animals of the cute kind, with a few birds thrown in.
Collydean’s owners assure me it wouldn’t befinancially viable for them to grow peas without killing animals. Which means that every time we eat peas, farmers have controlled the “pest” species on our behalf, and animals have died in our name.
Read Next
The number of animals that die to produce vegan food is astonishing. Consider wheat, a common crop in Australia. And let’s look at the nutrient density of the food in question, because not all foods are created equal. According to an article by Mike Archer, Professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of NSW, roughly 25 times more sentient beings die to produce a kilo of protein from wheat than a kilo of protein from beef. Thanks to monocultures, mice plagues and our modern farming systems, a hell of a lot of small animals die to produce wheat. Yes, most of them are rodents, but surely in the vegan world all warm-blooded life should be honoured equally?
On average, 1 billion mice are poisoned every year in Western Australia alone. According to a 2005 Senate report, if we didn’t kill mice the cost of food would rise drastically; even with heavy baiting programs, mice cost the Australian economy about a $36 million a year.
Let’s look at birds. Over a five-year period up to 2013, rice farmers in NSW killed nearly 200,000 native ducks to protect their fields. That’s right, to grow rice. That’s in addition to the animals indirectly affected, such as those that once thrived in the waterways drained by such a heavily irrigated crop on a dry continent. That’s how farming works. To grow something, other things are affected. Sometimes it’s an animal, sometimes it’s a helluva lot of animals. The most animals that die on Fat Pig Farm, our property in the Huon Valley south of Hobart, are the snails and slugs that would destroy our garden if left unchecked. We kill close to 5000 moths, slugs and snails each year to grow vegetables, and thousands and thousands of aphids.
Picture: Getty Images Picture: Getty Images
Insects bear the brunt of all annual vegetable production. And the most exploited insect of all is the European honeybee. True vegans don’t eat honey because it’s the result of the domestication, and utilisation, of the European honeybee. They don’t eat it because eating honey is “stealing” honey from the hive, and because bees die in the process of beekeepers managing the hives and extracting the honey. And they’re right, bees do die in that process. Problem is, honeybees are very, very good pollinators, and a whole heap of crops are pretty much reliant on these bees to produce fruit — and even more crops would suffer from far lower production due to poor fertility if we didn’t have bees. About one-third of all crops globally benefit from direct interaction with pollinators, of which European honeybees are by far the most efficient. Whether we eat honey or not, we are the beneficiaries of the work of the domesticated European honeybee. In their absence, some crops would come close to failure, and others increase substantially in cost. Gobs of bees die every year doing the work of pollination for us. According to Scientific American, up to 80 billion domestic honeybees are estimated to have a hand in the Californian almond industry each year, up to half of which die during the management process and the long journeys to and from the large almond orchards. And that’s the carnage from just one crop.
What about vegan wine, you say? It doesn’t use fish bladders, or milk extracts, or egg as a fining agent (ingredients used to clarify many wines, beers and ciders). But don’t forget the harvest. Come with me to watch grapes being picked, watch as huge tubs of plump grapes are tipped into the crusher along with mice, spiders, lizards, snakes and frogs. Sadly, vegan wine is a furphy.
Picture: Getty Images Picture: Getty Images
Let’s move on to peanut butter, that wonderful practical protein staple. Do you know how many parts of an insect are in each jar? According to Scientific American, each of us eats about 0.5-1kg of flies, maggots and other bugs a year, hidden in the chocolate we eat, the grains we consume, the peanut butter we spread on toast. According to US regulations (which are easier to access than Australian data), 125g of pasta (a single portion) may contain an average of 125 insect fragments or more, and a cup of raisins can have a maximum of 33 fruit fly eggs. A kilogram of flour probably has 15g of animal product in it, from rodent excreta to weevils to cockroach legs.
I don’t bring this up for the “ick” factor, but simply to show the true impact and cost of food production. When you eat, you’re never truly vegan. When humans grow and process food, any food, other things die — and often we eat them.
It does seem that food production gets unfairly singled out for killing animals, when every human activity has an effect on other living things. We kill animals when we drive. We kill animals when we fly, or transport goods by plane. We kill when we build railway tracks, when we farm grain, grow apples and mine sand. We alter ecosystems when we put up new housing developments, build bicycle factories and ship lentils. We push native animals out of their environments all the time, with the resultant pain and suffering you’d expect.
Perhaps, for those not interested in eating meat, or who choose not to eat meat, it’s about context. All the creatures killed in the raising of crops — the rodents, the insects, the birds — are just collateral damage. This line of thinking is based on the fact that meat eaters (or their agents, the farmers, slaughtermen, butchers and chefs) “choose” a victim, so this is different to an animal dying as a result of random chance. But a death is a death. Suffering is suffering, regardless of whether a human was involved, directly or not. All impacts of our actions need to be considered. And this I think goes to the heart of the matter.
What actions produce the least suffering? Some commentators believe that annual crops produce more suffering for more animals. The view is that life is life, that life begets life, and to live we must consume something that has lived, with impacts on other forms of life well beyond our circle of thinking. You eat a plant, and that affects an animal — one that was going to eat that plant (say a nut from a tree in the wild), one that dies because it was going to eat that plant (perhaps grasshoppers or caterpillars on farm crops), or one that might’ve lived in the wild if we didn’t farm that plant at all.
Killing an animal for food or fibre is a small effect. Bigger is the ecological footprint of livestock on the land. Bigger still, and more destructive, is the growing of plants for food, thanks to topsoil loss, the legions of animals killed to maintain monocultures, and the use of artificial fertilisers and chemicals available to the modern farmer. All of us, vegans and omnivores, are the beneficiaries of the fertiliser and compost that come from either animal waste or fossil fuels. Organic farmers use compost made from animal by-products, whereas conventional farmers use nitrogen fertilisers, which are produced using large amounts of fossil fuels. About 2-3 per cent of the fossil fuels burned each year is for making nitrogen fertilisers — accounting for roughly 3 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, including emissions from nitrogen released to the atmosphere. And then there’s the global transport system, which uses fossil fuels to ship your Brazilian soy beans and Californian almonds across the world.
If you don’t use fertilisers made from fossil fuels, you need animal by-products. There’s barely an organic fruit and vegetable farmer out there who doesn’t use some kind of animal by-product (manure, blood and bone) or the compost that contains it. And there’s barely a farm that isn’t reliant on gas and oil to make the fertiliser, run the tractors and ship the goods. Most estimates put it that the amount of fossil fuel needed to grow a calorie of food and get it to the table is 10 times more than the food calorie itself. It’s a negative-sum game. Grains and monoculture crops are worst among them — whereas grass-reared animals, killed and sold locally, are among the more efficient producers of food energy for fossil fuel use.
Take away the use of animal waste in the farming system and things will swing further to one side. If you want truly vegan agriculture, you’re going to have more fossil fuel emissions and in the process end up with more expensive food, poorer pollination and reduced variety thanks to the removal of domesticated bees.
Matthew Evans on his farm in southern Tasmania. Picture: Alan Benson Matthew Evans on his farm in southern Tasmania. Picture: Alan Benson
I have been fortunate enough to be on all sides of this debate. I’ve experimented with vegetarianism. I’ve thought about becoming vegan. I’ve been to intensive chicken and pig farms. I’ve “smelt money” and seen despair. I’ve also raised animals, killed animals (wild and domesticated) and cooked animals. What I’ve found is that the animal world isn’t isolated from the world of plants, and the place for nuanced, sensible debate about meat consumption should sit firmly with all, including with the omnivores of this world — a debate in which condemnation, aggression and intolerance should play no part.
Vegans are welcome to voice their opinion that raising and eating meat has consequences. Indeed, some of those consequences, from the personal to the animal to the environment, are worth serious thinking about. It’s quite possible that eating less meat might mean less suffering. But don’t be fooled into thinking that being vegan hurts no animal.
Edited extract from On Eating Meat by Matthew Evans (Murdoch Books, $32.99), out

Classic case of whataboutery
 

Veganguy

Member
So you’re a vegan ... but are you, really?
The number of animals that die each and every day to produce vegan food is astonishing.
By Matthew Evans
Matthew Evans. Picture: Alan Benson
Matthew Evans. Picture: Alan Benson
  • From The Weekend Australian Magazine
    June 29, 2019
  • June 29, 2019
    9 minute read
    440 Comments
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There’s a lot to be said for veganism. For the thinking eater, it gets around a whole bunch of ethical grey areas. If you care about what you put in your mouth, it is probably the most black and white way to approach the whole meat thing. There are no grey areas about so-called “ethical” meat, or questions over exactly how “free range” are the hens when there are 10,000 chickens to the hectare. Not eating meat, not buying products that come from animals — surely that means you’re doing better not only for those animals directly affected, but also the environment, and your health? But while veganism is on the rise in Western nations, it’s still far from mainstream. Why, then, is it so hard to convince people of its worth if it really is a win all round? The vegan philosophy is, at its heart, quite often about reducing suffering. By not eating animals, you — by definition — reduce suffering. It’s a lovely idea. And I wish it were that simple.
Let’s start with peas. Collydean (not its real name, but a real farm) is a 2700ha mixed farm in northern Tasmania. They grow beef cattle, some sheep, do agroforestry, have barley and some years grow peas. A lot of peas: about 400 tonnes a season. And to protect the peas, they have some wildlife fences, but also have to shoot a lot of animals. When I was there, they had a licence to kill about 150 deer. They routinely kill about 800-1000 possums and 500 wallabies every year, along with a few ducks. (To its credit, Collydean only invites hunters onto its farm who will use the animals they kill — for human food, or for pet food — and not leave them in the paddock, as most animals killed for crop protection are.) So, more than 1500 animals die each year to grow about 75ha of peas for our freezers. That’s not 1500 rodents, which also die, and which some may see as collateral damage. That’s mostly warm-blooded animals of the cute kind, with a few birds thrown in.
Collydean’s owners assure me it wouldn’t befinancially viable for them to grow peas without killing animals. Which means that every time we eat peas, farmers have controlled the “pest” species on our behalf, and animals have died in our name.
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The number of animals that die to produce vegan food is astonishing. Consider wheat, a common crop in Australia. And let’s look at the nutrient density of the food in question, because not all foods are created equal. According to an article by Mike Archer, Professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of NSW, roughly 25 times more sentient beings die to produce a kilo of protein from wheat than a kilo of protein from beef. Thanks to monocultures, mice plagues and our modern farming systems, a hell of a lot of small animals die to produce wheat. Yes, most of them are rodents, but surely in the vegan world all warm-blooded life should be honoured equally?
On average, 1 billion mice are poisoned every year in Western Australia alone. According to a 2005 Senate report, if we didn’t kill mice the cost of food would rise drastically; even with heavy baiting programs, mice cost the Australian economy about a $36 million a year.
Let’s look at birds. Over a five-year period up to 2013, rice farmers in NSW killed nearly 200,000 native ducks to protect their fields. That’s right, to grow rice. That’s in addition to the animals indirectly affected, such as those that once thrived in the waterways drained by such a heavily irrigated crop on a dry continent. That’s how farming works. To grow something, other things are affected. Sometimes it’s an animal, sometimes it’s a helluva lot of animals. The most animals that die on Fat Pig Farm, our property in the Huon Valley south of Hobart, are the snails and slugs that would destroy our garden if left unchecked. We kill close to 5000 moths, slugs and snails each year to grow vegetables, and thousands and thousands of aphids.
Picture: Getty Images Picture: Getty Images
Insects bear the brunt of all annual vegetable production. And the most exploited insect of all is the European honeybee. True vegans don’t eat honey because it’s the result of the domestication, and utilisation, of the European honeybee. They don’t eat it because eating honey is “stealing” honey from the hive, and because bees die in the process of beekeepers managing the hives and extracting the honey. And they’re right, bees do die in that process. Problem is, honeybees are very, very good pollinators, and a whole heap of crops are pretty much reliant on these bees to produce fruit — and even more crops would suffer from far lower production due to poor fertility if we didn’t have bees. About one-third of all crops globally benefit from direct interaction with pollinators, of which European honeybees are by far the most efficient. Whether we eat honey or not, we are the beneficiaries of the work of the domesticated European honeybee. In their absence, some crops would come close to failure, and others increase substantially in cost. Gobs of bees die every year doing the work of pollination for us. According to Scientific American, up to 80 billion domestic honeybees are estimated to have a hand in the Californian almond industry each year, up to half of which die during the management process and the long journeys to and from the large almond orchards. And that’s the carnage from just one crop.
What about vegan wine, you say? It doesn’t use fish bladders, or milk extracts, or egg as a fining agent (ingredients used to clarify many wines, beers and ciders). But don’t forget the harvest. Come with me to watch grapes being picked, watch as huge tubs of plump grapes are tipped into the crusher along with mice, spiders, lizards, snakes and frogs. Sadly, vegan wine is a furphy.
Picture: Getty Images Picture: Getty Images
Let’s move on to peanut butter, that wonderful practical protein staple. Do you know how many parts of an insect are in each jar? According to Scientific American, each of us eats about 0.5-1kg of flies, maggots and other bugs a year, hidden in the chocolate we eat, the grains we consume, the peanut butter we spread on toast. According to US regulations (which are easier to access than Australian data), 125g of pasta (a single portion) may contain an average of 125 insect fragments or more, and a cup of raisins can have a maximum of 33 fruit fly eggs. A kilogram of flour probably has 15g of animal product in it, from rodent excreta to weevils to cockroach legs.
I don’t bring this up for the “ick” factor, but simply to show the true impact and cost of food production. When you eat, you’re never truly vegan. When humans grow and process food, any food, other things die — and often we eat them.
It does seem that food production gets unfairly singled out for killing animals, when every human activity has an effect on other living things. We kill animals when we drive. We kill animals when we fly, or transport goods by plane. We kill when we build railway tracks, when we farm grain, grow apples and mine sand. We alter ecosystems when we put up new housing developments, build bicycle factories and ship lentils. We push native animals out of their environments all the time, with the resultant pain and suffering you’d expect.
Perhaps, for those not interested in eating meat, or who choose not to eat meat, it’s about context. All the creatures killed in the raising of crops — the rodents, the insects, the birds — are just collateral damage. This line of thinking is based on the fact that meat eaters (or their agents, the farmers, slaughtermen, butchers and chefs) “choose” a victim, so this is different to an animal dying as a result of random chance. But a death is a death. Suffering is suffering, regardless of whether a human was involved, directly or not. All impacts of our actions need to be considered. And this I think goes to the heart of the matter.
What actions produce the least suffering? Some commentators believe that annual crops produce more suffering for more animals. The view is that life is life, that life begets life, and to live we must consume something that has lived, with impacts on other forms of life well beyond our circle of thinking. You eat a plant, and that affects an animal — one that was going to eat that plant (say a nut from a tree in the wild), one that dies because it was going to eat that plant (perhaps grasshoppers or caterpillars on farm crops), or one that might’ve lived in the wild if we didn’t farm that plant at all.
Killing an animal for food or fibre is a small effect. Bigger is the ecological footprint of livestock on the land. Bigger still, and more destructive, is the growing of plants for food, thanks to topsoil loss, the legions of animals killed to maintain monocultures, and the use of artificial fertilisers and chemicals available to the modern farmer. All of us, vegans and omnivores, are the beneficiaries of the fertiliser and compost that come from either animal waste or fossil fuels. Organic farmers use compost made from animal by-products, whereas conventional farmers use nitrogen fertilisers, which are produced using large amounts of fossil fuels. About 2-3 per cent of the fossil fuels burned each year is for making nitrogen fertilisers — accounting for roughly 3 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, including emissions from nitrogen released to the atmosphere. And then there’s the global transport system, which uses fossil fuels to ship your Brazilian soy beans and Californian almonds across the world.
If you don’t use fertilisers made from fossil fuels, you need animal by-products. There’s barely an organic fruit and vegetable farmer out there who doesn’t use some kind of animal by-product (manure, blood and bone) or the compost that contains it. And there’s barely a farm that isn’t reliant on gas and oil to make the fertiliser, run the tractors and ship the goods. Most estimates put it that the amount of fossil fuel needed to grow a calorie of food and get it to the table is 10 times more than the food calorie itself. It’s a negative-sum game. Grains and monoculture crops are worst among them — whereas grass-reared animals, killed and sold locally, are among the more efficient producers of food energy for fossil fuel use.
Take away the use of animal waste in the farming system and things will swing further to one side. If you want truly vegan agriculture, you’re going to have more fossil fuel emissions and in the process end up with more expensive food, poorer pollination and reduced variety thanks to the removal of domesticated bees.
Matthew Evans on his farm in southern Tasmania. Picture: Alan Benson Matthew Evans on his farm in southern Tasmania. Picture: Alan Benson
I have been fortunate enough to be on all sides of this debate. I’ve experimented with vegetarianism. I’ve thought about becoming vegan. I’ve been to intensive chicken and pig farms. I’ve “smelt money” and seen despair. I’ve also raised animals, killed animals (wild and domesticated) and cooked animals. What I’ve found is that the animal world isn’t isolated from the world of plants, and the place for nuanced, sensible debate about meat consumption should sit firmly with all, including with the omnivores of this world — a debate in which condemnation, aggression and intolerance should play no part.
Vegans are welcome to voice their opinion that raising and eating meat has consequences. Indeed, some of those consequences, from the personal to the animal to the environment, are worth serious thinking about. It’s quite possible that eating less meat might mean less suffering. But don’t be fooled into thinking that being vegan hurts no animal.
Edited extract from On Eating Meat by Matthew Evans (Murdoch Books, $32.99), out

How many innocent people are killed by collateral damage in all the wars in the world? How many innocent people did the allies kill when they were at war with Nazi Germany?

Guess nobody can take the moral high ground over the nazis then.
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

  • 0 %

    Votes: 80 42.3%
  • Up to 25%

    Votes: 66 34.9%
  • 25-50%

    Votes: 30 15.9%
  • 50-75%

    Votes: 3 1.6%
  • 75-100%

    Votes: 3 1.6%
  • 100% I’ve had enough of farming!

    Votes: 7 3.7%

Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

  • 1,292
  • 1
As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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