On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Graydon <[email protected]> wrote: <snip> > The beef I eat is grass-fed, comes from the Bruce Peninsula, and doesn't > even cost that much. (Farm kid; I know what meat is supposed to be > like, so I don't buy any from supermarkets.) <snip>
Excellent. If one chooses to eat meat, I believe that's the most humane and ecologically sensitive way to go about it. <snip> > So I wouldn't particularly say the twelve to eighteen months is cruel; > it does matter a lot how the animal is killed, though, and the > conditions of its life up until that point. <snip> All factory-farmed beef cattle being killed at that age is cruel. They never get the chance to live longer. We've artificially, for our own purposes, determined that they all die based on economic principles. That's not exactly letting nature take its course and (what bothers me the most) the cattle certainly have no say in this! <snip> > That's "livestock counting mechanized agriculture in toto, including > fossil carbon sources for fertilizer production"; the methane load from > cow farts is part of that, but very far from the major part and you're > still stick with the issue if you're running truck gardens on that > basis. (Which we, as a species, obviously ought not to be.) There is much truth in that, but raising animals for meat still has a much much larger ecological footprint than growing plants on farms. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
