Let's Destroy the Family, Says PETA...
Your mother is a killer, PETA says to kids. And you know what? They're telling the truth. Our mothers, our fathers, we ourselves, are killers. Every time you eat, drink, turn on the light, you kill something, directly or indirectly. Even the self-righteous PETA morons do. Just our mere existence
kills other living beings, because where you live, someone else can't. That is a fact of life. A rule of the game. There's no way around it.
But when you show kids a picture of a woman (representing their mummy), knifing a scared-faced bunny (bunnies can't make scared faces, but when has PETA cared about the facts), it tells the kids that mummy is an evil person. That she should be feared. Shunned. Avoided. Put to prison. Cast out of the society.
Mummy!That picture has nothing to do with fur. Or the conditions in which animals raised for fur live. It is a picture of
mummy butchering a cute, cuddly, fluffy bunny! She's not wearing a furcoat. She's wearing something a housewife might wear in a 50's commercial for household products. While working in a kitchen. She's not wearing fur in those clothes, she's preparing dinner. It should be quite obvious where this picture is going...
Don't they think the family structure has taken enough beating in the last few decades? Is anyone else thinking, '1984' and 'Spies'?
Vegetarians Live Longer? I Think Not...
From an opposition publication..."Do vegetarians live longer than the general population? Absolutely! Vegetarians outlast the general population by perhaps as much as ten healthy years--a whole extra decade on Earth! (maybe as a karmic reward for living lives dedicated to justice and compassion :)
But naysayers like the Cattlemen's Association like to ascribe the extra years to "Non-dietary aspects of a vegetarian lifestyle such as regular physical activity and abstinence from smoking...". But we argued it was because we didn't eat meat. Is our extra decade because we just tend to smoke less and exercise, or is it because of what we actually eat?
To answer that question, researchers tried to control for these other factors by comparing vegetarians to healthy meat-eaters. To tease out the contribution of diet, researchers compared vegetarians to meat-eaters who were just as lean as vegetarians, smoked just as little and had similar social class or education (and who were of course the same age and gender). And what they found shocked them--the vegetarians did not seem to live any longer than the healthy meat-eaters. Wait a second, who did this study? The meat and dairy board? No, the principal investigator is an animal rights vegan.
Yes, the vegetarians in the study lived six years longer than the general population, but so did the meat-eaters! Other than their healthy lifestyles, this group of meat-eaters studied ate more fruits and veggies than your typical meat-eater and less meat. Wondering if that's why they weren't seeing a greater vegetarian advantage, the researchers compared the vegetarians to just those that ate meat regularly. And although there was no survival advantage over those that just ate meat a few times a month, vegetarians did seem to live about two years longer than those who ate meat every week. But just two years longer? We deserve better than that! And the vegans in the study did even worse."
...
"Well that was 1999. Maybe it was just a fluke. In 2002, an update on the Oxford Vegetarian Study was published which had been following 8,000 vegetarians for 18 years. And sadly they found the same thing--those that didn't eat meat didn't live any longer than those that did eat meat (after all the other variables were taken into account). What's going on?
And finally, just last month the mortality results from the single biggest study on vegetarians in human history was published, following almost 18,000 vegetarians. I had been waiting years to get my hands on it. And it shows... no survival advantage. What's going on?"
So, as this
vegan MD says himself, it is NOT a matter of diet. It is a matter of exercise. Of not smoking.
Not diet!Shall we call
this case closed?
Edit...
In case you, like a person I discussed this issue with, don't believe Dr Greger's interpretation, here are the articles he's refering to:
1,
2,
3.
Cannibalism?
It is not really about cannibalism. It's about this:
"The point to be learned from this is that we should not be basing our moral code on the behavior of other animals, but instead strive for something better. If we were to believe that eating meat is OK simply because other animals did it as well, then this would imply that there is also nothing wrong with cannibalism."
If we translate 'our moral code' as 'our behavioral patterns', then this actually makes sense. Indeed, human females shouldn't eat human males during the copulation, like the praying mantis females do. In the case of the praying mantis, eating the male during the copulation, or just after it, gives the female (and her offspring) a survival advantage. In the case of the human species, it would be totally counter-productive. We should pattern our behaviour according to
our evolutionary heritage. And whether AR loons want to believe it or not, human evolution is about eating meat.
Our Own Kind
Doesn't duty to our own kind come first? Of course it does. It is not "unfortunate that it is a part of human nature to have less compassion for those who are different from us than we do for our own kind", it is a necessary survival strategy. It is something which is present in all the living beings, although it doesn't manifest as "compassion" in the greatest majority of non-humans. Those of "our own kind" are, if nothing else, potential mates (or sources of our potential mates). Others are never even that.
The answer to the question to what our own kind is is obvious. It is our own species. This is a widely recognised (the term here doesn't mean any conscious recognition, but rather a principle around which living beings function) fact in the living world. Examples which at appearance disprove this exist, but they are a result of different survival strategies different species have developed, and don't invalidate this fact.
Some would, then, claim that "the species boundary is no less arbitrary" than the boundaries between nationalities, tribes, or religions. This is utter nonsense. Species is a group of organisms which can breed, and through breeding, produce offspring capable of breeding. Although the exact meaning of 'capability to breed' can be, and is, argued, there is nothing arbitrary about the meaning of the species. A German Shepherd and a Golden Retriever are, their different appearances regardless, of the same species - they can produce offspring, and their offspring is capable of it. On the other hand, no amount of mules thinking can make a horse and a donkey the same species.
So, why should the "duty to our own kind" come first? Simple. Put somebody else's kind in front of your own, and you're on your way to extinction.
Tendentious comparisons to the Holocaust, slavery, and other things humans do to each other from time to time, are nothing more than an attempt to play on people's emotions.
