why do vegetarians claim to be concerned about the environment?

Question

i mean, if they didn't continue to eat all of the vegetation, there'd be a lot more environment to go round, right?

Answer 1

For a start, let’s get one thing clear; despite their claims to contrary the vast, vast majority of people who call themselves ‘vegetarians’ are no such thing. They are ‘non-meat eaters’, and it is not the same. Eggs, milk, honey, yoghurt and cheese are not vegetables; they are animal products and if you eat them you are not a vegetarian. Don’t bother with the moral snob’s holier-than-thou argument – “You’re confusing ‘vegan’ with ‘vegetarian’!” - I reject it as completely as I reject any notion that meat eating is wrong.

Simply, a ‘vegan’ doesn’t use any animal products at all; a ‘vegetarian’ doesn’t eat any at all. That’s it. I am not interested in any other definition of the words, and these self-serving ovo- or lacto- rationalisations are good for a laugh but little else. If you use milk, eggs, honey, yoghurt or cheese in your diet you are not a vegetarian. All you are doing is transferring the moral burden of slaughtering animals to those of us who do eat their carcasses (and by and large don’t care about what happens to them in the process of becoming carcasses, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall notwithstanding) by pretending that you don’t.

It always amuses me to read the pretentious gibberish from well-meaning prigs in the BBC, Minority Inclusion Twits in local government or other overpaid, interfering busybodies to the effect that vegetarians can lead a healthy lifestyle as long as they take into account that:

“Foods such as eggs, nuts, seeds, beans, pulses, vegetable protein foods and soya products all contain protein. There are also small amounts in grains and dairy products.” 1

Get that? Eggs lead the way, folks. If you can’t get all the nutrition you need from a real vegetarian diet (and you can’t) then try using a fake vegetarian diet and telling everyone you’re a morally superior person because you don’t eat animals! Except you do. But hey, as long as you can convince yourself that chickens lay tofu, bees are actually a species of strawberry and milk comes from some kind of mutated juniper berry, you’ll be fine.

In the same vein – while I am concerned about dignifying their existence by even mentioning them - let me point out that “pollo-vegetarians”, “pesco-vegetarians” etc. etc. are no more vegetarians than I am. It’s like my claiming that I am a “bovo-vegetarian” or a “porci-vegetarian” because I eat beef and pork. Poultry and fish carcasses are meat, and people who eat them are meat eaters. End of argument.

The only kind of farming that supports an exterior, non-primary economy is intensive, inorganic farming, and if you find that ‘cruel’, then start eating rocks. Every cheese omelette you knock together supports that ‘cruelty’, and you’re stuck with that whether you like it or not. If you chose to doubt any of this, ask any dairy farmer what they do with their bull calves now that we are no longer allowed to eat veal. (I lived on the stuff when during a visit to Austria, by the way.) Choose the greenest, most tree-huggingest ‘organic’ farmer you can find, one with a t-shirt made of woven hemp and nettle flax with a self-righteous slogan ending with ‘No Thanks’ on it, and ask him a straightforward question – “What do you do when your milking cows give birth to bull calves?” Ooo, look, he’s staring at his toes and shuffling his feet in embarrassment. Here’s the skinny, folks – they shoot them and burn the bodies, because nobody is allowed to eat them so nobody will buy them, and they are worth nothing. I mean, let’s not be too obvious about it but the modern dairy cow has been bred for milk production, not meat. Male calves of the pure dairy breed are seen by many farmers as a pest, vermin, a nuisance to be disposed of by any means possible. Prior to the opprobrium heaped upon veal production and its virtual disappearance from the UK market, half a million calves about 2 weeks old were transported to Europe annually in tiny, restrictive ‘veal crates’, a system so cruel that it was banned in the UK in 1990.

The live export trade in calves ground to a halt altogether – with or without veal crates – when the emergence of BSE (“mad cow disease”) led to a worldwide ban on British beef and calf exports in the early 90s. To try to soften the blow the government introduced a harebrained plan called the Calf Processing Aid Scheme. Despite the disingenuous title it simply meant that the government paid farmers to have bull calves killed when they were just a few days old. This scheme was terminated in 1999. 33 Nowadays bull calves remain nothing more than an undesirable by-product of dairy production, thought of in the same way as mine tailings or factory exhaust emissions. They are treated in much the same way, too - disposable waste. Emphasis on ‘disposable’. UK Government advice for killing calves on farm is that :

" ... a free bullet or shotgun are preferred methods". 33

You could do little better than hearkening to the words of Steve Webb, M.P. :

“ ... there is now little or no market for dairy bull calves, which would perhaps have been exported in the past. There was Government assistance until last summer under the calf processing aid scheme, but that has now ended. Typically, a bull calf will now be shot at birth - often by the local hunt, apparently.” 2

Since there are no longer supposed to be local hunts, one wonders who is actually doing the shooting, but don’t doubt for a second that someone is. It’s happening now and will keep on happening. Live with it.

On the same basis, spare me the pious humbug about free range chickens, cows, geese, goats, or any other media con – milk and egg production in this and every other country is characterised by rigidly imposed cruelty, on your terms and by your definitions. It has to be to meet demand. Carefully examine the output of every (so-called) free range farm and you’ll find they produce barely enough to support the humans required to keep the place running.

Millions of eggs sold as free-range are about as free range as the turkeys Bernard Matthew’s staff use as baseballs – they come from battery hens. Don’t take my word for it - David Slaughter, Director of the UK Egg Producers' Association (UKEPA), stated :

“ ... egg packers have been conning consumers for years by passing battery eggs off as free-range and charging premium, ‘free-range’ prices.” 40

In fact official Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food figures reveal that in October, 1997, 341,000 dozen eggs were sold as free-range despite the fact that only 285,000 dozen were produced in the UK! Hard to make those figures add up. 40
Of course, you can’t blame the mug punter if some spiv cons them into buying falsely labelled goods, though I rather thought that free range eggs would be different somehow, and someone somewhere should have been able to tell that they were not the real deal. Apparently not. I don’t know the significance of the fact that a battery farm egg tastes and looks the same as a free range one, but it’s possible that they do so because “free range” farming as we understand it – rather, as we would like it to be – is a bit of a con, really.

Proposed : hens which produce "free-range" eggs spend much of their lives outdoors, warming themselves in the afternoon sun, enjoying dust baths, and laying their eggs in individual straw nests. Unfortunately, not so. In fact, no government laws or standards regulate the use of terms like “free-range” and to egg producers the words mean something entirely different if – as we shall see – they mean anything at all. It can be taken to mean that hens are uncaged, but confined indoors in sheds. 42 In fact “free-range” eggs may be produced by hens who spend their lives in conventional battery cages, and there is not one single law or regulation that will stop it happening, nor any that will let you know if you are inadvertently supporting the very farming regime you so vehemently oppose. In fact a producer who sells eggs labelled as “free range” when they came from a battery farm might be prosecuted under current Trades Description regulations, but prosecutions are rare and penalties risible. The United States Department of Agriculture, which defines free-range and free-roaming for labelling purposes, relies " ... upon producer testimonials to support the accuracy of these claims [to being ‘free range’ primary producers]." 43 In other words, if you describe yourself as a free range egg producer, that’s what you considered to be unless someone goes to the trouble of proving otherwise. According to The Washington Post Magazine the term ‘free range’ has become so diluted by unregulated use that it is now no more than a kind of sales patter, and:

“ ... the term free-range "doesn't really tell you anything about the [animal's] ... quality of life, nor does it even assure that the animal actually goes outdoors." 44

Karen Davis, president of the animal protection group United Poultry Concerns, visited “Happy Hen Organic Fertile Brown Eggs” in Pennsylvania. Now, that name alone would make me suspicious. It’s a bit like “Honest John’s Car Sales”, isn’t it? No matter. According to publicity material handed out by Happy Hen their hens “run free in a natural setting" and are "humanely housed in healthy, open-sided housing, for daily sunning - something Happy Hens really enjoy." 45

Davis tells a different story:

"Through the netting at the front of the long barn we saw a sea of chickens' faces looking out, as though they were smashed up against the netting. Inside, the birds were wall to wall. They were severely debeaked and their feathers were in bad condition - straggly, drab, and worn off." 45

More than 7,000 birds are housed in each Happy Hen barn, and individual hens have no more than 1.5 square metres of space each, not enough room to even spread their wings. One hen lays 250 eggs a year. Davis also reported that Happy Hens are also force-moulted now and then. Force moulting means that hens are denied food for several days resulting in a loss of their feathers. They also stop laying eggs for a couple of months. 43 Now, it took me a moment to work out why a poultry farmer would want to stop his chickens laying eggs, but it’s not rocket science. It’s to create shortages in order to keep the price of eggs artificially high. Why is that so significant? Simple. It wouldn’t work if just one company was doing it. If the price ramping Davis witnessed was not industry wide, it would have little or no effect. It wouldn’t be worth putting in the effort, and somebody is.

Chickens can live for 15 years, but hens on commercial free-range farms are too old to produce enough eggs to remain profitable after one or two years. Even on the most self consciously dogmatic “free range” farm, birds are kept for only two or three years. Worn-out free-range hens are usually sold to slaughterhouses or to live-poultry markets.

There is also an eerie parallel to the bull calf quandary so neatly solved by our shotgun toting dairy farmers: on both free-range and factory egg farms, male chicks are considered worthless. At birth, they are generally stuffed into a plastic bin liner and suffocated with tractor exhaust fumes.

The final irony here is that a free range regime might not be doing you the slightest bit of good anyway. Those chickens are likely to be getting their jogging rights at the expense of your health.

In 2005 the International Association for Food Protection tested a total of 135 processed “free-range” chickens in fourteen batches from four different commercial free-range chicken producers for the presence of Salmonella. 41 Overall, 9 (64%) of the fourteen batches and 42 (31%) of 135 of the carcasses were positive for Salmonella. An additional 53 all-natural (defined as those having no meat or meat derivatives, poultry meal or antibiotics added to their feed) processed chickens from eight lots were tested; 25% of the individual chickens from 37% of these lots tested positive for Salmonella. Three lots of chickens from a single organic free-range producer were tested, and all three of the lots and 60% of the individual chickens were positive for Salmonella. This is the best bit - the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service reported that commercial chickens processed between 2000 and 2003 on intensive factory farms had a Salmonella infection rate of just 9.1 to 12.8%. What a delightful irony. Free range chickens are little walking, clucking Salmonella factories, far more so than their miserable, cramped factory farmed cousins, and they vector that infection to us unsuspecting humans via their eggs. Hey, thanks a lot, you ungrateful little buzzards. That’s the last time I give you the run of my back garden.

Farming is cruel, by its nature. The rights of animals to any real quality of life comes second to the economic exploitation of those animals as food providers, and dressing it up in soft lighting and emotionally drippy terms changes nothing. If you buy food which originates with farm animals then you are not a vegetarian, and you are supporting the exploitation of animals at the expense of their quality of life, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t want that to be true.

Let me take a short sideways diversion and make it clear that I have genuine respect for vegans. Real vegans. People who will not commercially support the use of animals as suppliers of products for consumption (in the broadest sense of both words) by humans. Not because I think that they are right, but because they demonstrate the fortitude to make a lifestyle choice and live their life based on that choice, accepting the huge restrictions that places upon them. They know that eggs, milk, yoghurt, honey and cheese are animal products and they don’t use them. Hey, good for you, folks. You’re wrong, but you have moral strength and the courage of your own convictions to stick with something you believe in without comfortable exclusions.
Nor do I dispute the right of any person to make whatever dietary choices they want to make. I spent hours trying to recover my composure from near uncontrollable laughter after seeing an interview 3 with the “Breatharian” Ellen Greve, a brainless woman (and I did not find her gender at all relevant) who calls herself “Jasmuheen” and who actually claims that humans could live on no food at all. Her contention, seriously argued, is that human beings can absorb all the energy their metabolism requires from prana, some mysterious component of sunlight. Some such nonsense, anyway; look it up if you want to gape at the depths to which human dishonesty and folly can descend. No food at all. None. I ask you. The stupidity of that belief is so self-evident that it needs neither proof nor illustration, but I support her right to try to live without eating if that’s what she wants to do. (She is doing no such thing, of course. As well as being a type specimen of imbecility, “Breatharianism” is one huge, disgraceful, arrogant, dangerous lie.) But, I even back the rights the microcephalic nitwits who buy her line of trash and try it for themselves; they deserve everything that is coming to them. There have been at least three fatalities as a result of Greve’s pernicious drivel, by the way. 4 Verity Linn, 49, an Australian living a hermit lifestyle in a remote region of Scotland, Munich kindergarten teacher Timo Degen, 31, and 53-year-old Australian Lani Morris all starved to death while following Greve’s vile, pseudo-religious manifesto. Google them for further details, but they went into the whole fraudulent boondoggle with their eyes wide open, and they bought calamity down upon their own heads. There is nobody to blame but themselves, though I could see how Greve and her cohorts could warrant a charge of manslaughter. But, even when faced with the quasi-tragic consequences of extreme cases like these I support the right of people to commit suicide or make themselves ill, even if that is by a wholly voluntary and inadvisable choice of diet. What I do not support is the right of people who have made lifestyle choices which conflict with mine telling me that they have some kind of monopoly on the moral high ground because they don’t eat meat, when in fact the difference between their diet and mine and the environmental and social effects of pursuing that diet are largely a matter of hair splitting semantics.

Humans are not meant to be vegetarians. We are supposed to eat meat and have latterly adapted to eating cooked and carefully prepared vegetables. Vegetarianism is unnatural. Humans are omnivores.

Proposed : there are basically two types of animals in Nature:
Herbivores: animals that eat vegetation. They are able to digest and use as food the cellulose which forms the cell walls of all plants.

Carnivores: animals that eat herbivores. The carnivore's digestion is unable break down vegetable cell walls.

Unfortunately that’s an oversimplistic division. Many animals, most mammals and all primates have diets that vary enormously and cross over the boundaries of the division I’ve proposed. Chimpanzees were long thought to be exclusively herbivorous and are now known to be extremely active and voracious hunters 5 with a particular taste for Colobus monkeys 22, 23, which they hunt with cunning, organisation and grotesque, human-like brutality. 30, 31 Similarly gorillas were once thought to restrict their diets entirely to leaves and shoots. In fact they are partially insectivorous 6. Here’s the plain truth, folks; virtually all primates, every single furry one of us, from the thumb sized shrews chittering about in the jungles of Madagascar to a gorilla the size of a basketball team are omnivorous by nature, function, structure and physiology. 7 Some, like the tarsiers, are exclusively carnivorous. 8 However, humans are not plant eaters who supplement our diets with the odd bit of meat. It’s the other way around. We are carnivores first and foremost and have learned to supplement our diets with plants.

The walls of all plant cells are made of cellulose, a carbohydrate polymer which is extremely insoluble and remarkably resistant to chemical attack (read: digestion). In scientific terms, cellulose is a linear polysaccharide polymer with numerous glucose monosaccharide units, with the structural template (C6H10O5)n. Humans are unable to digest cellulose because the enzymes needed to break down the beta acetal linkages between those units are lacking. 34, 35 In layman’s terms: there is no enzyme in the human digestive system that will break down cellulose. None.

We hardly need the scientific treatise. In 1838, in Canada, Dr. William Beaumont performed a series of experiments on a man named Alexis St. Martin, who was, it must be said, a very reluctant guinea pig; he absconded several times and had to be virtually kidnapped by Dr Beaumont in order to allow the scientific study to continue. You see, St. Martin was a very unusual human indeed; had an opening in the front wall of his stomach. He had been accidentally shot in the abdomen at point blank range with a shotgun and the doctor who treated him simply assumed he was going to die – let it be said, a very fair assumption – and treated him with an ordinary dressing and wound cleansing rather than surgery. Incredibly the wound healed completely, leaving a small opening through which the mucous membrane of his stomach could be seen and through which substances could be introduced into the stomach or removed from it. Dr. Beaumont was able to introduce food through the opening and observe the rate of digestion, and he noted that raw beef digested in two hours, boiled beef in three hours and roast beef in four. Raw eggs took one and a half hours and hard boiled three and a half.

It seems repetitive to note that the cellulose which of which cereal grain coverings are made and which is the major constituent of vegetable cell walls was not broken down by St Martin’s digestion at all, and it won’t be by yours or mine, either. Cellulose is only broken down by the process of cooking. Cooking is also the only means of breaking down the large starch molecules in plants so that we can digest them. As a consequence, cereals and many other vegetables need not only to be cooked before they can be digested, they need to be cooked well.

If you want to start digesting uncooked cellulose, then you’d better learn how to cross the species barrier. It’s not only a matter of digestive enzymes, it’s a matter of structure, function and the home you provide for a vast population of symbiotic micro-organisms, too. Ruminants, which can digest cellulose (in fact, their lives depend upon their ability to do so!) have a stomach with four chambers; the rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. In the rumen and the reticulum the food is mixed with saliva and separated into solids and liquids. Solids clump together to form a bolus, known to you and I as the cud. The bolus is then regurgitated and chewed repeatedly to mix it with saliva. Cellulose is broken down into glucose in the first two chambers by symbiotic bacteria and protozoa – another couple of features in which we humans are sadly deficient. The broken-down cellulose, now liquid, then passes through the rumen into the omasum where water is removed, after which it passes into the abomasum where it is digested. It is finally sent to the small intestine, where the absorption of the nutrients occurs. There is nothing about that process which is faintly human.

A carnivore 1.8m tall weighing 80kg should expect to have a stomach capacity of 2.25 litres. 37 It would be emptied every three hours or so and there will be no cellulose digesting bacteria and no protozoa present. There will be very strong digestive acids but no rumination at all. A herbivore of the same body mass would have a stomach capacity of 37 litres 37 (no, that’s not a typing error) which never empties completely and which contains vast populations of essential cellulose digesting bacteria and protozoa. Stomach acids are extremely weak and 70% of the activity in the stomach is involved directly in the breakdown and absorption of cellulose. Rumination is an essential part of this process. Humans have a stomach capacity of about 2.3 litres, and we empty our stomachs every three hours or so. We do not have cellulose digesting gastric bacteria or protozoa, but we do have very strong stomach acids. We do not ruminate, and we do not break down any cellulose at all.
Carnivores and herbivores have certain structural characteristics which are unique and defining. There are grey areas here – there are physical features that make you a carnivore, and physical characteristics that make you a herbivore, and some animals have sprinkled combinations of both. We are resolutely members of the third category. We’re omnivores.

Our teeth are the number one pointer to our principally omnivorous. Carnivores have incisors in both upper and lower jaws, deeply ridged molars and canine teeth. Herbivores only have incisors in the lower jaw, have flat molars and no canine teeth. Humans have upper and lower incisors, ridged molars and prominent canines.

It’s not that simple, of course. Molars are useful not only for crushing meat but for grinding up tough fibre such as we find in plants. Animals that are primarily herbivores have very large molars with six pairs, three in the upper jaw and three in the lower. Carnivores have reduced molars, whereas humans come fully equipped with six pairs. But, compared to a typical herbivore they are not all that large, and certainly would not support a herbivorous eating pattern of constant intake, grinding, regurgitation and rumination – human dental enamel is the strongest substance in the body, but eating and chewing constantly (as almost all herbivores have to do) would wear them to stubs in no time at all.

Human premolars (or bicuspid) teeth are used for slicing food. Now, human premolar teeth are the smoking gun in this scenario, because they are meat eater’s teeth. Premolars are frequently missing in herbivores and when they are there they are small, flat and insignificant. Humans have four pairs of prominent premolars.

So, the evidence inside our own mouths suggests that they are supposed to be filled with both meat and vegetables. We humans are clearly built to be omnivorous.

Eyes. The placement of a mammal’s eyes indicate if it is a predator or a prey animal. Predators have eyes that face forward. The field of vision for each eye overlaps in the front to create binocular vision. Binocular vision gives the predator better depth perception and helps them catch prey moving at high speeds. A prey animal has eyes that face sideways, with only a small area of overlap between the field of vision for each eye. This large field of vision lets the prey animal see almost all the way around its body, giving it the opportunity to spot a predator and run to safety. This is a universal rule: all terrestrial mammalian carnivores have two forward facing eyes, and this is an evolutionary adaptation that is solely concerned with hunting – if you stalk your prey you require a clear forward view of it. What is happening on either side isn’t all that important. All terrestrial herbivores, on the other hand, have two side mounted eyes allowing an excellent lateral view but a poor forward view. You don’t need to stalk leaves, nuts or plums; they aren’t going anywhere. You do, however, need to know what is happening on either side of you as you graze because it is from that direction that predators will attack. Forward facing eyes are an adaptation for attack, laterally mounted eyes are an adaptation for defence. Two eyes facing forward, you’re a hunter and a killer, a meat eater. Two eyes facing laterally outwards, you’re a plant eater, something’s breakfast. You’re prey. OK, now go look in a mirror.
Our evolution is that of a carnivore.

Stone tools and fossil bones are found together on many Plio-Pleistocene archaeological sites. The bones almost always display distinctive cut-marks produced when a carcass is dismembered and stripped of edible flesh with a sharp-edged flint flake. These sites are between two and two and a half million years old, and the early Hominids who left the artefacts were obviously eating meat. 11 Humans were eating meat before they could talk. In fact, they were eating meat before they do pretty well anything.

In contrast, plant remains are absent or exceedingly rare on these ancient sites and their role in early hominid diet, therefore, can only be guessed on the basis of their known importance in contemporary forager diets, as well as their potential availability in Plio-Pleistocene environments. Few today doubt that early hominids ate meat, and most would agree that they probably consumed far more meat than did their primate forebears. Instead, most studies nowadays focus primarily on how that meat was procured; that is, whether early hominids actively hunted animals, particularly large-bodied prey, or scavenged carcasses.

On April 22, 1999 an international team of scientists unearthed the skeleton of a human-like meat-eating creature that lived in Africa 2.5 million years ago. The skeleton of a hominid species, tentatively named Australopithecus garhi, marks a turning point in evolution and may well be our earliest ancestor so far discovered. With the ability to use tools to eat meat, the diet of the garhi was vastly improved and broadened, which led to improved brain power that increased their ability to reason and survive and which ultimately produced modern humans. One of the team leaders, Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley, stated:

"All of a sudden, this is a bipedal primate with a difference. We now have the clearest evidence these very early hominids were butchering mammals and were knowledgeable about the (marrow) within the bones, a highly valuable food source," 46

The skeleton was discovered in the Afar desert in north-eastern Ethiopia, beside what was a lake during the time two and a half million years ago, when Australopithecus garhi ruled the roost. Animal bones and tools were found near the skeleton, which researchers say is strong evidence that the creature ate meat.
Again, scientists have to take the middle ground, and they say it is not clear whether they hunted animals or merely took advantage of dead animals found around the lake. The distinction is unimportant and outside the remit of this essay – dead or alive, it’s meat. It’s dead when it’s on the plate (well, I certainly hope it is, anyway ...) and how it died is beside the point.

In fact Humans became meat eaters at the dawn of the genus Homo, around 2.5 million years ago, which is to say we became meat eaters when we became identifiably human – and that is stretching the definition of ‘human’ backwards a little. According to a 1999 study of our ancestors' teeth, cut marks on animal bones dated at around 2.5 million years old, and they were made by teeth. Something was gnawing the meat off those bones. At the time the fossil bones were first discovered nobody was sure that they were made by meat-eating hominids, because none appeared to have suitable teeth.

However an analysis by Peter Ungar of the University of Arkansas revealed that the first members of Homo had much sharper teeth than their immediate ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis (the species that produced the famous fossil Lucy) and in fact had teeth that precisely matches the cut marks on the fossil bones found in the 1999 study. Ungar used a laser to scan each tooth and mapped the surface using a computerised geographic information system. He presented his findings to a symposium on diet and evolution at the University of Arkansas in August 2003. 49

Eating meat requires teeth adapted more to cutting than to grinding. The ability to cut is determined by the slope of the cusps, or crests. "Steeper crests mean the ability to consume tougher foods," Ungar stated.

"Ungar shows that early Homo had teeth adapted to tougher food than A. afarensis or chimpanzees. The obvious candidate is meat," says anthropologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University. 49

If you are emboldened by the idea of the noble savage battling against nature red in tooth and claw, risking all to bring home a still warm woolly mammoth or similar, then think again. It might not have been all that romantic an image. We not only started our evolution as carnivores, we started it with little sense of discrimination in terms of the species upon which we preyed.
Scientists from England, Australia, and Papua New Guinea consider that prehistoric cannibalism is the most likely explanation for the fact that humans have genes that provide some immunity against brain diseases that can only be contracted by eating contaminated human flesh. A growing body of evidence, such as piles of human bones with clear signs of butchery, suggests cannibalism was widespread among ancient cultures anyway, but the discovery of this genetic resistance, which shows signs of having spread as a result of natural selection, supports the physical evidence for widespread prehistoric cannibalism.

The brain diseases known as prion diseases, which include modern Creutzfeld Jacob disease and kuru in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”) in livestock are spread by eating the flesh from contaminated carcasses. The diseases are caused by misshapen ‘prion’ protein molecules that form clumps and accumulate in brain tissue, gradually destroying the brain itself.

Humans with one normal copy and one mutated copy of the prion protein are somehow protected against prion diseases.
A number of scientists undertook examinations of older members of the Fore, an isolated indigenous people who live in the mountains of Papua New Guinea. The Fore had a custom of consuming their dead at funerals, during which the men of the tribe ate the best meat, the muscle, while women and children ate the brains.

From approximately 1920 up to the forced abolition of post-mortuary cannibalism in the late 1950s an epidemic of the prion disease kuru swept through the Fore, killing about 200 people a year. Women and children were most vulnerable to the disease because they ate the most contaminated parts of the body - the brains. There is no treatment and no cure for kuru. It is 100% fatal.

Simon Mead, a co-author of the study into the Fore and the genetic resistance to prion diseases present in some of their members, 74 is from the Medical Research Centre of University College, London. He and a number of colleagues studied Fore women who had participated in the ritual feasts prior to their abolition but had not contracted kuru, and found that 23 out of the 30 women they tested had one normal copy of the prion gene and one with the mutated prion, which they called the M129V polymorphism. This very strongly suggests that those who survived the kuru epidemic somehow had a genetic resistance to the disease. 74

The researchers then sequenced and analyzed the prion protein gene in more than 2,000 chromosome samples selected to represent worldwide genetic diversity. They found either the M129K or the all but identical E219K polymorphism in every population.

After comparing DNA samples from throughout the human population of the planet as well as that of our genetic cousins, chimpanzees, Mead estimates that the polymorphisms arose more than 500,000 years ago, suggesting that prion diseases were widespread in early human history. The vector of these diseases is pretty clear. We spread prion diseases from one individual to another through the practice of eating their bodies, and we did that half a million years ago. We are not only carnivores by evolutionary bent, we are cannibals, too.

We know that the human digestive tract is extremely inefficient when coping with foods of vegetable origin. With no bacteria or enzymes capable of breaking down the cell walls to release the small amounts of nutrients inside, we can only eat many of these foods after they have been cooked. If you want to dispute that, eat a raw potato or turnip. Red kidney beans contain natural toxins which lead to severe diarrhoea if they are eaten raw. Only boiling them for twenty minutes renders them safe. Butter beans or lima beans contain cyanide which is only destroyed when they are cooked. Raw spinach, beets, chards and rhubarb contain oxalic acid which forms toxic compounds with metabolistic iron and calcium. Raw red cabbage, Brussels sprouts, mustard plants, cottonseed and ferns contain antithiamine which stops absorption of Vitamin B. Try eating uncooked beets, rutabagas, chickpeas, corn, oats, sorghum, millet, wheat or rice or – irony of ironies! – raw soya. Good luck. Obviously, though, in Nature all foods should be eaten raw. Cooking food is unnatural, regardless of what you might like to think. So, plants cannot have formed a significant part of our diet until we started to cook them. Now, 90% of our evolution as a species took place before we started to heat and cook foods – before we knew how to constructively use fire. We developed as a species by eating meat. It cannot be otherwise. Homo erectus began to use fire around 350,000 years ago, but cooking grain or vegetables is nothing like cooking meat.

To cook grain and other seeds you need a container of some sort, in fact a number of containers for an assortment of complex and time consuming procedures involved in the peeling, cutting, washing, milling, treating, mixing, fermenting, drying and cooking the grain or vegetables. The oldest known such pot is only less than 9000 years old.

Large scale archaeological excavations by archaeologists from the Dutch Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (National Museum of Antiquities) were undertaken in autumn of 2003 on a large earth mound the north-west side of Tell Sabi Abyad in Northern Syria. The remains of dwellings they found buried in the mound contained very simple pottery. The vessels are made by hand and relatively coarse, and they date from around 6600-6500 BC. It is the oldest pottery of Syria known so far, and pretty much beyond dispute the oldest pottery that will ever be found. 50
The earliest date quoted for the Tell Sabi Abyad pottery makes it 8,600 years old. In evolutionary terms, that was yesterday evening. If there was extensive grain or vegetable preparation during the first 90% of human evolution then it has left no traces whatsoever, and that is impossible. Eating cooked plants – the only way to eat them – is a very recent development in human history.

If fact European Neanderthal coprolites (fossilised faeces, to you and me) from just 50,000 years ago contain no plant material at all. None. Not a single peanut shell or a blackberry pip has ever been found. At the time the stools in question were excreted by our distant ancestors, Europe was in the grip of a succession of ice-ages. For about 70,000 years there were long winters and short summers, both colder than those we are now used to. Cro-Magnon and his ancestors cannot have eaten plants for the simple reason that in his environment there were no edible plants available for most of the year. He ate meat or he died, and he ate that meat roasted on an open fire if he had the fixings to make a fire in the first place. If he didn’t, he ate it raw.

Imagine yourself placed in nature in the total absence of modern technology. The only comforts you have available are those we had 250,000 years ago – fire, and some very primitive cutting and digging tools, flints, sharpened sticks and the like. What would you eat and what could you eat? You could eat and digest fruits, nuts, insects, worms, eggs, and animal flesh. These are about the only food substances found in nature that humans are capable of digesting without technological intervention. In fact, they are the very foods that are the mainstay of the few ‘undeveloped’ nomadic societies left in the world today. Growing, harvesting, preparing and cooking grains and vegetables is not natural at all. In fact it is about as unnatural as you can get.

Meat and fruit are not difficult to assimilate. Animals that specialize in these types of food tend to have a short digestive tract, with a very short large intestine. Fibrous plants foods can be nutritious if you can digest them but they take much longer to absorb. So, herbivores have long and comparitively elaborate digestive tracts. Humans are clearly intermediate. We have a long large intestine, a characteristic of herbivores, but we lack the complicated, multi-chamber system that would allow us to digest and assimilate nutrients from high fiber plant foods like as grass or leaves. The human digestive tract speaks with one voice here: we’re omnivores.

A vegetable diet does not provide the nutrients a human being needs to stay alive. The most important deficiency for the vegan is of vitamin B-12. Vitamin B-12 is essential to human life. It is essential for the synthesis of nucleic acids and the maintenance of the myelin sheath, the insulation around nerves. You’ll know it if the myelin sheath is damaged or deteriorates due to a Vitamin B-12 deficiency; that’s called Multiple Sclerosis. In fact a Vitamin B-12 deficiency affects nearly all body tissues, particularly those with rapidly dividing cells. Without it we suffer from pernicious anaemia which, as its name suggests, is deadly. You can also pretty much count on a severe degeneration of the nervous system, with all that implies.

Vitamin B-12 is unique among vitamins in that it is found universally in foods of animal origin. There is no vitamin B-12 in any plant on this planet.

The first manifestation of vitamin B-12 deficiency is usually mental disturbances. These range from abnormal mood swings, mental slowness and memory problems, followed by hallucinations and depression and severe psychosis. Physical symptoms include racing heartbeat and cardiac pain, swelling of the facial tissues, jaundice, weakness and fatigue and catastrophic weight loss.

To enable vegans to survive, vitamin B-12 is added artificially to breakfast cereals and sold in pill form in ‘health’ food shops.
This is what the radical vegan website ‘Viva USA’ has to say on the matter :

“Vitamin B12 can be found in fortified foods such as soy milk and breakfast cereals.
One of the following daily recommendations should maximize B12 status:
- fortified foods (in at least 2 servings, spaced 6 hours apart): 3-5 µg
- 1 supplement: 10-100 µg
- 2 supplements spaced at least 6 hours apart: 5 µg” 62

That is a comically unnatural way to get food.

There’s something else you can only get from animal produce, and to hear its name spoken out loud in an essay on the realities of healthy dietary composition might surprise you. Cholesterol. True, too much cholesterol will kill you, but then too much of almost any substance you can name will do much the same. Cholesterol (C27H45OH) is a sterol (a combination steroid and alcohol) and a lipid found in the cell membranes of all body tissues, and transported in the blood plasma of all animals. In small doses, in fact, cholesterol is essential for your well being. For a person weighing about 68 kg, typical total required dietary intake is 200 to 300 mg. 52 That’s a tiny amount in practical terms, but your life depends on it. Almost all steroid hormones are made out of cholesterol, and these include cortisol and aldosterone in the adrenal glands, and the sex hormones progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone. Recent research shows that cholesterol has an important role for the brain synapses as well as in the immune system, including protecting against cancer 53. Recent research strongly suggests that cholesterol is an important in cell signalling processes 56. Cholesterol is a vital link in the synthesis of vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) and vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) 51 54. Bile acids, essential for fat digestion, are made of cholesterol, and it is an essential component of your brain cells.

Cholesterol is found only in animal foods and in prepared foods that contain one or more animal products. This means that cholesterol is found only in eggs, dairy products, meat, fish, shellfish, poultry and animal fats such as lard and non-vegetable oils. Eggs are a very commonly used supply of cholesterol, though meats are much higher in cholesterol content, and shellfish have a higher cholesterol content than fish.

There is not one single plant on this earth which contains one single molecule of cholesterol.

One argument often offered in favour of vegetarianism goes along the lines that there is more than enough food grown in the world, but large amounts of that food, especially grains and the like, are fed to animals. If more people became vegetarians, the food fed to animals could be used to feed hungry people.
The crackpot’s exemplar, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, claim the following about vegetarianism :

Every day, 840 million people around the world, including 200 million children, go hungry. But much of the world's grain harvest - 40 percent - is used to feed livestock, not people. U.S. livestock alone consume about one-third of the world's total grain harvest, as well as more than 70 percent of the grain grown in the United States.

Many researchers believe that vegetarianism is the only way to feed a growing human population. A Population Reference Bureau report stated, "If everyone adopted a vegetarian diet and no food were wasted, current [food] production would theoretically feed 10 billion people, more than the projected population for the year 2050." 67

That’s a disgraceful misquotation of the report which in fact soundly rejects vegetarianism as a prospective solution to world hunger. In reality the Population Reference Bureau is quite clear that the main cause of hunger in the world today is poverty. In their landmark study on hunger, Population, Food, and Nutrition, (misquoted above) they don’t even consider vegetarianism as a possible solution to the hunger problem. 63 Hunger still exists because many poor people around the world lack the resources to buy enough food. In other words, people are starving to death (more correctly, being starved to death) through poverty, not though lack of food. It is outside the scope of this essay to consider why poverty exists in the world, but considering the money thrown at the problem – the G8 summit increased aid to Africa from $25 billion to $50 billion US in 2005 65 – it is certainly an intractable one. What desperate sinkhole of poverty couldn’t be cured by fifty billion dollars?

The fact remains that we produce enough food to supply all six billion people on this planet with a massive excess left over. There is so much food available, in fact, that everyone who can afford it has a plentiful supply. This is what the United Nations has to say on the subject :

... Despite the dire predictions that the world’s population would soon outstrip food production, it has been the other way around: food production has risen a full 16 per cent above population growth. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has noted that 78 per cent of the world’s malnourished children live in countries with food surpluses. Clearly, this condition indicates a need for a keener social conscience and better political leadership ....There is enough food to go around now and for at least the next half-century. The world is not going to run out of food for all. 67

Hunger is a political and social condition and distributing grain destined for animal feed to the hungry of the world will not work unless the problems which cause world starvation are resolved first. It is not a matter of making more food. We don’t need to. We already make more than enough. The problem is with food distribution. Food surpluses in Europe and the United States are either suppressed by subsidies to farmers who agree not to grow certain crops during periods of overproduction, or they are destroyed. They are not loaded into bulk grain carriers and shipped to areas of the world blighted by famine. If they were the problem might be solved (note the “might”, because everything in that sentence is grossly oversimplistic) without one single cow, sheep, pig or chicken escaping its ultimate fate in the abattoir.
How can we have a net surplus of food in the world while a significant proportion of the human population is not merely undernourished but starving to death en masse? Given that it is true that "Due to advances in agriculture of many countries, there is now a substantial world surplus of food" 68 how is it that “more people than ever before are undernourished or malnourished”. 69 73

The standard economic definition of surplus is not just ‘too much’, as you would think it might be. Economists can make anything more complex than it needs to be, that’s why they have a Nobel Prize just for them. “Surplus” is defined as a supply situation where buyers do not exhaust available supply while still paying a unit price acceptable to sellers. Right. Glad we got that sorted out. Used in connection with world population and their food requirements, the words "food surplus" are worse than misleading. Only from food producers' point of view is there surplus. From many potential customers, there is shortage. There is widespread famine even in countries that are net exporters of food. 71 There is surplus largely because millions of people in these countries simply don’t have the financial clout to create an economic demand sufficient to interest suppliers. 72 73 For example in India the National Institute of Nutrition estimated that as many as 50% of rural households and 55% of urban slum households do not have enough food to meet daily energy requirements. 75 Yet India exports massive amounts of food and makes huge export income as a result. The food has been distributed out of the country and away from starving people because they cannot afford to buy it, and consumers in other countries can. Would you like to know what India’s principal exports are? (It’d be nice to know where this argument is leading in terms of vegetarianism, I suppose.) They are, in order of economic importance: rice, wheat, sugarcane, tea, cotton, jute, cashews, coffee, spices, “other vegetables”, melons, sorghum, millet, corn, barley, chickpeas, bananas, mangoes, rubber, and linseed. Read that list again. There is not one single animal or animal-derived product on it. If every single starving person in India was a dedicated vegetarian (and they may well be, as far as I know) they would still be starving because the food they need has been sold overseas.

I’ve got here by a roundabout way, but let me sum up. We make enough food for the entire population of the world. If we did cut vegetable food consumption by stopping the production and consumption of meat, thereby obviating the requirement to feed meat animals it is doubtful that world food supply would increase by the tiniest amount, but even if it did there would be no alleviation of hunger because food shortages are caused by poverty and inequitable distribution of food, not the lack of food supplies.

Finally, we get to the simple question of drawing lines. Do you shower in the mornings? Yes? You’re killing tens of thousands of micro-organisms every time you turn on the hot water. Do they not count as animals? What about fleas? Houseflies? Mosquitoes? Cockroaches? No?

What about the dust mites in your pillows and bedclothes? (Don’t bother. They’re there.) House dust mites are tiny (about 0.3 mm) animals related to ticks and spiders and live in house dust. Whether or not your house is crawling with the little buggers or relatively free (no house anywhere in the world is completely free) has nothing to do with cleanliness but depends on the amount of moisture in the house; dry houses in cold climates have few mites, but houses in temperate climates are picayune dust mite heaven.

House dust mites eat the dust which is formed from our skin cells as they slough off our bodies. That’s right; our skin. They leave droppings everywhere they go, and those tiny turds contain left-over enzymes which the mites use to digest the skin. It is these enzymes which cause asthma and other allergic diseases.
Do they have a right to life? What about if you or a member of your family suffers from asthma? It can be aggravated to fatal proportions by airborne dust mite faeces. Do they still get a berth in your crib?

Okay, what about rats? Rats are an appalling blight on humanity. They eat incredible quantities of foodstuffs, destroy poultry and devastate stored fruits, grains and vegetables. They destroy or contaminate beyond use an estimated one third of the world's food supply each year. 58 The rat has been called the world's most destructive mammal - other than man (a statement with which I disagree, by the way). Male and female rats may mate twenty times a day. A female can produce up to twenty pups every month: one pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year.

Disease organisms may be transmitted directly through the rodent's bite, carried from the rodent by a flea, tick or mite which bites man and transfers the pathogen, or by contamination of food or water with faeces or urine. Amongst the delights facing you courtesy of our jolly rodents chums are :

Hantavirus: This disease has various strains that may induce symptoms such as high blood pressure and as pulmonary collapse due to fluid build up. The strain Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS; also sometimes referred to as Muerto Canyon hantavirus or Four Corners hantavirus) was first identified in 1993 in New Mexico and is one of the deadliest known strains of the disease. It produces pneumonia-like symptoms, and 40% of the more than 100 cases of HPS in the U.S. since 1993 have been fatal. 59, 60 The various strains of hantavirus occur in different rodents, primarily rats and mice. The Four Corners strain is known to occur in field mice or deer mice and is transmitted to humans through dried faecal material. However, the three major urban rodent pests - the house mouse, the Norway rat, or the black rat - all carry hantavirus, and they can all pass it on to humans.

Plague. The big boy on the block. The great plague of London that killed more than half of the city's inhabitants, and the "black death" that devastated Europe for more than 50 years in the 14th century, killing some 25,000,000 individuals, were both due to the abundance of rats. The infected rats carried plague fleas which in turn infected humans. Think it’s not something we have to worry ourselves about anymore, what with the Dark Ages being hell and gone? Think again. Between 1898 and 1923 11 million lives were lost due to plague outbreaks in India, China and Mongolia. Plague outbreaks occurred in San Francisco in 1900, in Oakland and San Francisco in 1907 and 1908, in New Orleans in 1914, in Galveston in 1920 and in Los Angeles in 1924. Do you ever get the worrying feeling that it is just sitting out there biding its time ... waiting ... waiting ...

Weil's disease. Caused by the spirochete, Leptospira icterohaemorrhagiae, which is found in the blood and urine of the rat. Human beings may become infected by handling or eating things contaminated with rat urine. It is also contracted by swimming and wading in contaminated water. The disease is generally not fatal but is very debilitating.

Trichinosis. This is a real horror, the alien chestburster of rat-borne diseases. Caused by a tiny roundworm, Trichinella spiralis. Large numbers of Trichinella in the adult or sexual state are most commonly present in the intestine of humans, pigs and rats. While encysted, the worms do not develop. This only happens if the infected flesh is eaten by another animal in which the worm is capable of living (e.g., man, pig or rat). Once this is done, the cysts are dissolved by the digestive juices, the worms escape, become sexually mature, mate and migrate, producing the disease again.

Where do you draw the line? At what stage of animal evolution and development do we decide that our right to life, both individual and as a species, comes before that of the cute li’l furry critters with which we share the planet? If a rabid dog got into your back yard, would you shoot it, or try to talk it out of attacking you? If you do draw lines, if you do think that some animals like rats and dust mites can be killed because they present a nuisance or a danger to human life, then why not draw that line where eating animals – their ultimate use, for many species – is acceptable? Isn’t starvation or diet related illness a nuisance or a danger? I happen to think it is.

Vegetarianism is wholly unnatural. It holds no answers to the world’s problems and perhaps exacerbates them. We are meant to eat animals, and if there is anything ‘natural’ left in the world then we will continue to do so for the rest of our time on this planet.

Answer 2

Well, why couldn't you flip it around?
most Vegetarians CLAIM to be concerned about the environment
but most enviormentlists ARE vegetarians

this comes from a website that tells you about do's and don'ts for being an environmentlist

DONT-eat meat at every meal. Raising animals for meat requires a much larger amount of resources than growing vegetables.

INSTEAD-become a vegetarian. (helps with HEALTH & MONEY)

OR AT LEAST- eat less meat. Have more vegetarian meals. Make dishes like casserole or stir-fry that use small bits of meat, instead of eating a big piece of meat with side dishes. Consider eating vegetarian food at home and meat only in restaurants


Also Most vegetarians care about the Earth because they eat the Earth, I recently have decided to become a vegetarian, and the more vegetables I ate the closer I became concerned with the conditions in where the food I was eating grew in, and how polluted was the area. I also found myself going off on more walks instead of driving anywhere because I FELT healthier and I wanted to BE healthy... so I started to care about the environment. Not only vegetarians should be concerned about the environment, I think a lot of people should start to think more and more about global warming, pollution, and water pollution (not that I'm saying that there aren't a ton of other people who do care, I'm simply stating that we haven't shown it in many of our actions, and we could care a little bit more.) We all use things that effect this daily, and even ONE change is enough.

Fairy Codswallop- "if everyone turned veggie overnight, think of all those animals that died for no reason at all."

No, they wouldn't die for no reason at all. Of course they would be dead but if everyone magically became a vegetarian over night it they wouldn't die for to reason, because some would die and the rest would live which means the population of those animals would INCREASE!

It's honestly very hard to explain, if you are a vegetarian because you don't like the ways animals are treated then you act on that. On the way of trying to get things to stop you come across other things too, like the environment. Also like I said before once you start eating healthy you start feeling healthy, instead of sitting down on the couch watching TV and eating chips you get the sudden urge to move, to be active. And while you are being healthy you want things around you to be healthy.
You start to act upon weather the air your breathing is healthy, weather those pesticides your neighbour uses on their perfect little flowers is healthy when it runs down in the sewage or runs down to a little creek.
You might have to try it to understand. Challenge yourself, say "Hey, I might go 2 weeks without any meat, or maybe a month, maybe a year! Just to check out how I feel after I do so."
You can't really judge before you've done it.

Answer 3

We're omnivores, or ancestors were omnivores, virtually all the smartest animals are omnivores as omnivores exploit the environment well - if there is a shortage of prey, there should be enough veg, cereals and nuts to eat - and vice versa. Chimpanzees - our closest relatives love to snack on the occasional little monkey. If that's not damning to the "Humans are supposed to be vegetarian" argument I've heard - I don't know what is.
If our ancestors - particularly those in colder climates - never touched meat, milk, or made cheese, it's very likely there wouldn't be any humans in the colder countries of the world at all. That's most of North Europe.

As long as the veggies don't forget that. Plus - crop farming in recent decades - and over-use of pesticides has done more to kill and wipe out animal populations which people don't even eat. In the UK, birds like Peregrines were all but wiped out by pesticides used on crops.

So....there's a side of the Veggie argument that isn't so nice - and hardly pro-environment...

But I don't dislike Veggies - I have enough of them as friends! If they just don't like meat, or don't agree with the way animals are kept - that's a perfectly valid and fair argument. But if they start developing a holier-than-thou attitude I get really annoyed! XD

Answer 4

I'm a vegetarian ONLY because it grosses me out to eat a formerly living animal. That's why. I don't see any connection with environmentalism there.

Anyway, I will not save the environment at the price of starving to death. And besides, we don't eat "all of the vegetation". We eat some vegetables, but as we eat them (and many other people eat them too, along with their meat) more vegetables are being grown. So the balance is not lost.

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Answer 6

This is a double-edged sword.

I am going to reply and say that, "it takes alot more vegetation to feed a cow that is to be slaughtered for meat eaters."

Then you would reply with, "well, if we didn't eat cows the cow population would eat all of the vegetation along with the vegetarians."

You can continue the chasing your tail in a circle game or just let balance exist.

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Answer 8

I read Dilb's answer - I copied it to Word and printed it. Read it - you might learn something. It's an intelligently argued and almost completely irrefutable argument against vegetarianism, and neatly punctures the hypocrisy and pomposity of so-called 'vegetarians' who are in fact no such thing. I have a holier-than-thou aquaintance who claims to be a vegetarian because he regards it as a pathway to spiritual superiority, and I now have the facts at hand to give the little tosser a right kicking.

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Answer 10

No, if all the vegetation as you so loosely put it weren't destroyed to clear land for livestock production there'd be more good environment. Also, it takes far more land area to feed livestock than to feed vegetables to humans.

Wise-acre!

Answer 11

Some vegetarians don't eat meat because they either are allergic to it or don't like it, but the silly vegetarians saying it's cruel to eat animals have to think, those poor cows/fish/chickens etc. are getting killed for no reason if people don't eat them, if everyone turned veggie overnight, think of all those animals that died for no reason at all.