Topics Animals

Question There were some questions about vegetarian diets recently, and I'd like to ask a few follow-up questions if I may? First, what is the philosophy in favor of vegetarian diet? is it mostly that it is healthier, or is it moral objections to using animals for food? if the latter, how come so many vegetarians wear leather shoes and carry alligator bags? are they being poseurs or are they just superficial in their thinking? Second, if people object to the way cattle or chicken are raised to be slaughtered, that's fine if we don't want them to suffer. Eating shrimp, crab, insects, and the like would also give us plenty of protein we need for a healthy diet. Finally, in parts of the US prairie, protectect ungulate populations (deer, elk) have no natural predators. To prevent overbreeding which would lead to overgrazing which would lead to mass starvation, state Conservation Departments survey their ungulate populations every spring in order to determine how many hunting permits to issue each fall. If the philosophy behind vegetarianism is compassion, then to be consistent, shouldn't vegetarians APPROVE of this humane hunting, culling a few animals from the population so that the overall health of the herd is enhanced? Thanks!

Accepted:
September 6, 2012

Comments

On (1): Different people have different reasons to be vegetarian. Besides the ones mentioned, there are many others. One important one, nowadays, is an environmental concern. Animal farms emit enormous amounts of greenhouse gases; they produce large amounts of pollution; etc. It's also true that animals raised for slaughter are fed a lot more protein (and other foodstuffs) than they will ever produce. They are, if one wants to think of them this way, very inefficient food factories.

Regarding the latter part of (1), obviously this depends upon one's reasons, but most vegetarians I know would never carry an alligator bag.

On (2), I'm not sure I understand the question, but perhaps the point is that shrimp, crabs, and insects do not plausibly suffer. If that is the point, I don't disagree, actually. If one's reason not to eat chicken, say, is that chickens are intelligent, sentient creatures, etc, etc, then this reason certainly does not apply to scallops, or shrimp, so far as I can see. There will be difficult cases, where we do not know what to say, of course, but those cases seem pretty clear to me. Even still, though, one might have other reasons not to want to eat those sorts of animals. The harvesting of scallops, for example, as it is generally done commercially, typically causes a good deal of destruction to the seabed.

On (3), this sort of question is difficult, in large part because humans are the ones responsible for the changes in question. But one might wonder if there are not other alternatives, such as attempts to re-establish a natural eco-system. In Massachusetts, for example, some natural predators of deer have been successfully re-introduced in recent years, and they now helps prevent over-population among our local deer. I just saw a coyote in my backyard the other day! Fortunately for them, our deer weren't around at the time.