Veganism and animal rights

[Filthy Tugboat]

Following many animal rights protests here in Australia over the weekend as well as worldwide over the last decade and longer a significant debate has been sparked in the media, in the social atmosphere, online and just about everywhere. The protest included a passive sit down in the middle of a busy city street for hours, activists chaining themselves to equipment in an abattoir to prevent use of the equipment and obstructing large trucks moving live chickens. Going to farms to film and photograph the establishments and their livestock.

I've seen quite a few responses to animal rights activism and I'll list a few here, do any of these arguments ring true, or false, for you, the reader?

Privacy should be respected for everyone, including farmers, nobody has the right to enter private property.

Farmers are already struggling in this country due to recent significant drought, flooding and bush fires, not to mention other challenges to running their business and the suicide rate has increased dramatically as a result. The added stress of dealing with this is literally killing people.

They sat down in a busy intersection for hours causing mayhem and massive traffic back ups, many people couldn't get to work and it even obstructed some emergency vehicles from getting to where they were needed.

The "activists" are only doing it for attention, it looks like most of them are wearing leather, the ones obstructing the trucks with livestock on may well have inadvertently killed those livestock by not allowing air circulation and keeping them from their destination where they can be fed and watered again. They don't care about animals.

More "leftist" nonsense with no respect for the economy, get a job you wan****!

Questions for debate, do animal rights activists and advocates have a valid point? Does the right to privacy trump animal rights? If farmers are going about their work illegally (breaching protection of animal laws), are these measures a reasonable response? What do you think of veganism and animal welfare?

[Purple Knight]

I still eat seafood, but I'm planning to give it up this May.

There really is no excuse in our day and age to continue to feed on animal flesh. We should at least be moving in the direction of full independence from meat. It's immoral, it hurts the environment and everyone around us, and it leads to disease and irritability and other emotional disbalances. I am giving up animal flesh because it's the right thing to do ethically as well as religiously.

I'll give up meat when they start growing real meat out of plants. I don't care how it tastes. I'll give up the taste of meat.

I already tried going vegetarian for a few years in collage. I was sick. I was tired. I had weird pulsating visual auras, sometimes in multicolour. I was wandering around in a fugue. My IQ was probably so low I could have barely gotten into Mensa. I never actually fainted but I kept coming close, and nearly once when I was driving.

Some people don't do well on a vegetarian diet. I'm one of them. I can't seem to absorb B12 properly from supplements.

If that gross plant stuff is nutritionally meat, as in, I eat it instead of meat and don't come close to death, I'll willingly make the trade, provided I can afford it. And provided that me giving up killing one animal doesn't mean that dozens upon dozens of Mrs. Brisby's poor, sick mouse children don't die under the plough for my veggie sausage instead of that one pig.

[Dimmesdale]

I still eat seafood, but I'm planning to give it up this May.

There really is no excuse in our day and age to continue to feed on animal flesh. We should at least be moving in the direction of full independence from meat. It's immoral, it hurts the environment and everyone around us, and it leads to disease and irritability and other emotional disbalances. I am giving up animal flesh because it's the right thing to do ethically as well as religiously.

I'll give up meat when they start growing real meat out of plants. I don't care how it tastes. I'll give up the taste of meat.

I already tried going vegetarian for a few years in collage. I was sick. I was tired. I had weird pulsating visual auras, sometimes in multicolour. I was wandering around in a fugue. My IQ was probably so low I could have barely gotten into Mensa. I never actually fainted but I kept coming close, and nearly once when I was driving.

Some people don't do well on a vegetarian diet. I'm one of them. I can't seem to absorb B12 properly from supplements.

If that gross plant stuff is nutritionally meat, as in, I eat it instead of meat and don't come close to death, I'll willingly make the trade, provided I can afford it. And provided that me giving up killing one animal doesn't mean that dozens upon dozens of Mrs. Brisby's poor, sick mouse children don't die under the plough for my veggie sausage instead of that one pig.

I like that movie.



I would recommend you at least not eat animals with higher developed consciousness, like cows and pigs.

Like I said, I still eat fish.

[Purple Knight]

I like that movie.

So do I. And if anything deserves to be "Disneyfied" (even though this is Don Bluth, not Disney) it's mice. Mice have very humanlike intelligence. They're smarter than dogs.