Slaughtering and eating cats (NSFW?)

[Animavore]

I was petting a sheep on the farm on Sunday. The question came into my head as I ran my fingers through its soft wool - Is it right for me to eat you guys?

I let cognitive dissonance sort it out for me

[FBM]

The once alleged advantages of vegetarianism on health have long been debunked. Meat does a body gooder than veggies alone. IF...and I mean IF...some vegetarians are healthier than some omnivores, then it may have to do with vegetarians being more health-conscious in the first place, exercising, not smoking, not drinking to excess, etc.

Agriculture and the Decline in Health, Nutrition, and Food Security
Agriculture commonly has been associated with a number of social features: reduced territories, more marked social boundaries, further closing of mating systems; greater territoriality and formal definitions of property; complex social and political organization; more defined concepts of property; food storage; and sedentism. Moreover, agriculture has until recently been considered the cause or enabler of these altered social institutions. These features are only loosely bound, may be separated by long spans of time, and may occur in any of various sequences. For example, sedentism in many regions occurs long before domestication (as in parts of the Middle East), but in the New World the reverse often occurs—domesticates appearing long before settled reliance on those domesticates. Social complexity may commonly follow the origins of agriculture but precedes it in many parts of the world and, as mentioned above, occurs without domestication in some parts of the world.

Changes in Health
What was once interpreted by researchers as a transition toward improving human health, nutrition, reliability of the food supply, greater ease of food procurement, and greater longevity is now viewed as the start of declining health, nutrition, and efficiency of labor, probably declining longevity, and perhaps even declining security of food supplies. It is now commonly accepted that the adoption of farming economies and sedentism resulted in declining health and nutrition. The conclusion is based on triangulation from three sources: contemporary observation of hunting and gathering versus farming societies; theoretical patterns of nutrients and parasites in nature; and paleopathology, the analysis of health and nutrition in prehistoric skeletons representing different periods of prehistory. Many sources have found parallel trends toward declining health in prehistoric populations but challenges to quantitative methods, interpretations of some evidence, and some specific conclusions in paleopathology have been offered. Observed paleopathological trends commonly accord with expectations from other lines of evidence.

It seems probable from epidemiological considerations—and it is clear from paleopathology—for example, that farming, large concentrations of population and sedentism, the accumulation of human feces, and the attraction of stored foods to potentially disease-bearing animals markedly increased parasite loads on human populations. The increase in the prevalence of visible periostitis, osteomyelitis, treponemal infection, and tuberculosis in skeletal populations conforms both to ethnographic observations and models of probable disease history. The reduction of wild animal meat in the diet with the increasing focus on vegetable foods may initially have reduced the likelihood of food-borne diseases (of which animals are the major source). But the domestication of animals, their crowding, and their continuing proximity to human populations are likely to have raised meat-borne infections to new highs and seems responsible for epidemic diseases in human populations, many of which began as zoonotic (animal-borne) disease shared by people and domestic animals.

Consequences of Agriculture
Sedentism and farming resulted in declining quality of nutrition (or at least in the decline in the quality of nutrients available to the human populations). Indeed, some researchers have extolled the virtue of hunter-gatherer diets. Agriculture is likely to have resulted in a marked downturn in food diversity and food quality, and ultimately to a decline in nutrition. An increase in cumulative neurotoxins may have occurred as farming was adopted, the latter despite the fact that domestication itself may have bred toxic substances out of foods.

Agriculture also seems to have resulted in a change in the texture of foods toward softer foods, resulting in a decline in tooth wear but an increase in dental caries and a reduction in jaws and jaw strength. A significant advantage of soft foods based on boiling in ceramic pots, a practice largely restricted to sedentary populations, may have been the increasing potential for early weaning of children and improved food for toothless elders. But early weaning to cereals as opposed to a diet of mother's milk is well known to have serious negative effects on childhood nutrition, infection, and survival.

A dramatic increase in iron deficiency anemia (porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia) is associated everywhere in the archaeological record with both sedentism, infection, and new crops. The trend is also predictable in nature, and may be observed in contemporary populations. The increased anemia probably resulted primarily from a large increase in iron-robbing hookworm associated with sedentism and with the sequestering by the body of its own iron as protection against bacterial disease.

The declining health that came with the advent of farming is also reflected in (but not universally) childhood declines in stature, osteoporosis in children, decreases in tooth size (as a result of declining maternal nutrition), and tooth defects.

...

Domestication, sedentism, and storage appear to have evened out potential seasonal shortages in resources, but they may also have reduced the reliability of the food supply by decreasing the variety of foods consumed; by preventing groups from moving in response to shortages; by creating new vulnerability of plants selected for human rather than natural needs; by moving resources beyond their natural habitats to which they are adapted for survival; and by the increase in post-harvest food loss through storage—not only because stored resources are vulnerable to rot, or theft by animals, but stores are subject to expropriation by human enemies. One possible biological clue to the resolution of this problem is that signs of episodic stress (enamel hypoplasia and microdefects in teeth in skeletal populations) generally become more common after agriculture was adopted.

Sedentary agriculture seems likely to have increased human fertility through a variety of mechanisms, including the shifting work loads for women; calorically richer diets; sedentism; and the increased marginal utility of children or the increased availability of weaning foods. Some researchers estimate that during the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the Iberian Peninsula fertility may have increased as much as from four to six live births per mother, which would imply very rapid acceleration of population growth. If, in fact, fertility on average increased (possibly significantly) but population growth on average accelerated only by the trivial amount calculated below, then life expectancy must on average have declined (since growth rates are a balance of both fertility and mortality). (There is little evidence from paleopathology that the adoption of sedentary farming increased on average human life expectancy and little reason to expect that it did.)

For whatever reasons, essentially all estimates of average post-domestication population growth suggest an increase in rates of population growth (calculated as compound interest rates). But on average, the increase can have been no more than from about .003 percent per year for pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers to about 0.1 percent for Neolithic and post-Neolithic farmers. (In both cases the averages are simple mathematical calculations of what is possible based on all reasonable estimates of world population at the period of adoption of agricultural (about 5–25 million) to estimated population in 1500 C.E. (about five hundred million). Average population growth even after the onset of agriculture would therefore have been trivial to the point where it would have been almost imperceptible to the populations involved. It would have taken such populations about one thousand years to double in size. Growth and dispersal of agricultural populations and/or diffusion of domestic crops were hardly likely to have been exuberant in most locations for that reason, particularly if arguments about declining health and very low average growth rates are considered. Owing to their low rank as resources, crops would presumably have diffused only to populations facing similar levels of demand or pressure but lacking good local domesticates of their own.

...

Since health and nutrition seem to have declined, the primary advantage to farmers seems to have been both political and military because of the ability to concentrate population and raise larger armies. This would have conferred a considerable advantage in power at a time when few if any weapons were available that were capable of offsetting numerical superiority.

http://www.enotes.com/food-encyclopedia ... re-origins

[lordpasternack]

I don't see the word "vegetarian", anywhere in that article, FBM - far less a thorough debunking of the notion that they're healthier in general…

And even if vegetarians are just as healthy - that's good enough.

[fordo]

noooo, not the kitties i hate humans sometimes/allways

[FBM]

Human health declined with the advent of widespread agriculture and the increase of vegetable matter as food, supplanting meat. This is now the mainstream view of anthropologists.

Don't get me wrong. People who torture animals should be subjected to the same torture they inflicted. But throwing the baby out with the bath water does no one any good. Humans eat meat because they evolved to do so, and they evolved to do so because it aids health and survival.

I'm not convinced that vegetarians are as healthy as omnivores. I sure don't envy the bodies of the Hindus I've seen, and in terms of longevity, the longest-lived people aren't vegetarians, on the whole.

[Animavore]

Souls are more nutritious than any physical food stuffs

[FBM]

Souls are more nutritious than any physical food stuffs

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I've seen people eat things that would astound most of us, as it did me at the time. I've also been hungry enough to dream about those very items with a deep lust. I'll save my judgment on this matter for a specific case if it is presented to me.

[Animavore]

I'm going to be consistent here and say that I would actually happily eat cat if it was put on a plate in front of me. Or if I saw it at a stall in a foreign place I would find myself gravitating towards it out of pure interest.

[Tero]

Save the guts, they make baroque violin strings. We have switched to nylon on guitar but you cant bow nylon.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Save the guts, they make baroque guitar strings. We have switched to nylon on guitar but you cant bow nylon.

Two cats watching a tennis match.

#1: Great game!

#2: Do you play?

#1: No, but I have an uncle who's in the racquet.

[lordpasternack]

Scientific endeavors in the area of vegetarianism have shifted from concerns about nutritional adequacy to investigating health benefits and disease prevention.[26] The American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada have stated that at all stages of life, a properly planned vegetarian diet is "healthful, nutritionally adequate, and provides health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases". Large-scale studies have shown that mortality from ischaemic heart disease was 30% lower among vegetarian men and 20% lower among vegetarian women than in non-vegetarians.[27][28][29] Necessary nutrients, proteins, and amino acids for the body's sustenance can be found in vegetables, grains, nuts, soymilk, eggs and dairy.[30] Vegetarian diets offer lower levels of saturated fat, cholesterol and animal protein, and higher levels of carbohydrates, fibre, magnesium, potassium, folate, and antioxidants such as vitamins C and E and phytochemicals.[31][32]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism

And what the hell are you on about, FBM? The Agricultural Revolution involved the domestication and selective breeding of animals, FOR MEAT. As hunter-gatherers, you only get meat if you catch and kill it in the wild. As a farmer, you go to your barn, and strategically pick animals to kill/breed from, and you can breed animals to be tamer, and produce more meat - as we, er, DID, and do, to grotesque proportions in some cases…

If nutrition declined at the onset of agriculture, I'm more willing to put it down to an increase in the homogeneity of the diet in general (grain and other food staples are never good to rely almost solely on) rather than a decrease in meat consumption. And ultimately, a vegetarian (even vegan) diet can be perfectly nutritionally complete.

[Hermit]

Save the guts, they make baroque violin strings.

You must be fucking joking. If you've ever heard a cat trying to be musical, you'll understand why "catgut" is usually made from the intestines of sheep or goat intestines and occasionally cattle, hogs, horses, mules, or donkeys, but never from the guts of cats.

[FBM]

What I'm on about is in the link I already posted. As in most debates, we are choosing the sources and information that best support our subjective preferences. I don't have any agenda to impose my preferences on you. Can you say the same? I hope so.

[charlou]

Just highlighting our lovely tacit hypocrisy between our attitude towards "pet" animals, and those that died for their/our food. So much livestock is treated similarly to those cats, and I bet cats and dogs are damn tasty.

Caring for animal friends is good for humans. So is eating meat.

Actually, most vegetarians are healthier than the average "omnivore" in Western society. Practically every quantitative study reveals this same old fact. We simply don't need to eat meat to subsist. We want to eat it… and we're not 'meant' to be COMPLETELY vegetarian (though best bets are that we're meant to be MOSTLY vegetarian) in much the same sense that we're not 'meant' to wear clothes, drive cars, live in air-conditioned houses in cities, and fly at several thousand feet above sea level going at several hundred miles per hour, and all the other privileges that have been bestowed on us since we started rising above nature.

As for mistreatment - were the cats in the first video really being mistreated? They were being treated coldly, unaffectionately, bundled into cages, and what have you, but I didn't see them being beaten or handled too aggressively. Maybe they're all fed well and otherwise not mistreated… And as for prevalence of such treatment, well, safe to say, particularly in America, factory farming is going mainstream - battery hens already ARE mainstream (aww, but they're just chooks), and veal crates were only fairly recently banned in the EU… conditions that may not always be overtly 'cruel', but which we wouldn't dream of ever bestowing on cats or dogs, all the same - even those who weren't OUR 'animal friends'. Fancy trucks loaded with kittehs headed for the abbatoir…

That's quite a lecture in response to my brief observations.

Are you disagreeing that caring for animals is good for humans, and that eating meat is good for humans?