OT: Why you should go veggie!

Here are some facts:
Vegitarians save 96 lives every year by not eating meat.
People drug cows so they make more milk. Pesticides, fats, and pus gets in your milk. Drink soy milk. It's WAY healthier!
About 80 percent of the farmland and nearly half the water used in the U.S. are used to raise animals for food. And the sewage produced by those animals?thousands of pounds of it?often spills into lakes and streams, contaminating them.
Every vegetarian saves an acre of trees every year.

Chickens raised for KFC are taken away from their families and stuffed into sheds with tens of thousands of other birds. (Think of how scared you?d be if you were locked inside a crowded room with thousands of people you didn?t know!) The birds aren?t allowed any fresh air or sunshine, and they can barely move (each chicken has to make do with a space smaller than one sheet of notebook paper).
Once they?re fattened up, the birds are thrown into tiny crates and trucked to the slaughterhouse. Some chickens fall off the trucks and are left to die alongside the road. The frightened birds who make it to the slaughterhouse are killed when they are just 6 weeks old?still babies!

Those are just some that I found online.
~O-C [img]graemlins/heart.gif[/img]

I don't think we need to go veggie. I don't agree with that, but I can see why some of the things you listed should be changed...such as the way they treat those chickens.

Here is why I think it is ok to eat meat:

"Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything." Genesis 9:3

Now the way they treat the animals and the fact that they give them chemicals to make them grow or produce things (which can be very unhealthy for us) could be changed and improved upon.

Thanks for your views, Allie! [img]smile.gif[/img]

What do the rest of you think?

I saw that in the PM you sent me! Thanks!

I'm a person that doesn't eat anything made by/ from something with a face. So this was really interesting to learn.

I don't care if you eat meat, or wear clothes made from wool, furs or other things I wouldn't even touch! But I think vegetarians aren't represented enough.

A lot of people become vegetarians by starting to think of meat as rotting flesh, or seeing the animal in their food and realizing they're eating a once living thing. Another factor that turned me off to a lot of these products was food poisoning..... I never have had food poisoning at an extream degree, but was always worried about it.

Not trying to change anyone, or sound like a hippie (I?m really not a flower child type person), I just want to tell people about becoming a vegetarian from a bit of a personal POV.

I can see how if you think too much about where your food comes from, you might not want to eat it. "rotting flesh?" EEEW! Once my friend saw the insides of a chicken... well, she hasn't eaten chicken since. Still, if you really think deep about where all your foods come from, the fertilizer for the ground which grew your plants is poop and rotting organic material like that. Of course, if we thought too much about that we wouldn't eat anything at all! It's not wrong to go veggie, and I can see you have valid points, but I don't think it's necessary (see my above post) simply because the Bible gives us permission to eat meat.

Thanks for your views!
Tra

There's no doubt that eating meat is religiously okay (If your a Christen that is, I don't know what your religion tells you), but becoming a vegetarian is a totally personal decision I made for myself.

[img]smile.gif[/img]

Yup, I'm a Christian. And yup, the Bible says it's ok to eat meat. And yup, being veggie is a totally valid option though it is not a requirement. [img]smile.gif[/img] [img]smile.gif[/img] [img]smile.gif[/img]

Well, I have seriously considered vegetarianism at several different points in my life, especially recently with the report of the first spotting of mad cow in America and the avian flu threat. Whether it's morally right or wrong to eat meat, we're going about it the totally wrong way, which is why we even need to worry about mad cow or avain flu.

Personally, I haven't made the change because I'm already in a constant battle to stave off anemia and I don't need to make my body more deficient.

I agree with Tra that God did put certain animals here for food purposes. But when He put man above all other life forms on this planet, He gave us a great responsiblity to take of His creation. We're not doing a very good job of it and we're paying the price with global warming and mad cow and avian flu.

It's funny, btw, but Orthodox Jews belive it's a sin to be a vegetarian, because God tells us in the Bible/Torah it's okay to eat meat. Remember, their Torah is our Penetauch.

And as for the "I won't eat a living thing" defense...well, carrots techinically are living things too. [img]wink.gif[/img]

Quote:

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Originally posted by WhimsicalGypsy:
We're not doing a very good job of it and we're paying the price with global warming and mad cow and avian flu.

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">[img]graemlins/grrr.gif[/img] WE ARE NOT UNDER GOING GLOBAL WARMING! And if we are it will take hundreds of years of research and charting to know. Just because we have a week of weather in the warm 60?s now, it doesn?t mean global warming is happening! I don't really think that's the reason our animals have some bad diseases either.

Sorry to get off topic. Back to vegetarian stories?????

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">WE ARE NOT UNDER GOING GLOBAL WARMING! And if we are it will take hundreds of years of research and charting to know. Just because we have a week of weather in the warm 60?s now, it doesn?t mean global warming is happening! I don't really think that's the reason our animals have some bad diseases either. <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Well, SOMETHING is making the polar ice caps melt, so some sort of warming is the obvious answer. It might not be a global epidemic, but it's happening at least on some scale. Could it be exaggerated? Sure. But so far there's more evidence saying it is then saying it isn't.

And global warming is not why our animals have bad diseases. Mad Cow and Avian Flu were natured created BUT if we didn't engage in some of the practices we do, it would never have reached these levels. In the case of mad cow, we turned it into an epidemic by grinding up dead cows and feeding them to the cows being fattened for slaugther.

And I still say we're not doing that great of a job taking care of God's green earth. Our food supply is a great example of that. Yes, cows and chickens are for eating, but we should treat them humanely up to slaugther and slaughter in a humane way. Instead they are forced to live in horrible conditions and suffer cruelty before their deaths and that's not acceptable. We're all God's creatures, it's about durn time we show it!

<< Every animal has a purpose, and we must face that fact. >>

Exactly! God put certain animals here for certain reasons, and while we should treat every living thing with respect, there is the unescapable facts of nature: life must feed on death. It's God's way, it's nature's way, and those are the only two reasons I need to not feel guilty about enjoying a steak. [img]smile.gif[/img]

BUT, I will add, if we start getting madcow or bird flu over here, I will be going veggie until it's safe again. Those diseases are our punishment for not treating living animals - even food animals - as creatures of God, IMO.