[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]We feed her biscuits with fish in’em. I’ve heard there are vegan cat biscuits, it’s on my list of inconvenient things to investigate. There’s a vegan shop on K Rd that I keep meaning to check out. [/quote]Thanks. 
So the most historically acurate drawings of roman soldiers would be Asterix?
[quote=“Sypher”]So the most historically acurate drawings of roman soldiers would be Asterix?[/quote]Um. I think they’d tend to be skinnier because soldiers in the field would be doing a lot more marching and digging than a gladiator. I’m pretty sure they’d be relatively short by today’s standards, though, as height is pretty closely linked to how much protein you get as a kid. To give a comparison, Julius Caesar thought that the Germans ‘savages’, who ate mostly meat, were huge and of a fine and beautiful form.
EDITED TO ADD: And also didn’t wear very much in the way of clothes.
[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]For that matter, is it okay to keep pets as, essentially, slave species?[/quote]That’s heading back into the murky ground of defining what behaviour is ‘moral.’ Of all the animals kept as pets, cats probably get the best deal, though, they trade companionship and occasional vermin catching for regular meals and vet care, and if they don’t like it they can just take off, as opposed to the many other species who are confined. (*) I remember watching the latest version of Planet of the Apes where a little girl was adopted as a pet, just taken away from her family and dressed up and put in a cage for the night because she hadn’t been socialised enough to let her wander around the house yet. That made me think pretty hard about the last time I’d acquired a kitten - picked him out and taken him home, and not really been bothered about the fact that he’d never see his family again.
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- Except in America where apparently many cats are kept inside all their lives.
Um Gladiator diet?
Of all the pet species, Cats are the least slave like.
Cats don’t have owners they have “humans who feed us” or co-habitants at best.
Take for instance my fiancees cat, Montoya, also known as Monto-o-saurus Fat, Fatoid, “The Fat” and a multitude of other names:
He is a fixed ginger male, who turned up on Helens doorstep one day and stayed there until she fed him.
Then “he” moved in, got really fat & basically acts like he owns the house.
Not a slave. But we’ll not feed him vegan food, ever!
We have dogs too & a turtle (who appears to be insane but then again I did find him walking down the road at my work).
Are they slaves? Nope. Captives against their will, well maybe the turtle, who did experience freedom.
Do I feel bad about it? Nope. Why? Cause a non adopted pound dog is a dead dog & the turtle shouldn’t be released into the environment.
Maybe we should post into a new thread?
Jared
[quote=“Jared”]
He is a fixed ginger male, who turned up on Helens doorstep one day and stayed there until she fed him.[/quote]
Oh, one of those cats! My family has one too. It rocked up in our yard at the age of about four weeks, looking like a furry little sack of bones and looked at us so pitifully that we gave her some food.
Ten years later, she shows no signs wishing to part company with us.
I gotta say, if anyone’s really worried about the ‘footprint’ they leave on the world the FIRST thing to do is never have children. Then stop buying products made out of unsustainable crude oil (there goes all the plastic…).
And from a biological point of view, all the scientific evidence points to humans (and other primates) having evolved from being almost completely herbivorous to omnivorous (dentition, arrangement of the digestive system - I think someone already mentioned this) . Also, the cooking meat argument is stupid - the reason the cooking of meat became widespread is because cooking it effectively sterilises it. Cavemen who cooked their meat tended to remain alive/healthier in the long run and have more children than cavemen who didn’t - the first step on the road of hygiene development, and the same reason why other cultural practices eg a taboo on cannabalism, incest etc came about. These things lead to inbreeding, spread of disease etc, and all the associated ramifications. Higher animals (mainly mammals here) rarely practise incest or cannabalism. The only reason they don’t cook their food is because (for other, and varied, reasons) they haven’t discovered how to use fire. The early evolution of humans is the same as for any animal - until we got to a point where we actually began conciously affecting our own development, as opposed to semi-accidentally discovering things and them sticking around because they turned out to be useful.
Someone mentioned about having enough food to feed the world if we stopped farming animals and used all the space and resources to grow crops. Newsflash! We HAVE enough food to feed the world. American farmers are being paid to throw away food or underproduce. I don’t want to sound like a ‘corporations are evil, it’s all their fault’ nut, but it’s a well documented fact that the amount of food in the market is controlled so that prices don’t drop too low. Aside from that, it’s also a distribution problem. All the food is in places like Europe and America - who’s going to get it to Africa? Charity organisations like World Vision do a lot, but they’re limited by the philanthropy (or lack thereof) of others. And should you get all the food to these places, how will you get them to the actual people? Most of these countries have a very unstable infrastructure - even if you don’t land in the middle of a conflict of some kind there’s still unlikely to be any effective system of getting food to people. The problems in third world countries are more than just starvation. Wars, coups, lack of stable government, drought, disease, poverty…
All of these arguments boil down to the fact that the world is overpopulated. We can’t sustain this for much longer whether we eat meat or not
[quote=“No Rectangulars”]
All of these arguments boil down to the fact that the world is overpopulated. We can’t sustain this for much longer whether we eat meat or not[/quote]
Agreed
Number 1 environmental problem in the world today : To many people
Solutions
Breed less human beings?
Export them to another planet?
Exile them to Australia?