It"s no bother. I sort of see Art as an internet forum version of father ayahusca. He tells you what you don"t want to hear , in no uncertain terms. But perhaps it is something that you need to hear.
I respect every insult the old fucker sends my way.

I don't think calling somebody a son of a bitch because they fish is at all "wise" or "necessary." Seems to me like he's just being an mean and spiteful because of a differing in opinion more than anything

I'm pretty sure he was joking.....

Well whatever. I know if i were to say that i would be banned. Lol. Anyways, don't mean to off rail the topic.

I don't understand why people call hunting unnatural when it's something that happens in nature all the time. But I do highly disagree with trophy hunting. That is just wasteful and I don't see how it can be considered fun. Killing an animal for food is never an easy thing for me to do, but that's how I stay alive.

Jamie: you could make the argument that we also evolved the capacity for mass factory farming. Why isn't that also "just part of nature?"

Again, I'm vegetarian, so I am in no way suggesting that it is BETTER to eat store-bought meat then hunt your own. I do however think it's a fallacy to claim that your way or killing to get meat is better then any other way.

Also: since when is an animal living in the real world necessarily leading a "good" life? When talking to life in the animal kingdom, the phrase "nasty brutish and short" tends to get tossed around a lot.

Blessings
~ND

Just my two cents on this topic:

Why do we always keep looking at how we have been living for so many thousands of years and our so called nature? What is wrong with changing that and not killing animals, especially now in this age where we do not need to kill them in order to survive...
On the Nexus people always talk about how to expand and evolve our consciousness, well isn't it a possibility that not killing animals to eat them is one way of expanding?

We have evolved in so many ways... Sometimes it seems that we use this "natural" way of being as an excuse to kick some habits (because eating meat is nothing more than a habit imo) which we are accustomed to. The universe changes, the world changes, the creatures change and adapt...

The fact that it happens all around us in nature doesn't mean we couldn't try to be different. After all we seem to have the capability to be different than other animals around us, because we have the choice.
For me it's simple, if I can avoid killing something (directly or indirecly) in order to survive I will.

"Why do we always keep looking at how we have been living for so many thousands of years and our so called nature? What is wrong with changing that and not killing animals, especially now in this age where we do not need to kill them in order to survive"

Can you back that up with proof? I was strict raw vegan for a number of years, and vegetarian for much longer and after nearly 10 years cycling around on those diets I just felt sub par at best and really shitty and unhealthy on the worst days. Please don't tell people here that there is some kind of proof that humans don't need to eat meat etc..if you believe this is so than that's fine, that is your opinion but I have looked into this extensively and I don't see any proof that all humans can just live healthy forever without eating animal products.

Also, you did not address what I said above about how much more destruction and death agriculture has caused. Vegetarianism is completely a product of agricultural societies. maybe you can do it in a polyculture food forrest type of system but that still not not address the fact that some people just get ill on diets that don't include animals, and then get better when they eat animals again. Why do you assume that our tiny tiny by comparison period of time away from a hunter gathere lifestyle is so great that we can suddenly choose to just evolve a new set of dietary requirements?

People have this deluded idea of progress, and that everything we do now must be some kind of progress. In reality we have caused mass deforestation(a large part of which is due to agriculture), mass species extinction and polluted the ecosystem with pesticides. herbicides, nuclear radiation, exhaust fumes etc..I guess I just fail to see how this current agriculture modality that has allowed novel ideas like vegetarianism to even flourish is any kind of progress in the long run, other than that we are now seeing in it's wake why mimicking natures dynamic systems as much as possible is the most sustainable. If anything this should be seen as a learning process where from our mistakes we learn what does not seem to work.

"Jamie: you could make the argument that we also evolved the capacity for mass factory farming. Why isn't that also "just part of nature?"

Because the original etymology of the term was closer to something like "she who gives birth" than it is to just a reference to anything that goes on within a biological system. Nature to me means a system of dynamic and self regulating sustainable abundance that maintains a state of coherence..nature is abundant with a diverse array of life..nature is abundant with fertility. Factory farming causes mass environmental devastation and species extinction.

I don't believe in this idea that "everything is natural". I think that is a fallacy and a weak excuse to make a point without really making one.

If you really want it explained another way, one system can sustain environmental coherence, the other cannot.

Hostilis, I think you need to read the attitude page carefully, specially the small print at the bottom

I think this is a good point (and i am a meat eater). Also, once we evolve more and learn the linguistics of other species, there is going to be a lot of guilt going down over the fact that we have been munching on other self aware beings for millenia.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/t...og-language-decoded.html

With the population as it is, and increasing all the time, if everybody in the world did sustainable hunting, wouldn"t it become unsustainable?

LOL. I saw that.

"Hunting for food is one thing, but many in this country love to go kill for the sake of killing. They'll shoot coyotes, groundhogs, squirrels, birds, anything. They just kill it and leave it. That is truly sick, and I've never understood it."

It is really sad and just another symptom of how removed we are from nature. I see this also expressed in the way our culture collectively sort of assumes we are more civil, more peaceful and fair etc..while at the same time most people are shopping at large department stores to feed and cloth themselves, which is made possible by child and wage slavery that goes on behind the scenes. We have become desensitized to it because we don't see it. We live in the illusion that we are "civil". Instead of living in honerable acceptance of our wild nature as our ancestors once did, we now try to suppress our primal side and so the actions that meet the demands of our culture are left to the small portion of people who are truly sick enough to do the deeds.

We left it to the slave runners and eco rapists..ones who wont bat an eye at ethnic or cultural genocide etc...just as hunting by and large in our culture is not portrayed as a path of honor and respect for life the way the native americans and some other indigenous peoples approach it. We left it for the cattle concentration camp runners and sport hunters.

..and we live in the illusion we are "civil" in our sheltered lives.

I have to agree with jamie here. Mass farming is in no way natural imo. This mass farming is not sustainable. Hunting is sustainable and VERY natural. All carnivors/omnivors do it (we are omnivores). There is no denying that this is how it works for carnivores/omnivores.



If all of the worlds people had to hunt, a big majority of them would not be eating meat anymore. I think that the population would drastically go down honestly. It's not an easy thing to do. I think more people would eat more plants and not take meat for granted. There wouldn't be so much food wasted. Every part would be used. I think the world would be a WAY better place if everyone hunted their own food.

Yup..
but modern agriculture practices are not going to sustain a growing population either..

The only sustainable way to manage the land we have destroyed due to farming, is to move towards polyculture fast. With polyculture you are regrowing a forrest..you don't weed, you don't till..you don't fertilize..you plant a forrest and let it go..then it brings back the animals..then you go into that forrest or "garden" and pretty much hunt and gather. It is the future IMO and it is bringing us back full circle but in a somewhat more sophisticated manner. Essentially all forests and untouched landscapes are examples of polyculture. Everthing goes in cycles..what else should we expect? We are completing a cycle and coming back to our roots in a novel way.

I would like to see a time where we just regreen our farmlands to the degree where we don't call them farms anymore..they are just food forests..and all forests become the indigenous lands of humanity again. We came from the forests and we rely on the bounty of the forests.

"Can you back that up with proof? I was strict raw vegan for a number of years, and vegetarian for much longer and after nearly 10 years cycling around on those diets I just felt sub par at best and really shitty and unhealthy on the worst days."

The only proof you are providing is your own personal experience with being vegan/vegetarian. I do not know what kind of diet you were on or if you were eating the necessary things for a balanced diet. As I can provide no proof except my own experience where I have been feeling much better since I have quit eating animals since it made me more tired, weaker more subject to diseases.


"In reality we have caused mass deforestation(a large part of which is due to agriculture), mass species extinction and polluted the ecosystem with pesticides. herbicides, nuclear radiation, exhaust fumes etc..I guess I just fail to see how this current agriculture modality that has allowed novel ideas like vegetarianism to even flourish is any kind of progress in the long run, other than that we are now seeing in it's wake why mimicking natures dynamic systems as much as possible is the most sustainable."

I don't know if you are aware of the statistics, but more than 70% of grain produced by the agriculture goes straight to feeding animals that are thereafter killed for consumption. So I think saying vegetarianism is the biggest part of the problem is a overstatement. I agree that a lot of vegetarian products made with soya are not that good for the enviroment, but I try to avoid those as much as I can. Plus if you compare the impact of the meat industry on the enviroment I think that leaves a much bigger print then all of the rest combined.

The statement I'm just trying to make is that it is not sustainable for the whole world to eat meat every day as is happening now. I think comparing the hunter gatherer society to ours is totally out of proportion. First of all they didn't eat meat on a daily basis as we do. The meat wasn't filled with antibiotics and all the rest that goes in it nowadays, so I don't believe this can be healthy for the body. I know you stated getting your meat from a farm who controls all this, but how many people do this? As I said before if we all would do this it would be impossible to eat meat on a daily basis.

As for hunting and fishing, I don't see the connectedness with nature by doing this... but that's just me. I'd rather try to feel the connectedness with the living animal by looking at it move and live and bathe in the feeling of awe that I get when looking at it and realising that it too has the consciousness that seems to flow through everything in nature.

by the way jamie you are again putting a lot of different things in the same sack. Vegetarianism is not the same as veganism, as you are well aware, and people can live perfectly healthy lives being vegetarians and even vegans. (source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih....icles/PMC1022500/?page=1 )

Also, it's a fact that vegetables are more sustainable to grow in terms of energetic resources, energy, water and amount of land as compared to meat. (source http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.short ). Of course monoculture is anyways unsustainable one way or another, but this is not an argument against vegetarianism or veganism, this is an argument against monoculture (which can also be associated with factory meat, take soy for feeding cows for example).

Comparing wild hunted meat vs monoculture agriculture is not a fair comparison, either compare wild hunted meat vs wild gathered/local agriculture, or compare factory farming meat vs monoculture agriculture.

You tend to generalize your own experience (being vegetarian/vegan and you weren't healthy) to others, and that is a falacious argument. Just because it didn't work for you does not mean it doesn't work for others. I know plenty of lifelong vegetarians that are perfectly healthy, and I just linked a peer reviewed paper also saying so.

That all being said, eating meat or not eating meat is one's own choice and not something that one should try to convince others about, IMO.

Sports hunting is stupid IMO, it causes unnecessary suffering. Hunting for your own meat is way better than factory farming, though. Whether one decides to take the life of an animal (and how does one value the life of plants) is again, something that each one has to decide for themselves and not something to convince another about IMO.

I agree.

I never brought vegetarianism or veganism into this thread. Other people did that.
I never said I had proof for eating meat..other people made the claim that humans don't need to eat aniamls..

I never said that farming animals is any better than just farming plants. You seem to assume I did. The point I made was in reference to vegetarianism as a whole being a product of agricultural societies, and animals or not agriculture has done more damage than hunting and gathering ever did..and it did it fast.

In reference to vegetarian farming though..the still use farmed animals most of the time(even in vegan foods) to fertilize the fields.

I never generalized anything here about diet so please don't come here to attack me on claims I never made. I never made this thread to debate meat eating with people. I made the claim that not everyone seems to thrive on vegetarian and vegan diets both..which is fact I have seen and you only have to go to other forums on the subject to see that. If anyone does not like that reality than that is not my problem. I could not care less about debating that.

Random thoughts, draw your own conclusions...

It's true, nature is cruel. I'd guess that most of the creatures that ever lived died violently and were eaten by another.

I shot a bird with my slingshot when I was 8 or 9, dropped it right out of the sky in the back yard. It felt like crap. Never really wanted to hunt after that, though shooting cans and bottles can be fun.

With many natural predators largely removed from the scene, there are certain populations that sort of need to be culled by hunting before they overpopulate their terrain and food sources. But predators are opportunists and nature tends to kill the weak end of the herd while trophy hunters try to kill the strongest members of the herd.

Most of us want meat without having to face the actual reality of death firsthand. It is a packaged item much like toilet paper or gasoline. We don't like to look our food in the eye. Maybe we see ourself in there, or maybe we're just weak.

Moral decisions aside, 6 billion + people cannot live as hunters. Meat or no meat, we need agriculture for that.

Meat takes a tremendous amount of energy to produce, something like 10 times as much per unit of protein as beans and rice.

We can live without meat, and most westerners eat way more than is needed. Even a serving a month or once a week is probably plenty for most people.

I suppose hunting can still serve as a rite of passage, but so can most any experience. We could all ride a roller coaster high on acid or sit in the desert alone for 3 days. Probably either one would be offer more personal insight than drinking PBRs all weekend and killing Bambi from a tree stand.

"Moral decisions aside, 6 billion + people cannot live as hunters. Meat or no meat, we need agriculture for that."

Why do you assume modern agriculture is going to sustain our growing population? It makes no sense to assume that there is something more sustainable about our current agricultural system than hunting/gathering. The only way we can make that land sustainable is if we make it into polyculture..and then that eventually makes more land that you have to go into and hunt the game and collect the plants. You wont be walking down little rows of neatly lined up vegetation just picking the way it is done now.

Once things are at that point is it even agriculture?