Re: After reading this article

I'm a big fan of the Weston A. Price Foundation and have read through every article on the site.

I just want to point out some quotes from the site that show being a vegetarian or vegan still involves the death of many many animals in order for the vegetarian or vegan to eat, so I don't understand "following your heart"?

"The farmer would point out to the vegan that even she has a ’serious clash of interests’ with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate. Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. If America was suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t all that clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensively cultivated row crops. If our goal is to kill as few animals as possible people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivated land: grass-finished steaks for everyone."

"If you want to be a vegetarian you have to kill, kill, kill. To grow fruits and vegetables organically, farmers must protect their crops from the wide range of pests that attack them, till the soil so that the planting can be done and harvest crops in an efficient manner. All of these activities require killing creatures, sometimes in large numbers. Gophers are one of the biggest pests that threaten fruit and nut trees in California, and the diligent organic farmer kills gophers by the score every day."

"You can’t be crying over every single brown-eyed life in the world." "I already told you, that’s not my religion. I grew up on a farm. I’ve helped gut about any animal you can name, and I’ve watched enough harvests to know that cutting a wheat field amounts to more decapitated bunnies under the combine than you’d believe."

"The knowledge that every animal, plant, person, wind, and season is indebted to the fruit of everything else is an adult knowledge."

I also want to point out that vegetarians rely on the meat eaters of the world to solve the problem for them of what to do with the animal, once the vegetarian takes and eats that animal's milk and eggs. Thus, vegetarians need the meat eaters of the world in order to solve their dilemma:

"For the most part, it is the more extreme forms of vegetarianism that are dangerous. Lacto-ovo-vegetarianism carries little or no health risk for its adult adherents (although there may still be risk for children if a bulky, high-fibre, low-fat/protein diet is fed). In this category are those who have given up meat for moral reasons: those who don't like the thought of the slaughter of food animals, but do continue to eat milk, cheese and eggs. Here we have the situation where people who cannot bear the thought of killing animals for food, rely on the rest of us to carry the burden of guilt for them — as the production of milk, cheese and eggs inevitably involves the birth and the death of animals.

A cow produces milk for about one year. Before she can give milk, however, like any other mammal she has to have a calf. If we are not to eat those calves, what are we to do with them? Some, of course, would be kept to produce milk themselves in the fullness of time, but what of the rest — the bull calves and the excess heifers — indeed the majority? Could we, perhaps, just keep them, unproductive, on pasture for the rest of their natural lives? Well, no, that would be quite impractical. We cannot afford the land to keep unproductive animals in any quantity. We could, of course, kill them at birth, but that surely, makes the whole exercise pointless. The same goes for the other animals.

The vegetarian is in the dilemma that he can't kill animals — yet he cannot afford to let them live. So the vegetarian conveniently puts this out of his mind, carries on his unnatural lifestyle, relying selfishly on the meat eaters to solve his dilemma for him."
From:
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/vegetarian.html
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