[PvK]

This discussion has been interesting to me, not just for the topic and to hear people's reactions, but also as an example of the effects of overstatement. Particularly when I think others are overstating a case or writing something that seems ridiculous to me, I am often tempted to respond with overstated sarcastic and ironic humor that only I (or those on my rarified wavelength, but not often those I'm responding to) am likely to get, and that can lead to misunderstandings getting out of control.

Anyway, Renegade 13, I'd like not to upset you with miscommunication, so I'll try to respond as clearly as I can and maybe explain better than I have been.

I was making sarcastic remarks about not trusting vegetarians because the replies from you and Fyron seemed to say you wouldn't trust any information from a URL with "vegetarian" in the domain name. I thought that was pretty remarkable, and was trying to express it with sarcastic humor. Perhaps I was responding unclearly to something I somewhat misunderstood, just getting us circling each other.

It seems that at some point in history some people on the "animal" side of this issue have made some people on the "meat" side (sorry if my terms are offending anyone) quite annoyed and skeptical, though this seems like a very polarizing topic. I guess I was trying to express too that I find it hard to understand how people could get to the point where they trust corporations with tons of money at stake over people who are trying to help animals, to the point that they'd just disbelieve anything with the word "vegetarian" in its name. For my part, I've gotten to the point that I distrust most corporate and corp-media messages, and expect corporations to frame animal rights activists much more readily than I'd expect activists to frame farmers. It's an extreme example of people getting upset at "the other side" and overreacting and hurting both communication and their own cause, leading to lots of mistrust and entrenched sides.

I was trying (and apparently, failing) to reflect what seemed like your illogic back to you. (I'm still surprised how rarely that approach works, but I guess I shouldn't be.) I was not really meaning to say I thought you abused or neglected or didn't care about animals. I just meant to show the same level of illogic and intolerance I seemed to be getting. All it did was make you frustrated in the same way your replies frustrated me, but without you understanding (or at least, not accepting), what I was trying to express.

I wasn't saying the whole meat industry was wicked; of course it's not. Again, my expressions tended to reflect illogical and incorrect expressions from the other side. Again, it didn't get understood. My mistake more than anyone else's.

I hope though that you would realize too that the same is true of people on the other side of the argument. There are some who do bad things and say bad things, but that doesn't make them all bad or wrong either.

I understand about beak trimming. My understanding is that sometimes it is done by burning, but that's not necessarily a significant detail if we're talking seriously. I have seen many arguments on both sides about how humane it is or isn't in different specific cases. I was guilty of overstatement in the way I expressed it, but again this was because I was reacting to overstatements to the effect that it never happened, would never happen in the USA, etc. But two wrongs don't generally make a right, nor do they reach an understanding.

I don't know the details of the "starve" comment - that was the New York Times writing that.

"Vegetarians are primarily people who have lived in cities all their life, and not been in touch with the real world, outside of cities. "
- No, vegetarians are simply people who don't eat meat, for a wide variety of reasons.

"Vegetarians have been raised watching Walt Disney movies"
- Fascinating.

"Vegetarians [...] think that all animals are harmless and nearly the equal to people. They're not, never will be."
- "Equal" in what sense?
- Some people, who may or may not actually be vegetarians, even think that they prefer animals to people in some ways.

"If you couldn't go to the grocery store and buy all your organic, non-meat products and you actually had to grow and kill what you eat rather than go buy it, you would eat meat. If you didn't, you'd die."
- Er, no. Many Asian cultures (and, see "Buddhism") have been largely or almost entirely vegetarian (in the not-animal-eating sense, not in your strange Disney-raised sense) even before significant contact with Western cultures. They did just fine, and many continue to do so.

"You'd also see that animals are just that; animals. They are not on the same level as a person."
- In what terms? I've had plenty of contact with animals, and I respect and appreciate them quite a bit, and certainly prefer many of them to many humans I've known.

"Killing and eating animals does not make people 'evil'."
- Who (on this thread) ever said it did?

I don't think we really disagree on the main issue here. Seems to me we agree that there can be humane meat farming, and there can be abusive meat farming, and there are at least some cases of abusive meat farming, and that's bad. Where we disagree is maybe what counts as abusive, how common abuse is, what should be done about it, and so on. None of which we really want to discuss in detail here.

PvK