Animal Ethics

JANUARY 20, 2008

Ethical vegetarianism is the thesis that killing and eating animals is morally wrong whenever equally nutritious plant-based alternatives are available. The case for ethical vegetarianism starts with several uncontroversial premises. Most people hold that it is wrong to cause animals unnecessary suffering.

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Animal Person

JANUARY 23, 2010

God thinks vegetarians are evil, and we want to please god. Cain=farmer=evil murderer; Abel=slaughtered animals=victim/good son. The fact remains, however, that if you don't need to kill anyone to survive, no amount of storytelling and mythmaking (or myth borrowing/co-opting) around that slaughter excuses it. Net message?

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Animal Person

MAY 30, 2009

If any "drastic measures" are employed, they are to remove animals from suffering, not to impose our dietary choices on others. Often confused with American Humane Association, they raise tens of millions, not to ‘save the animals’ as most people assume but to further the causes of vegetarianism and ending animal agriculture."

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 3, 2008

There I argued that the interests of animals ought to be considered equally with our own interests and that from this equality it follows that we ought to become vegetarian. Peter Singer , "Killing Humans and Killing Animals," Inquiry 22 [summer 1979]: 145-56, at 145 [italics in original; endnote omitted])

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

In other words, we become vegetarians, not through any decision of principle, but through being unable to bring ourselves to continue to dine upon the flesh of animals. What the vegetarian wants, surely, is that we should stop eating meat even if our liking for it exceeds our revulsion at the suffering endured on factory farms.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

I suspect that many regular readers of Animal Ethics are already vegetarians. That's because those who read Animal Ethics with regularity know that there are many compelling reasons to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. a vegetarian diet is associated with a lower risk of death from ischemic heart disease.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 16, 2009

Animals raised for food suffer miserably. Would we say these people were slaughtered in a “people friendly” manner? Confinement is confinement, mutilation is mutilation, and slaughter is slaughter. After time in the Marines, I veered strongly away from eating creatures, thinking of their suffering.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 2, 2008

As a recent convert to vegetarianism, I found that it reinforced my feeling that the eating of living, thinking, emotional creatures is just plain wrong. The fact that geese mate for life, and that the mate of the poor goose that was slaughtered would step forward, was enough to make me swear off meat forever, if I hadn’t already.

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 24, 2009

22): Mr. Steiner might feel less lonely as an ethical vegan—he says he has just five vegan friends—if he recognized that he has allies in mere vegetarians (like me), ethical omnivores and even carnivores. Go vegan, go vegetarian, go humane or just eat less meat. Suffering and injustice are inherent in life, and time is short.

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New York Times New York Vegan Vegetarian 40

Animal Person

JUNE 8, 2009

The tiresome Hitler was a well-known vegetarian comment is included in this segment, but I found it irksome long before that. In 10 or 15 years of life, he suffered through multiple surgeries and infections and endless hours of restraint in a plastic chair. Part III: Pepper Goes to Washington. And for what?

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Animal Person

OCTOBER 26, 2009

He always refers to himself and his wife and his child as "vegetarian." But why does he say "vegetarian?" That bothers me, as there's a significant difference in motivation for vegans and vegetarians and he sounds like one, yet calls himself the other. You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer.

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Factory Farm Factory Farming Animal Vegan 100

Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 23, 2006

In his fresh and candid first post (available here ), Jonathan admitted that he is struggling with the issue of ethical vegetarianism. He clearly thinks that it is wrong to cause animals to suffer unnecessarily, but he appears to be somewhat ambivalent about killing animals (provided the killing is carried out humanely).

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