colon cancer

[rhaazz]

I'm happy doing the LC thing. I'm an ethical vegetarian and preached to all who would let me -- for years -- that a diet full animal fat is bad for you, as well as unethical (in terms of our duties to animals and the planet).

Well, check out the surprises that life had in store for me. Now that I'm eating tons of animal fat in the form of cheese, mayonnaise, butter, and eggs, I'm losing weight, my cholesterol is down, my fingernails are healthy & strong for the first time in years, my hair is thicker, I have more sustained energy . . . . etc.

I buy all my animal products from humane and organic producers so I don't feel TOO bad about it.

But I had one concern. Diverticulitis runs in my family and I'm worried about colon cancer.

When I was eating a high carb diet, I would poop about three times a day (no kidding), and was sure that I would never develop colon cancer.

Now that I poop maybe once every other day, I'm worried.

Thoughts?

[Dean4Prez]

How many vegetables are you eating per day? Are you still in Induction and getting just three cups?

[gotbeer]

Three times a day? Wow.

Such frequent movements often indicate (or foreshadow) Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) or Ulcerative Colitis (UC) - both of which are associated with a hightened risk of cancer.

Low carb diets often help with these diseases (something to which I can attest to personally in the case of UC).

[Lisa N]

Well...first of all, there is no direct link between how many times a day you move your bowels and colon cancer. Since the bulk in your diet has decreased, it's only natural that the amount of fecal matter to be eliminated would also decrease. As you move through the different phases of low carb towards maintainance, you should be gradually increasing your daily carb allowance and using mostly veggies and some fruits as well as nuts and seeds to achieve that increase. By the time that you get to maintainance, you may be eating more veggies (and a greater variety of them) than you ever have in your life along with some fruits and whole grains as well.
Recent studies have shown that there is no direct link between the consumption of animal proteins and colon cancer and as for the diverticulitis, it's more likely to be aggravated by grains than beef. Same goes for IBS.

Edited to add: I moved this post to the General Health forum in hopes that more people would see it and be able to add their knowledge and experience to the topic. :)

[rhaazz]

Thanks for the replies!

I thought though that colon cancer was caused by the very slow movement of animal protein through the digestive tract? Animal protein takes so long to digest, that it rots in there for days, becoming toxic. Vegetable matter, by contrast, moves quickly and doesn't have the chance to become so toxic.

I also thought that there was a correlation between the length of an animal's intestines (short for meat eaters and long for primarily vegetable eaters) and what it should be eating. Since we have very long intestines, we should be eating mostly vegtable matter.

I agree, you know, this concern will probably resolve itself once I reach my goal weight and increase the number of veggies in my diet.

[gotbeer]

Those arguments (food digestion speed, “rotting”, and intestine length) are propounded and spread by the literature of the Hare Krishna’s – a strongly vegetarian-oriented faith. This fact doesn’t make the arguments wrong in and of itself, but the actual scientific foundation for the arguments is lacking.

First, they assume that creatures are either plant eaters or flesh eaters. Humans, apes and many other animals are omnivores – we can and do eat both plants and animals.

Second, both plant and animal tissues are digested just fine in the intestines of omnivores (and rot rather nicely outside of it). Their use of the term “rot” is a scare-word, designed to elicit an emotional response, not a scientific one.

Third, meat doesn’t linger in the intestines for days nor become toxic any more than vegetable matter does. One can get food poisoning from contaminated vegetables as well as meats. The only “linger” exception occurs in those prone to constipation – and if you are getting enough fiber, the “lingering” disappears.

Obesity is a major threat – for cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, etc. The question for me becomes one of the balancing of risks – even if meat bumps up the colon cancer risk, to me, the decline of the other risks does more to offset other risks. Interestingly, studies that have shown increased colon cancer for meat-eaters show little difference in mortality, suggesting that the meat-related cancers are more benign and treatable than other types.

Also, there is a quality of life issue here as well – getting and being thinner is improving my life in many ways. If it came down to it, I’d rather have 20 more good years than 30 more miserable ones.

[rhaazz]

I'm a vegetarian, and not a "Hare Krishna." Don't lump all vegetarians into some fruity cult.

There are many good reasons not to eat meat.

1. Eating meat means that you are cruel to animals. I wouldn't kick my dog, and for the very same reason, would not eat an animal (unless I had absolutely no alternative). But many people who like to think of themselves as kind are perfectly willing to have animals kept in crowded and inhumane conditions, then slaughtered, so that they can eat them.

2. Eating meat means that you are harming the planet and its people. It takes more than a 100 gallos of water to produce a pound of animal protein, and about 1/5 that to produce a pound of vegetable protein. It also takes more fuel, more pesticide, more fertilizer, more land. When the majority of the world's population is starving, it makes no sense to devote most of arable land to the production of grain that will be fed to animals that will -- very, very inefficiently -- go to feed a tiny fraction of the world's wealthiest and most privileged people. It's disgusting and morally wrong.

3. Eating meat is irrational. People who eat meat say "they're just animals," or "they can't speak," or "they can't think." So? The issue is, "Can they suffer?" When it comes to inflicting pain on another living being, the only considerations should be, 1. Can this being feel pain -- i.e., does it have a central nervous system? and 2. Can this pain possibly be avoided?

Many many people are vegetarians because they want to live a life that is as free of violence and cruelty as is possible. And yes, I understand that it is NOT possible to live COMPLETELY free from inflicting violence and cruelty on other living beings. And yes, I understand that there are OTHER ways of reducing the amount of violence and cruelty in the world, and that vegetarianism is not the only way. Please don't oversimplify what I am saying here. All I am saying is that vegetarianism is a rational, pragmatic (and not perfect) way to try to live in a humane and responsible way.

[gotbeer]

"Fruity cult"? Isn't that a bit abusive towards that gentle, veggie faith? Yours are violent and cruel words, I think. Are you sure about those plants you've been eating?

If I were you, I'd be nicer to those fellow travelers who espouse the same ideology as you - indeed, they published it years ago in almost exactly the same word-for-word treatment as your earlier post.

Personally, I love the Hare Krishna's. Their food is great (if too carby), their worship and artwork are colorful, and their devotion seems genuine. They are no more fruity than any other religion.

My point was, their viewpoint (and your arguments) come more from religious inspiration than scientific rigor.

1. Eating veggies means that you are cruel to plants. At least the animals can cry out and run away - plants suffer in silence. People who think of themselves as kind will still happily rip a defenseless carrot from the arms of its warm Mother Earth - or worse, pay for others to do it for them.

2. Eating plants means that you are harming the planet and its peoples. Agricultural land practices - plowing, fertilizing, and using pesticides - kill far more creatures than living off free-range grazing animals.

3. Eating meat is rational - indeed, recent studies show it IMPROVES brain function as well as improving physical health.

Despite these shortcomings, I really don't mind vegetarians at all - in fact, every person I can convert to vegetarianism means more meat is left for me!

[rhaazz]

Wow.

I am really, realy offended by your inaccurate and careless spouting of preconceived notions about me and my "fellow travelers."

You did not even bother to read what I said and yet you feel qualified to tell me why I am a vegetarian and what's wrong with my views.

OK, actually, I admit, know very little about the Hare Krishnas. What I do know about them is not very positive -- they do seem like a cult to me. I have read accounts of people who have left the Hare Krishnas and felt that they had been brainwashed and exploited. But I am willing to be corrected on that.

But as for telling me that I have no right to have an opinion that others might not agree with -- Did you even bother to read my post? I did not say I was -- or that vegetarianism is - perfect. I did not say that vegetarians never got irritated, or espoused controversial views.

It was not inconsistent with my position to call Hare Krishnas a cult, and had you bothered to read my post you would have understood that. I was saying that vegetarianism is consistent with an ATTEMPT -- again, did you catch that? -- ATTEMPT -- to live a less violent and cruel life.

As for kindness to my "fellow travelers" -- Excuse me?

You obviously think there are about 50 vegetarians in this world and we can all be lumped into one little group and we all think the same.

Please trust me when I tell you, YOU COULD NOT BE MORE WRONG.

There are millions of people all over the world who practice vegetarianism for so many different reasons that it would be IMPOSSIBLE for me to agree with all of them on every issue.

Again, since you seem not to be a very careful reader, let me reiterate: I cannot possibly be expected to agree with every living vegetarian on the planet about every issuse.

And no, I am not "religiously" inspired.

You have so many misconspetions that it is really hard to address them all.

As for religious inspiration -- Let me be CLEAR here:

I do not believe in God,

or any religious system,

and don't tell me I do when you know virtually nothing about me.

I was inspired to become a vegetarian by a Moral Philosophy course I took in college. OK? Want proof? Want the phone number of my philosophy professor? Want the titles of the books I read?

Try reading Pater Singer's "Animal Liberation" if you want to understand my motivations for becoming a vegetarian. Otherwise, please, please, don't tell me who I am or why I do what I do -- especially when you don't even bother to read my posts -- the ONLY source of information about me that you have.

Intellectual rigor -- NOT RELIGIOUS BELIEFS -- inspired me to become a vegetarian.

OK, as for cruelty to plants.

Let me reiterate:

question one is,

CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEMS?

and question two is,

AVOIDABLE PAIN?

Remember? When the question of cruelty comes up, you must ask yourself two questions,

First, "Does this creature have the capacity to feel pain?"

Second, "Is this pain avoidable?"

To adddress your (almost certainly sarcastic and mocking) "concerns":

1. PLANTS ALMOST CERTAINLY DO NOT FEEL PAIN AS THEY LACK CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEMS.

2. BUT, FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT, LET US ASSUME THEY FEEL PAIN.

IF THEY DO FEEL PAIN, IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO AVOID INFLICTING IT ON THEM WITHOUT DYING OURSELVES BECAUSE THERE WOULD BE NOTHING LEFT TO EAT AT ALL.

THEREFORE THE "PAIN" IF ANY TO ANIMALS IS NOT AVOIDABLE WITHOUT DYING OURSELVES.

MY GOAL -- REMEMBER? -- IS TO AVOID INFLICTING UNNECESSARY PAIN WHILE REMAINING ALIVE MYSELF. AS I SAID, I WOULD EAT AN ANIMAL IF THERE WERE NO ALTERNATIVE BUT EATING MEAT OR DYING.

3. IF YOU TRULY WISH TO REDUCE UNNECESSARY DEATHS OF PLANTS, THEN BECOME A VEGETARIAN. PRESENTLY YOU ARE CAUSING THE UNNECESSARY DEATHS OF MILLIONS MORE PLANTS BY EATING MEAT -- FED ON PLANTS -- THAN YOU WOULD BY SIMPLY EATING THE PLANTS THEMSELVES.

If you had read my post you would have understood that.

Good luck to you. I hope that someday you learn the meaning of the phrase "intellectual rigor."

[gotbeer]

No need to shout, dear. I heard you; I just didn't believe you were correct.

I've read your posts - indeed, I responded to them, point by point, 1-2-3. Just because I read your posts doesn't mean I have to agree with you - do you believe everything that you read? Disagreement is a natural part of any rational, truth-seeking process - a good thing. I'm surprised I have to explain that to a lawyer.

Quote: "I am really, realy offended by your inaccurate and careless spouting of preconceived notions about me and my 'fellow travelers.'"

The offending words in question were mostly yours. I tweaked them slightly, of course, to show you how they applied to your own position. For example, your "preconceived notion" was that "many people who like to think of themselves as kind are perfectly willing to have animals kept in crowded and inhumane conditions, then slaughtered, so that they can eat them." My reply, that plant-eaters did the same to defenseless plants, merely echoed (and parodied) your own prejudices.

Quote: "But as for telling me that I have no right to have an opinion that others might not agree with ..."

Really? Where did I say or even imply that?

I disagree with your opinions, yes, but I never said you didn't have the inalienable personal right to any errant idea you may fancy.

Quote: "I was saying that vegetarianism is consistent with an ATTEMPT -- again, did you catch that? -- ATTEMPT -- to live a less violent and cruel life. "

Yes dear, I heard. While "attempting" is admirable, actually succeeding in one's attempts is better. Claiming a feeble moral justification despite one's admitted moral failings just doesn't sound flattering to one's position, don't you think? It sounds to me like a defense of "well, yes, Your Honor, I did shoot him, but it is okay, because I really didn't like the fact that I did."

Quote: "You obviously think there are about 50 vegetarians in this world and we can all be lumped into one little group and we all think the same.."

Actually, I think there are 0 actual vegetarians, since all vegetables contain microscopic animals that one cannot avoid ingesting. Seriously, though - you had no hesitation adopting yours as a nominal vegetarian position - why are you so enraged and offended when someone else dares to question the assumptions behind it? After all, if you don't want to defend a vegetarian position you can always stop replying to my posts.

Quote: 'First, "Does this creature have the capacity to feel pain?"'

How carno-centric of you to assume that central nervous system pain is the only meaningful source of suffering. Left without water in the sun, for example, plants suffer and die. Experiments have shown that stressed plants communicate that stress with each other via chemical messengers passed back and forth between in their root systems. Hell, even non-biological legal fictions like "corporations" can suffer pain in the form of "growing pains", "economic pain", and "regulatory pain".

Quote: 'Second, "Is this pain avoidable?"'

In the case of plants - no, or at least, not yet: we don't yet know enough about botanical pain (or economic pain, for that matter) to relieve the sufferings of those mercilessly harvested for food (or corporate greed). In the case of large animals, however, we could relieve their suffering if we wanted to - anesthetic technology is easily advanced enough to curtail central nervous system pain during animal harvest. At present, most food animals have quick deaths with minimal pain - and given that I have to die, too, someday, that is how I'd want to go. (Being shot post-coitus by a 21-year-old girlfriend's jealous husband would be ideal).

Quote: 3. "If you truly wish to reduce unnecessary death of plants, then become a vegetarian..." [to avoid the additional deaths of plants fed to meat animals].

I'm not sure why you've switched from "pain" to "death" as the thing to be avoided - they are not at all the same, after all - but since you brought it up, let's take a moment to consider avoiding death instead of avoiding pain as the superior moral good. Grazing animals typically don't KILL the plants they eat - they are more like lawn mowers, trimming the leaves back without causing mortal suffering. For plants, this might be painful, but it also might be no worse than trimming hair or shedding skin cells. Most agriculture practices, by contrast, kill the plants wholesale during harvest or ingestion - the carrot dies bite-by-bite between your molars.

As an afterthought...

Here's a link to a Hare Krishna-run vegetarian website: http://society.krishna.org/Articles/2002/05/035.html . The issues raised and words used are eerily similar to yours, even if there is no actual link between them and you. As an atheist myself, I guess I'd be really disturbed and upset if some religion echoed my thoughts so closely, too.

[rhaazz]

There very well may be some overlap between the reasons compelling Hare Krishnas and the reasons that other ethical vegetarians choose not to eat meat.

I really don't know and I don't care.

You're the one who brought up the Hare Krishnas, with your notion that my vegetarianism is provoked by "religious" impulses.

I would appreciate it if you would have the courtesy and honesty to admit that you were wrong about that notion.

The one relevant thing you said about the Hare Krishnas is that I don't know enough about them to dismiss them as a "fruity cult."

I agree. That was an ill-considered remark. I really do not have enough information about that group to take a position on them.

You see, I do try to acknowledge areas in which I am relatively ignorant, and I do try to admit that there are things I do not know.

I wish you would do the same.

You clearly have not read any animal rights philosophers and, just as I am in no position to debate the merits of the Hare Krishnas, you are in no position to debate ethical vegetarianism until you are better educated.

As for your analogy about "It's ok that I shot him, you honor, because I felt bad about it afterwards" --- I honestly do not see what point you're trying to make here.

It's not that I DISAGREE with your point. It's that I have utterly no idea what it is.

Thatanalogy seems to have something with my point that most nonvegetarians -- just as you do here -- try to attack vegetarianism by pointing the finger at a given vegetarian and saying "Look at this person's moral failings! Aha! See, I can dismiss vegetarianism!" (For example, your position in an earlier post was that if I am opposed to cruelty I should not scoff nastily at Hare Krishnas.)

You're probably right. I shouldn't scoff nastily at Hare Krishnas -- or at you, for that matter.

I just don't see what my moral failings have to do with vegetariansim.

Ethcal vegetariansim was the topic under discussion.

I believe that the merits or otherwise of ethical vegetarianism have very little to do with me.

Consider this: Martin Luther King Jr was an imperfect eprson. He was, for example, terrible womanizer, something many would consider a moral failing because it is likely to inflict pain on those close to the womanizer.

Yet many of his positions about civil rights were highly ethical.

It would be just plain stupid to reject civil rights on the grounds that some of its advocates were not completely kind in all their actions.

Similarly, it would be just plain stupid to reject ethical vegetarianism because some of its advocates are not completely kind in all their actions.

I don't know if this is what you were saying or thinking when you pointed out my failings, but if it was, it was not relevantto the question of the ethics of vegetarianism.

The issue is ethical vegetarianism, not me.

I certainly don't reject the idea that we should all STRIVE to be ethical and kind in all our actions.

(Was this the point you were trying to make in the "it doesn't matter that I shot him You Honor because I feel bad about it" analogy?)

Good lord. If that what you think I'm saying -- STOP! It's NOT!

Of course I am a seriously flawed person -- and so are you.

Of course, we should strive to be ethical and kind in all our actions. We will fail but we should try.

I was merely pointing out that if you are attacking ethical vegetarianism because vegetarians are not unimpeachably ethical in all their acts, you are making no sense.

Also, I am not saying that vegetarianism is the only way to be a kind person or help the planet.

Maybe you are right about free range cattle. Maybe that is a humane and ecologically sound option.

I really don't know, because I have not studied it, and do not choose to debate issues that I have not studied.

As for your position that plants "suffer." Perhaps they do. Again, I do not know because I have not seen the studies that prove this. What you say about "sending stress signals" to other plants does not sound like pain as I know it.

1. Physical pain, as I experience it, depends on a central nervous system.

2. I know that physical pain, as I experience it, can be horrible, and I know that it is wrong for others to inflict physical pain on me without my consent or any benefit to me.

3. I also know that I wish to avoid death for as long as possible. I believe that it would be wrong for another to inflict death on me without my consent.

4. I believe that most human beings share my feelings about unnecessary pain and death.

5. Therefore, I believe it is unethical to inflict unnecessary pain or death, generally speaking, on other human beings, because they usually do not consent to it.

[It would not, for example, necessarily be unethical to inflict pain on a human being who needed some medical procedure involving unavoidable pain and who consented to it; not would it necessarily be unethical to inflict pain on a person who was seeking pain for masochistic purposes and who consented to the pain. Similarly, it would not necessarily be unethical to assist in the suicide of a person who had good reasons to want to die and who consented to the activity.]

Generally speaking, however, it is unethical to inflict pain or death on human beings who wish to avoid pain and death, do not consent, and do not experience any benefit from their own pain or death.

Next,

1. I also believe that other non human beings possessed of a central nervous system have very much the same experience of pain that I do.

2. I also believe that they also seek to avoid death for as long as possible.

3. I believe that in the desire to avoid pain and death so far as possible, nonhuman animals are very similar to human animals.

4. I believe that this similarity between human and nonhuman animals is significant.

5. I believe that if it is unethical for me to inflict unnecessary physical pain or death on another human being without that person's consent, it is also unethical for me to inflict pain or death on a nonhuman animal without that animal's consent.

The reason is, there is no significant difference between the animal's basic desire to avoid pain and death and my desire to avoid pain and death.

There are many differences between human and nonhuman animals, but in this regard, the desire to avoid pain and death, I am convinced that there are no significant differences.

I have several important assumptions here:

1. Assumption number one:

I am assuming that animals do not consent to the pain or death they experience when we keep them in inhumane conditions and slaughter them.

[However, it may be ethical under some conditions to kill animals. I recently read an interesting book about an Aboriginal people who DO ask for animals' consent before eating them. This people lives in near-starvation and total poverty and truly eat barely enough to survive. They have no agriculture and simply wander. They never know where their next meal is coming from, Their way of life does not strike me as unethical, because -- whether or not the animals truly consent -- this people is wholly committed to living at peace and in harmony with their environment and each other. This is not my belief system, however. For the world in which I live, I believe that vegetarianism make more sense.

Similarly, I believe some medical and scientific research on animals may be necessary. I would hope that animal researchers would do their best to treat the animals humanely.]

2. Assumption number two:

I am assuming that if plants experience stress, it is not pain as I know it, and that the moral implications for me of plant stress are not the same as the moral implications of animal stress.

I am relatively confident that plant "stress" is not suffering as I know it because (1) plants lack a central nervous system similar to my own and (2) the pain response in human beings and animals serves an evolutionary purpose: it incites them to flee from attackers, but generally cannot serve such a purpose in plants that cannot flee predators.

If anything, plants BENEFIT from those that eat them:for many plants, being eaten is crucial to their propagation -- it's how they spread their seeds.

3. Assumption number three:

The significant differences between human and nonhuman animals do not obliterate the important similarities between their desires to avoid pain and death.

Just as the fact that the person sitting next to me may have gifts that are more valuable to the world than mine does not give that person the right to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on me,

so it is also true that my different abilities do not give me the right to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals.

A being's capacity to make the world a better place is not relevant to that being's basic rights to be free from unnecesary pain or death.

4. Assumption number four:

I do not believe that killing an animal is as wrong as killing a human being.

5.

Also, I am not saying that vegetarianism is the only -- or even one of the best -- ways to be a good and nonviolent person.

For example, I sometimes think that driving a car every day and living a life rich in consumer good is more violent and more morally wrong than eating meat. (If I really have enough money to go to New York for a weekend then why don't I have enough money to donate the same sumto the homeless? If I can buy season tickets to the opera why am I not supporting Oxfam? The way I am consuming a disproportionate share of this world's wealth is morally indefenisble and probably worse than eating meat.)

I'm not trying to shift the debate back to me and whether I am a good person. Rather, I'm saying, vegetarianism isn't the end of the story.

However, I am completely convinced that NOT killing beings fully as capable as ourselves of desiring life and freedom from pain is better than killing them.

[Elihnig]

Here are some links about the myths of vegetarianism.

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/vegetarian.html

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/carn_herb_comparison.html

You have the right to eat as you wish, but be informed.

Now that I'm eating tons of animal fat in the form of cheese, mayonnaise, butter, and eggs, I'm losing weight, my cholesterol is down, my fingernails are healthy & strong for the first time in years, my hair is thicker, I have more sustained energy . . . . etc.

Your body seems to agree with what you are doing for it.

Beth

[gymeejet]

hi raz,
see why i did not want to get into the meat-eating discussion on my thread ? i know where it digresses. LOL.

we should not kill animals. there are no qualifications. each animal has a right to its life, irregardless of its ability to make the world a better place. but boy, if that were the qualification, then we should obliterate humans completely. we do not make this world a better place.

anyone who thinks that humans in someway are needed for the survival/betterment of the earth, are really off their rockers. we are about the only species on the earth that continually disrupts the ecology of the planet.

some of us may indeed make the world nicer for humans, but certainly not for the earth. and then, only for a certain grouping of other humans. mostly what we do, is do things for the betterment of ourselves, with little regard for others. that would be much more indicative of human behavior.

if some alien life form, that found us tasty, ever inhabited the earth, people would very quickly change their minds. but it is my belief that any society that ever developed enough for interstellar travel, would have also developed the wisdom not to hurt other beings. but perhaps i am too optimistic about that one.

[rhaazz]

OK, thanks for the links.

I'm willing to think that the health benefits of vegetarianism mayhave been exaggerated.

But I will never agree with anyone who thinks there's no moral value in avoiding inflicting unnecessary pain or death on living beings that wish to avoid unnecessary pain and death just as much as we do.

[rhaazz]

Elihnig: this part of one of those posts is just WRONG: "A question frequently posed by vegetarians is: how can you justify killing an innocent animal for food? This question may seem difficult to answer at first but really it is not. Would it be reasonable to ask a lion to justify his killing of an innocent gazelle? Of course not: it is natural for the lion to kill the gazelle and that is justification enough. And what of a gazelle's right not to be eaten? Put this way, you can see that such questions are really meaningless. The same is true for us, for we are not a vegetarian species. "

The lion has no choice but to eat a gazelle.

We have a choice.

It's this simple:

Imagine a person driving down a road at night. A deer is caught in his headlights, stunned, frozen.

He's driving a big huge SUV.

He COULD choose to wait for the deer to come to its senses and bound off into the forest. But he likes the taste of venison so he plows the deer down, takes it home, butchers it, and eats it.

It is absolutely CLEAR to me that he made the wrong choice. Clearly the more moral choice would be to wait a few moments, allow the deer to go off and live its life, and then go home and eat some tofu.

However, most meat eaters don't see this choice with any moral clarity because they do not actually SEE the animal suffer and die. Since they don't see it, they don't think about it.

And yes, there are some who actually do kill their own meat. Yuck.

[rhaazz]

Yes, gymeejet, I agree:

human beings -- as a group -- behave as though every other living organism on the planet were put here for us to us, abuse, and destroy at our whim. That's just wrong.

I don't however think that meat eating is wrong for ALL human beings.

Just as the lion must eat the gazelle, certain cultures -- hunter-gatherers living at subsistence level -- must eat meat.

But then, those ancient hunter-gatherer cultures are not destroying the planet in all the ways you mention.

[gymeejet]

hi raz,
in regards to bowel movements, this is the most common types of problems i see, when helping people - digestion/elimination problems.

i go #2 several times a day, but they are not huge stools. and it takes me longer to wipe than it does to go. people sitting there reading the newspaper have a problem.

ideally, we want fast digestion systems, so nutrients get in, and waste gets out quickly. but it also behooves us to have slow metabolisms. all these diet pills that basically speed up the metabolism in one way or the other, ARE BAD NEWS.

what we want to strive for are slow, relaxed, basal metabolisms. we do not want our bodies working hard, when we are at rest. but when we want to go, the energy of a turbocharger. sort of like the big guy with the muscles, but a jovial personality, UNTIL YOU GET HIM MAD - LOL.

[rhaazz]

gymeejet, I thought that more muscle mass gave you a faster metabolism? Isn't more muscle mass a good thing?

[gymeejet]

adding muscle does allow us to burn more calories, and to a certain extent, help us to keep fat off.

we are all born to have certain hormone levels. our bodies will always attempt to adjust to these hormone levels. some of these hormone levels are the cause for each of us having so many body fat cells, and it is the number of fat cells that dictate our body's preferred body fat percentage.

this is why liposuction actually does work, because it eliminates some fat cells, thereby actually lowering the body's set point.

each of us is only gonna have so much muscle, mostly determined by our testosterone levels. and i do believe it is a good idea for us to have as much muscle as our body naturally allows.

but within those limits, we are better off with slowed down metabolisms. we age slower, we have less anxieties about getting older, and all the things that go along with it.

if someone is carrying around more fat than what is ideal for that person, speeding up the metabolism is not the answer, for the answer to all problems is to fix the problem at the source, which is what medicine almost never does. most pills that one takes, work by shutting down some enzyme that may have gone out of kilter, but it does not address the reason why it went out of kilter in the first place, which means that because the real problem was never solved, it still exists to create other problems for us in the future.

[gymeejet]

in fact, the biggest thing i preach is STAY IN BALANCE, so that your body can work as it was designed.

[Bon]

rhaazz--
I have had diverticulosis since at least 1995. Had part of my colon removed in 2001. It's a disease that used to affect only the elderly, but is showing up in many folks in their 30s. This is due to our poor diet -- especially not enough fiber -- and those nasty carbs contribute to the problem.

If this runs in your family (it's not hereditary, but bad eating habits are), you may want to use preventative measures with this WOE. Every day I take metamucil and one colace pill. Colace (or the cheaper generic) is a stool softener, and will keep stool soft so it moves through the intestine easily. Drink LOTS of water. Flax oil is excellent, also.

I have been on Atkins since 6/1/03, have lost 22 lbs., and mostly "go" once a day, if not more. Everyone should have a "movement" daily. If they aren't, they're not ridding themselves of toxins and place undue pressure on their colon. If you are worried that you're not going often enough, taking a stool softener will help move things along -- and it's not habit forming like laxatives, so you can take it daily.

I'm not a doctor, but I am living with this disease and successfully low-carbing. I hope my two cents helped a bit.

[Mara]

Ok, I normally don't get involved in these debates, as much as I enjoy reading them, but this one sucked me in --

Imagine a person driving down a road at night. A deer is caught in his headlights, stunned, frozen.

He's driving a big huge SUV.

He COULD choose to wait for the deer to come to its senses and bound off into the forest. But he likes the taste of venison so he plows the deer down, takes it home, butchers it, and eats it.


First of all, this analogy is ludicrous, flat-out. Whatever moral issues you may have with the "superiority" of vegetarianism, I'm not sure there's anyone in the world stupid enough to take the $5000+ damage to his SUV, not to mention the potential risk of losing his life because he "likes the taste of venison." I mean, come on - while this analogy might appeal to you on an emotional level, and fill you with a righteous fervor of the evil abuses of "meat-eaters", it doesn't hold water as a real-life situation. I think most "meat-eaters" wouldn't see it as a moral choice for the simple fact that it's not one. But, to continue with your analogy, it's also hard to think that the fictional "guy" in your example wouldn't see the animal "suffer and die", after crawling out of his wrecked SUV and extricating the wounded, thrashing animal from wherever it ended up, putting it out of its agony and throwing it in the back to take home.

Secondly,
The lion has no choice but to eat a gazelle.

We have a choice.


this doesn't hold water either. Our evolutionary and archeological history make it quite clear that without consumption of animal tissues, we would have never progressed to the level of agriculture in the first place. (And no, please do not take this as an invitation to argue on the merits of creationism - that's been covered quite thoroughly on another thread.) Alright you may say, that might have been true for our ancestors, but not now, when so many non-animal protein sources are available. Well, you yourself in this very thread mentioned the benefits to your health that you've seen after adding animal proteins and fats back into your dietary regime. Now that I'm eating tons of animal fat in the form of cheese, mayonnaise, butter, and eggs, I'm losing weight, my cholesterol is down, my fingernails are healthy & strong for the first time in years, my hair is thicker, I have more sustained energy . . . . etc. Animals must be sustained and raised in an orderly fashion to produce these things. In other words, there are still resources being devoted to their care, feed, and upkeep, the same as if these animals were being raised strictly for their own meat. Also, when the animals reach the end of their productive life, after having spent so many resources in the animal's production, shouldn't we, morally, utilize said animal to its fullest?

Finally, I'd like to address the hunting issue. You said:

And yes, there are some who actually do kill their own meat. Yuck.

Is it really moral to stand by and watch the animal suffer a slow starvation due to overpopulation run out of control? Deer are quite capable of surviving in neighborhoods where any chance of natural predation has been reduced to 0%. Instead, they run out into the streets, and are struck quite accidentally by motorists and left to die slowly on the side of the road. Or, as I mentioned earlier, slowly starve to death in the winter when the available food can't support the population. Hunting not only prevents the population from reaching such dire straights, it allows for the "harvest" of animal proteins (with a better essential fatty acid profile, no less) without the expenditure of resources that giant factory farms (whether animal or vegetable in nature) require. It also enables me to raise my own fruits and vegetables in my backyard, using composting to enrich my earth by re-using resources, instead of stripping it, requiring a high expenditure of resources, as well as the injection of artificial chemicals in the forms of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides as mass agriculture does. And finally, to interject my own personal feelings here, from a cycle-of-life, respect for animals position, giving thanks to the spirit of the animal that died so that I can be sustained is a daily part of my life.

I'm not sure how a question about colon cancer ended up in a vegetarian debate, but I think while your intentions are admirable, and respect your right to choose, "preaching" vegetarianism as the moral alternative doesn't stand up under scrutiny to me.

Just my 2 cents...now it's back to lurking for me! :roll:

[rhaazz]

Wow, Bon, that was great! You're really helpful! Thanks.

[Quinadal]

Personally, I think all total vegetarians are fruitcakes that don't have a clue to reality. People were made to eat meat and plants. Anyone that raises their kids on a veggie.vegan diet needs to have those kids taken from them as child abusers.

[rhaazz]

Mara, you missed the point of my analogy by focussing on irrelevant details. It doesn't matter whether there's an SUV instead of a Humvee, or a deer instead of a fox, or it's nighttime instead of daytime, or it's a man instead of a woman.

The only point I am making is that unnecessary cruelty to animals, and killing of animals, should be avoided.

If you think about it, you yourself almost certainly practice this principle every single time you treat any animal humanely. It's intuitive for most people that it is more ethical to avoid cruelty to animals.

Of course, if you're a psychopath who likes to go around torturing animals, then everything I've just said is wasted on you.

As far as the necessity of eating animal tissues -- this is clearly not the case as there are any number of extremely healthy vegetarians running around and liing long healthy productive lives.

As far as the necessity of eating animal tissues prior to the development of agriculture -- I DID say that for ancient hunter-gatherer cultures meat eating is a necessity.

So when I said "we have a choice," I was referring to the "we" who live in a modern industrialized society.

Clearly, we DO have a choice.

I have exercised that choice.

So, yes, that statement DOES "hold water."

And as for the health benefits of ANIMAL proteins -- one can get these from humanely farmed eggs and dairy.

Obviously, there is No need to KILL anything.

As far as the overpopulation of deer, etc. -- hunting is not the solution. Animals in the wild DO regulate their own populations in lean years by having fewer offspring.

As far as farm animals now in existence -- it is clear that even if my wildest dreams come true and the world adopts a vegetarian diet, this process will happen very gradually, over hundred of years. The number of animals in farm production will gradually decline.

When animals die, of natural causes, of course, do whatever you wish with their dead bodies. Just don't inflict unnecessary suffering or pain on them.

[gotbeer]

Oh, cool! We made it to the war zone!! :yay:

The application of moral precepts to the food chain is just not as clear-cut and "eating A is good" and "eating B is bad".

The food chain predates the development of human morality by 3 billion years at least. It developed in amorality and continues that way.

Observe the food chain and this is what you see:

Some animals eat living plants.
Some animals kill and eat other living animals.
Some plants eat other living plants (Mistletoe, for example).
Some plants kill and eat living animals (the Venus flytrap, for example).

What can we conclude from this? Is the meat-eating Venus Flytrap less moral than the plant-eating Mistletoe? The question is silly because human moral standards are irrelevent to the food chain.

The morality of the food chain seems to be this:

1. Every living thing is food for something else.
2. Eat or be eaten.
3. Don't waste your food.

Obey the morality of the food chain and you, your progeny, and your species are rewarded with an improved chance of survival.

Ignore it, and you, you progeny, and your species will become extinct pretty quickly.

In the face of these realities, the high-minded ideals of "avoiding killing" and "minimizing pain" become unaffordable luxuries.

If we are "destroying the planet" it is only because we have done a masterful job of harnessing the food chain to our own benefit. We are still not as successful as insects and fungus but we're making progress.

***
On the question of feelings: I love animals. I love them to the point that I am an animal rescue volunteer. I presently have 12 cats living in my house - 4 of my own, and 8 as temporary fosters awaiting placement in good homes. Over the years my details records indicate that 231 cats have passed through my doors. 206 were eventually adopted elsewhere, 2 disappeared after a burglary, and 11 died of natural causes.

Cats are obligate carnivores - they must eat lots of meat to survive. I could have saved thousands of other animals by just allowing area animal shelters to kill the 231 cats I rescued. By the convoluted "morality" of animal rights, would this slaughter have been justified?

***
I'll try to explain my point of: "It's ok that I shot him, you honor, because I felt bad about it afterwards". (This was a part of my reponse to your explanation of vegetarianism: "I was saying that vegetarianism is consistent with an ATTEMPT -- again, did you catch that? -- ATTEMPT -- to live a less violent and cruel life. ")

The point is this: attempting to avoid evil, and failing, is not a moral good. If an alternative to vegetarianism is more efficient in avoiding evil (by being less cruel), then it is morally superior to vegetarianism. Meat-eating is such an alternative:

Eating 1-2 pounds of beef a day, I could live for over a year on the death of just one big grazing cow.

Eating 1-2 pounds of grain a day for a year involves: clearing an acre of land (countless deaths of plants, mice, voles, birds, etc), fertilizing that land (countless deaths of fish from the run-off), spraying pesticides (killing the countless insects, and more birds and mice), harvesting the grain (by uprooting and killing the plants), then grinding up the grain (killing it, too).

The score:

Meat-eating: 1 death (the cow) per year per eater.
Vegetarianism: at least 1 million deaths (both plants and animals) per year per eater.

The morally superior victor at minimizing deaths:

Meat-eating, by a factor of about 1 to 1,000,000.

[rhaazz]

Quiadal, you're ill informed. But I am not going to debate the [well-documented] health benefits of a vegetarian diet -- except to say THERE IS NO NUTRIENT IN MEAT THAT CANNOT BE DERIVED FROM EGGS AND DAIRY.

But health is NOT why I'm a vegetarian. I am a vegetarian because I do not want to go around killing sentient beings that wish to avoid death and pain.

Quinadal, you almost certainly also do not go around inflicting unnecessary pain on animals -- at least, the ones you can see. If you had a dog, you wouldn't go home and kick it, would you?

I'm simply pointing out that the same principle applies to animals that produce our meat.

[rhaazz]

gotbeer, the fact that something happens in nature doesn't make it RIGHT in human civilization.

There are animals that commit infanticide, murder, and rape -- these behaviors are "natural" and make sense, given their environment.

But obviously those same behaviors are immoral for human beings in this society (I am not going to comment about other societies that I do not know about).

I'm just curious, gotbeer, have you ever taken a moral philosophy class?

If you had, you would know that "natural = moral" is a widespread fallacy.

[tholian8]

I am a former vegetarian. I have also taken philosophy classes, although my opinions on meat eating are informed purely by my personal story. I would never tell anyone else what they should or should not eat, as I believe individual human bodies differ too widely for one dietary "prescription" to fit all...which goes for LC as well!

As an ovo-lacto vegetarian for nine years, I gained 25 pounds and my well-being deteriorated to the point where I was depressed and listless most of the time, and beset with all sorts of nagging aches and pains. I was constantly hungry and bad-tempered from wildly fluctuating blood sugar levels. Physically, I was miserable, and I felt totally out of control of my body.

I vegetarian-LC'ed for about one month in 1999, before giving up and putting meat back in my LC diet. I almost couldn't believe the difference in how I felt. My energy levels went up immensely. I no longer felt the constant hunger that I had even on LC before re-introducing meat. My aches and pains vanished literally overnight. I didn't like working with raw meat in my kitchen (still don't), and I really had to get used to eating meat again (I didn't keel over though). But despite my squeamishness, I could not and would not ignore the blatantly obvious benefits of including meat in my eating plan. Although I went off LC dieting after a few months, due to lack of support at home, I never went back to being a veggie. I just felt much, much better as an omnivore.

Believe me, I tried every vegetarian option I could think of to get my protein up without having to eat meat. And nothing worked as well, not by a long shot. The unpleasant truth is that, for whatever reason, eating meat appears to be GOOD FOR MY HEALTH. These days, my energy has returned to what it was in my pre-veg incarnation...small wonder, I observe wryly, since my diet has pretty much returned to what it was in those days, as well.

Now, in my opinion, there was one animal who was made to suffer greatly, perhaps even--in a sense--tortured, during my vegetarian period.

ME.

Am I not a sentient being who deserves to be relieved of pain? Or should I have stuck with the veggie diet? What would have been the morally correct thing for me to do?

Or in other words, how much diminution to the quality of my own life should I be required to accept, in the name of not causing pain to or killing animals?

Or, in perfectly plain English, how much should I be expected to martyr myself on behalf of livestock, in order to be a morally good person?

Emily

[gymeejet]

tholian,
the fact that you can afford a television has no bearing on whether i can get one. either i can afford it or not. the fact that you are having problems does not give you the right to inflict problems on someone else. each animal has a right to its own life. i am not only living, BUT THRIVING, without meat. i would suffice to say that there is no 1 food that is essential. i have heard tons of rationalizations from people who do not want to feel guilty when they eat meat, but the taking of a life is wrong. like i posted earlier, if all of a sudden some aliens more powerful than us appeared, you would change your tune pretty quickly. do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

[jeanne48]

Dear rhaaz and gotbeer,

Regarding the length of intestines for digesting vegetation vs. meat--if you watch National Geographic or other documentaries regarding animals, you will note that these documentaries say Gorillas have a "pot belly" to best digest their diet of vegetation and fruits. E'nuff said.

So rhaaz...I agree with you regarding the "intestines." If the Hare Krishnas agree with us, too, so be it.

gotbeer--I am surprised at you! I've been reading your posts and you sound very intelligent. Let's not defend this diet beyond reason--the diet works (even rhaaz says so) without any debate between vegetarians/animal lovers vs. meat lovers/plant humanitarians. We eat the meat that eats the plants, LOL. So, we'll get our grain one way or another. :lol: It's called the "food chain."

I am an animal lover and if I had to kill to eat (which my family had to do at one time in Alaska) I would probably starve. However, the meat is out there and hypocrite though I seem to be, I will eat it.

Y'all have a great day!

God bless,


Jeanne48

[Quinadal]

Quiadal, you're ill informed. But I am not going to debate the [well-documented] health benefits of a vegetarian diet --
You mean the birth defects that B12 deficiency causes? Show me ONE study that shows vegetarianism is healthy that the PCRM WASN'T involved in.

except to say THERE IS NO NUTRIENT IN MEAT THAT CANNOT BE DERIVED FROM EGGS AND DAIRY.
1 egg contains .5 mcg of b12, 1 cup milk contains .9 mcg.
3 oz of beef contains 2.1 and beef LIVER contains 60!
The RDA is 6.
Who eats 12 eggs or 6 cups of milk A DAY? You can ONLY get B12 from ANIMAL PRODUCTS!



Quinadal, you almost certainly also do not go around inflicting unnecessary pain on animals -- at least, the ones you can see. If you had a dog, you wouldn't go home and kick it, would you?

I'm simply pointing out that the same principle applies to animals that produce our meat.
Beef cattle are there for ONE REASON ONLY--FOOD. I'm not saying that they should abuse those cattle (I don't eat veal), but meat is necessary for good health. Doctors HATE vegetarians because they don't heal well and take longer to cure than meat eaters. I've talked to many doctors at work (I'm a nurse) and they all agree, they can pick out a vegetarian in a crowd, because they're pasty and have an unhealthy complexion.
I eat 1-2 lbs of meat a day and have perfect cholesterol, my diabetes is under control and am never sick. I tried going veggie a few years ago. I was ALWAYS tired and got sick constantly. My skin dried out and my hair was falling out. My TOM would skip several months at a time. None of this normalized until I went low carb.

[aimie]

well...when i started reading this debate i was not going to get into this but...

i in no way want to offend anyone or say that no one is allowed to thier own opinion or beliefs.


so... with that said here are my beliefs and some friendly suggestions, although i realize this is the war zone...so some will take this the way they want to, and be offended and thats okay too because you have the right to perceive things the way you want...

i agree that animal cruelty is a very bad thing. i agree if you feel good and you like veggies and want to eat that way to save animals lives thats great. i agree that slaughter houses are horrible.

i use to be a vegetarian.

i did not eat anything that pertained to animal. one day after a trip with our children and youth from church we stopped and got chiliburgers... the smell of them were so good i tore into them... and have ate meat ever since.

it is okay to kill animals to eat. if it is done right. usually it is not. i can not preach to anyone because i know that the pork, beef, and chicken i eat was possibly probabley brutely killed in a slaughter house. i still eat it and just do not think about it or try not to any way. i guess that is the way most of us think.

there is nothing wrong with saving lives and protecting our beloved animal friends, but God gave them to us to eat just like the plants, veggies, fruit. He did not say we had to eat animals.

i think if someone wants to spare life, pain and suffering great for them it is wonderful. a person like that must have some love in thier heart. goodness and self control is a part of Gods plan for our lives.

sorry for who ever wrote this one but...the posts i read where plants were compared to animals was rediculous... come on now adults.

i would usually never bring God into a conversation like this but... i am a christian and it saddens me to think some one would say they do not believe in God. my mother has made that statement before also. i am really sad for her.

please DO NOT get me wrong. it is your choice to believe in what you want to. i respect that. God gives us the right to do so. ( believe) The Bible says God gave us meat to eat... in the Bible meat was considered to be food, all food. "meat" and veggies and etc...

im not here to say any one is wrong in thier beliefs about anything mentioned here except for believing in God because He is real and some day we will see for ourselves.

the only reason i brought up God in this was because i read somewhere where some one did not believe. i just wanted to say think about that statement. quote:" i do not believe in God" because He is real.

im not here to attack you. please just think a little more about it.

when we seek God we will find the answers we are looking for.

rhaaz, i think you are a kind hearted person and it is great that you care for animals. i feel the same way you do about the slaughterers. i just cant believe that a person with such a big heart has no room for God. like i said it is you choice. i hope i have not offended you.

oh yes... if you feel that some veggie groups are cults that is your right and you should not have been attacked. i feel like some "christian" groups are cults in fact i know they are. but respect that they believe in what they believe in... just as i believe in God. but i guess that is why this is the war zone... so i guess i will wait to see how many attack me or my God. I have been convicted to present the good news to anyone willing to listen and if they turn away that is thier choice and if they say things about God they will have to answer to Him for that... i have done my part. (spreading the gospel) for God so loved the world. John 3:16.


ps:

about the bathroom thing. I use stool softner. i also do a colon cleansing every once in a while.

[gymeejet]

i am thriving without meat. also, has anyone heard of vitamin supplementation ? pretty easy to do. you can get the b-complex from non-animal sources.

http://www.vrg.org/nutrition/b12.htm#possible

A number of reliable vegan food sources for vitamin B12 are known. One brand of nutritional yeast, Red Star T-6635+, has been tested and shown to contain active vitamin B12. This brand of yeast is often labeled as Vegetar-ian Support Formula with or without T-6635+ in parentheses following this new name. It is a reliable source of vitamin B12. Nutritional yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is a food yeast, grown on a molasses solution, which comes as yellow flakes or powder. It has a cheesy taste. Nutritional yeast is different from brewer's yeast or torula yeast. It can often be used by those sensitive to other yeasts.

[Quinadal]

i am thriving without meat. also, has anyone heard of vitamin supplementation ? pretty easy to do. you can get the b-complex from non-animal sources.

http://www.vrg.org/nutrition/b12.htm#possible

A number of reliable vegan food sources for vitamin B12 are known. One brand of nutritional yeast, Red Star T-6635+, has been tested and shown to contain active vitamin B12. This brand of yeast is often labeled as Vegetar-ian Support Formula with or without T-6635+ in parentheses following this new name. It is a reliable source of vitamin B12. Nutritional yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is a food yeast, grown on a molasses solution, which comes as yellow flakes or powder. It has a cheesy taste. Nutritional yeast is different from brewer's yeast or torula yeast. It can often be used by those sensitive to other yeasts.
Why would you want to take supplements when you could eat real food?
I looked at nutritional yeast nutritional info. 2 TBS has 133% of the RDA, but it also has 7 g of carbs! hmmmm lets see....... 9 oz of meat= 105% 0 carbs, or 2 TBS of fungus= 133% and 7 carbs.......
Of course, you have to KILL the yeast first...aka-super heating it or adding boiling water. Picture all those little fungi screaming as they get boiled alive! :lol: "HELP ME! HELP ME!!!!! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

[gymeejet]

while i could not find the specs for red star yeast, i have KAL yeast right in front of me, as i eat it. it contains 8 g of protein, and 1 g of sugar, 1/2 g of fat, and 4 g of fiber, and 130% of B12. again, look for another rationalization as to why one needs to eat meat. MEAT IS NOT NECESSARY. not to mention the tons of hormones, rush of adrenaline, all sorts of crap fed the animals so they can get more per pound, plus all the meat poisonings at restaurants, etc. i am living proof that meat is not needed.

[Quinadal]

The stats I posted were for Red Star yeast

[tholian8]

tholian,
the fact that you can afford a television has no bearing on whether i can get one. either i can afford it or not. the fact that you are having problems does not give you the right to inflict problems on someone else. each animal has a right to its own life. i am not only living, BUT THRIVING, without meat. i would suffice to say that there is no 1 food that is essential. i have heard tons of rationalizations from people who do not want to feel guilty when they eat meat, but the taking of a life is wrong. like i posted earlier, if all of a sudden some aliens more powerful than us appeared, you would change your tune pretty quickly. do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Well, I asked, so you answered. Guess I should have expected something like this.

I never said meat was essential, only that I personally feel much better in provable ways (condition of hair and nails, energy level, weight control) when I include it in my diet. I never claimed that this applies to anyone other than myself. However, my return to meat-eating was based on experiments I did on my own body, and I will not be argued out of it.

OBTW, I don't feel the least bit guilty. You find you can thrive without meat. By experimenting on myself, I discovered--to my great surprise--that I could not. And I do not believe that, for example, beef cattle have a greater right to thrive than I do.

Never before in my life have I been told that I should sacrifice one iota of my personal health on behalf of barnyard animals. This seems somewhat irrational to me. We are not talking about having some material object, such as a television, or not. We are talking about lowering the quality of my health, something that impacts me every second of every day. It also impacts everyone who is in relationship with me. It also negatively impacts my contribution to society in myriad ways.

Again, I make no claims here about the general suitability, or not, of a vegetarian diet as regards human nutrition. As before, my position comes solely out of my personal experience with vegetarian and omnivorous diets.

Emily

[rhaazz]

I agree, Emily, I would never tell ANYONE what they should or should not eat.

And for the same reasons as you: my personal experience.

Giving up meat was one of the hardest things I ever did.

I would never impose it on anyone.

I believe that eating meat is unethical

(yes, even for you, Emily -- and please don't hate me for saying this, because I really like you a lot, but the suffering you experienced as an ovo-lacto vegetarian -- and I wonder how could that be, because you were getting EXACTLY the same nutrients from eggs & cheese as meat -- but that suffering was relatively trivial compared to the suffering and death of the animals you now eat)

but you certainly have the right to choose what you can, and cannot sacrifice in your efforts to live a good life. Sacrificing pleasures (or perceived necessities) for the sake of the wellbeing of others is a very personal and difficult decision.

My position is only: it is unethical to inflict unnecessary pain and suffering on animals.

My position is NOT that every meat eater must immediately act on this knowledge to give up meat. That would simply be too much to ask.

I think that a perfectly acceptable response would be, "Yeah, ok, sure, lots of animals are suffering and dying for the sake of meat eaters. And yeah, as a general principle, it seems pretty obvious that it is better to avoid unnecessary suffering and death. However, I'm just not ready to stop eating meat -- it's too big a sacrifice for me right now."

[rhaazz]

Another vegan source of B 12 is tempeh -- it's an Indonesian food made with grains and legumes and a live culture, and I've never had trouble finding it in better grocery stores.

Mmmm, tempeh. :yum:

But even vegans who have NO dietary sources of B 12 are not found to lack it.

No one really knows why that is. There is some speculation that there are traces of B 12 in foods not ordinarily thought to contain it. There is also speculation that it can be manufactured by bacteria in the human gut.

But a true B 12 deficiency is extremely rare.

By the way:

I used to be a vegan for ethical reasons. Talk about energy? I was very lean (not surprisingly) and had TONS of energy. I was running up to 16 miles a day.

Anyway, I had to stop because in my new job there were too many group occasions for which the caterer had provided literally NOTHING for me to eat.

Plus, you really couldn't do the Atkins diet as a vegan, and I really like how Atkins is working fo rme right now.

So yeah, if someone were to say, "I can't change my diet according to your ethical principles because it's too inconvenient or is inconsistent with my need to lose weight" I would say, "yeah, I know what you mean, I've encountered the same difficulties and I too have had to make comrpomises."

[rhaazz]

aimie, I really, really liked your post! You seem like such a good and kind person!

I really like the way you set out your different views without being contentious.

What a good example you set in this forum! I wish I had your gentleness.

Thanks for that post. :)

[gymeejet]

hi tholian,
i never said that cattle had a GREATER right to thrive than you do. i would never make a non-sensical statement like that, for there is no definition that you can attach to it. i am sure the cow feels its life is more important, while you feel that yours is. it is when we use those feelings as some sort of rationalization that it is okay to kill another animal for our greater good, that i step in and say it is wrong. do unto others ....

[rhaazz]

Quinadal, some of the things you post are demonstrably not true.

Quote: " Doctors HATE vegetarians because they don't heal well and take longer to cure than meat eaters."

No, no, no, no.

I have been a vegetarian for twenty years.

I have enjoyed excellent health.

EVERY SINGLE DOCTOR I HAVE EVER VISITED APPROVES OF MY NOT EATING MEAT!!!!!!!!!!

MY CURRENT FAMILY PRACTITIONER IS A STRICT VEGETARIAN -- FOR HEALTH REASONS.

[tholian8]

rhaazz: This is where we have to part company, I'm afraid. You think it is morally wrong for me to eat animals. I don't. We are never going to bridge that chasm.

I never thought it was wrong to eat animals even when I was a vegetarian. I chose vegetarianism for two reasons, neither of which had anything to do with morals: the belief that it was a healthier diet, which turned out not to be true for me, and the influence of my partner (at the time), who disapproved of meat-eating even though she claimed she did not.

The fact that my choices had nothing whatsoever to do with my moral precepts or my religious beliefs, is what IMO made it possible for me to go back to meat-eating when it became apparent that I was feeling better on such a diet.

Interestingly, although we both ate exactly the same food, my ex thrived on a veggie diet, and my health suffered. She is still vegetarian today, from what I understand.

Emily

[aimie]

rhaazz,
i am glad you are not up set. thanks for reading. have a great evening. i look forward to reading more of your posts.

[Tiawyn]

THERE IS NO NUTRIENT IN MEAT THAT CANNOT BE DERIVED FROM EGGS AND DAIRY.

But health is NOT why I'm a vegetarian. I am a vegetarian because I do not want to go around killing sentient beings that wish to avoid death and pain.


Well is it killing, or is it pain that you're trying to avoid? Because if it's pain - where do you think those eggs and dairy come from? From animals that live their lives in small cages, that are bred to produce more eggs (or milk) than would ever normally be possible. If you are a vegetarian for moral reasons, you certainly shouldn't be eating eggs or dairy food (or any animal product at all, for that matter).

[rhaazz]

Hey aimie -- check it out: our stats are almost identical! You go girl! Isn't it SOOO exciting to see the numbers drop below 150? I was totally psyched to move that big chunky weight to 100, just like the skinny girls weighing themselves at the gym. :)

And you know -- I have tried to learn to have faith in God, in the past. I used to be in Overeaters Anonymous. It's a 12 Step program just like Alcoholics Anonymous, and like AA, OA is centered on spirituality.

Sadly, I never was able to get myself to believe -- my rational self just kept coming up with so many arguments against the existence of God.

It was sad for me because I was really struck by how much more successful -- not just in program, but in life -- the people with faith were.

Can you BELIEVE we're having this chat in a thread titled "colon cancer"? :lol:

[rhaazz]

Yes, yes, yes!! I want to avoid inflicting unnecessary death AND pain.

Which is why I buy only organically farmed, free-range eggs and dairy.

These animals are not kept in small cages. They are cage free and allowed to engage in normal behaviors, exercise, socialize, explore, etc. They are under much less stress than the animals you describe.

Many believe that it is wrong to exploit animals even to the extent that these humanely treated animals are exploited.

I respect that position, and if I were able to at this point in my life, I would try to practice veganism. It doesn't seem possible to me to be a vegan right now, though I do hold hope for myself that someday I will be able to reduce my participation in the exploitation of animals.

Right now, however, a more pressing moral concern for me is my general selfishness. Right now, what really concerns me is not my participation in cruelty to animals, but rather how little I seem to be able to make myself donate to charity.

Changing your behavior is a slow process, though, you know? I'm working on this. I have a long way to go.

[gymeejet]

hi raz,
the universe is here today. either it had no beginning, or its beginning was due to something outside of this universe, since by definition, the universe was not here at that time.

both of these point to a supernatural force (i.e. not of this universe). whether that force is God, can never be proven/unproven while we reside in this universe. but there is no doubt something more powerful than you and i.

[rhaazz]

I love that articulation, gymeejet. The times when I was closest to having faith, it was in something like the vastness and mystery you describe.

Again -- in your wildest dreams, did you EVER think you'd be discussing this under a thread titled "colon cancer"?

We start out talking about poop and end up talking about God.

[gotbeer]

My experiences in MATH class taught me well enough that 1 death from meat-eating is better than the 1 million deaths needed to sustain a vegetarian.

[gotbeer]

I found some interesting material on Peter Singer, the veggie "ethicist":

link to statement (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/2900/psai3.html)

Excerpt:

Statement on the Hiring of Peter Singer

We the undersigned protest the hiring of Dr. Peter Singer as the Ira DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. We protest his hiring because Dr. Singer denies the intrinsic moral worth of an entire class of human beings – newborn children – and promotes policies that would deprive many infants with disabilities of their basic human right to legal protection against homicide.

In his book Practical Ethics, Dr. Singer states that no infant has as strong a claim to life as a rational, self-conscious human being.1 Dr. Singer’s criteria for distinguishing newborn infants from “normal human beings”2 (including more mature infants) thus hinge on subjectively imposed conditions such as “rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness”.3 This lesser claim to life is also applied to those older children or adults whose mental age is and has always been that of an infant.4 His assertion of the appropriateness of killing some humans based on others’ decision concerning the “quality” of their lives should strike fear into everyone who cherishes equality and honors human life.

Furthermore, Dr. Singer defines certain disabled persons as individuals who are living “a life not worth living.”5 His views permit the killing of certain newborn infants with disabilities up to 28 days after birth.6 Dr. Singer states that “killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often, it is not wrong at all.”7 Dr. Singer’s message threatens individuals with disabilities and contributes to the erosion of the public’s regard for the fundamental human rights of disabled people.

Finally, Dr. Singer suggests that the regulated killing of babies with spina bifida be permitted.8 He would extend to parents the authority to “replace” a Down’s syndrome or hemophiliac infant (i.e. kill the child and conceive another) if adequate family or societal resources were not forthcoming. 9 Even though Dr. Singer concentrates on disabled infants, the ethical arguments and metaphors that he provisionally adopts10 leave open the potential empowerment of parents to kill a non-disabled newborn whose “replacement” would ameliorate their prospects for a happy life.11

1 Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics 2nd edition p. 182
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid. p. 181
5 Ibid. p. 184
6 Kuhse & Singer, Should the Baby Live?, pp.194-97
7 Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics 2nd edition p. 191
8 Ibid. pp. 184, 202-03
9 Ibid. pp. 186-90
10 Ibid. pp. x-xi, 127, 129-31
11 Ibid. pp. 182, 186

[Lisa N]

Wow...that's absolutely frightening and sickening. The same rationale could also be extended to adults who have become brain damaged through accident or stroke/heart attack. What about adults who have suffered spinal cord injuries? Are their lives not worth living as well and therefore subject to termination?
Yikes!

[gotbeer]

More on Singer:

The ethics of baby-killing

His protesters call him a Nazi, a hater and a snob, but the most interesting truth about Peter Singer is that there are many more like him.

By Jason Zinoman

link to article (http://archive.salon.com/books/it/1999/07/02/philosopher/)

July 2, 1999 | On a gray Saturday morning in April, two vastly dissimilar groups congregated in front of Nassau Hall at the center of Princeton University's campus. A band of handicapped protesters, who had come to New Jersey to rally against the appointment of the new Ira W. De Camp professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, stood 40 feet from a neat circle of prospective parents, eagerly listening to undergraduate David Beal sell them on the virtues of the Ivy League school.

Beal, a red-faced enthusiast with a surplus of school spirit, lectured loudly about the glorious diversity of Princeton University: All 50 states are represented in the student body, he explained, and public figures like Toni Morrison and Dan Quayle come to speak. As he spit out his practiced speech, a bitter-looking disabled man who learned about Peter Singer that day began a lonely chant: "Hey hey, ho ho/Peter Singer's got to go./Hey hey, ho ho..." Although a few parents turned their heads, most of them didn't seem to notice at all.

An accomplished scholar and intellectual pioneer, Peter Singer first gained attention with his book "Animal Liberation," which sparked the animal rights movement. More recently, the Australian philosopher has been attacked for his rigorously utilitarian views on the sanctity, or lack thereof, of human life. His most controversial stance is his belief that it's not always morally wrong to kill a severely disabled infant who is not rational, self-aware and autonomous -- the three morally significant qualities, he argues, when considering the life of a sentient being.

In a recent New York Times article, Sylvia Nasar compared the controversy surrounding Singer to the one that flared when City College hired Bertrand Russell in 1940, only to later rescind the offer because of the philosopher's liberal views on premarital sex. But nobody thinks that Princeton University will rescind its offer to Peter Singer. Princeton's president has consistently defended Singer, and the faculty and alumni, like those prospective parents, have studiously ignored the controversy.

Buoyed by newspaper articles and outraged editorials, however, a small anti-Singer group on campus planned an early morning protest to boost its cause. The anti-Singer rally featured about 200 sign-toting protesters, several of whom made short, orchestrated speeches. From their commentary, it appeared that few had read more than brief excerpts from Singer's writing; they had a wildly sinister view of his philosophy. Many of these veteran activists were part of New Jersey Right to Life, which had held a smaller demonstration at Princeton months before. The pro-lifers were joined by a smaller crowd of handicapped-rights activists, led by contingents from Disabilities in Action and the Illinois group Not Dead Yet, whose president, Carol Cleigh, has been quoted as calling the professor "the most dangerous man in the world today."

The protesters carried signs with slogans like "Go Back Down Under"; the smattering of speeches were laced with lines like, "I'm not a philosopher or an ethicist but I do know what is right and wrong." The general message: Singer is an arrogant, elitist intellectual who has come to America to poison the minds of our Ivy League youth. The protesters called him a killer, a Nazi, a hater and, perhaps most telling of all, a snob. One sign proclaimed, "Dr. Singer: the new Dr. Mengele." Murray Sabrin, a New Jersey Republican candidate for Senate, accused Singer of advocating "infanticide as a mainstream philosophical premise" and joked, "This proves that anything is believable, especially in higher education."

Oddly, when people attacked Singer, many started talking about the danger he posed to them personally. "I'm elderly," moaned Jon Rutkowski. "So what are we going to do next, kill the old people? I think I'm valuable to society."

In the most dramatic example of this kind of personalized politics, the burly ex-captain of the Princeton football team spoke to the assembled crowd. A big fellow with a small voice, the quarterback touched on everything from the abomination of homosexual acts to the immorality of premarital sex (no doubt he would have been keen to protest Bertrand Russell as well). The hiring of Peter Singer was just the last slide down the slippery, tie-dyed slope of moral relativism. And no one was spared blame.

"We're all cowards," he shouted. "Let's admit it. At school, I didn't speak up because I thought I'd be laughed at. At work, I don't speak up because I don't want to be fired."

The crowd madly cheered for their own cowardice, raising the rally to a feverish pitch. Yet conspicuously absent from this event was any substantial student or faculty presence. Chris Benek, founder of Students Against Infanticide, which organized the rally, explained away the low student turnout as just another reflection of youthful apoliticism. "Students here are ridiculously apathetic," he said. "They're just more interested in academics." Yet it wasn't just students who ignored the rally. Although organizers sought appearances from every single Republican presidential candidate -- a pool of people presumably out searching for viable political issues to endorse or condemn -- all declined the invitation.

After such heartfelt recriminations from so many varying special interest groups, why hadn't the protest inspired a more robust response? Had this odd coalition of conservatives, disability activists and euthanasia opponents failed to create a coherent enough message? Or had the media blown the whole controversy way out of proportion?

Despite all the alarmist profiles and editorials, it's doubtful that Singer holds any real threat to our nation's children. He isn't advocating that the government or doctors make life-and-death decisions instead of parents; in fact, he wants parents to have more power to make these decisions. Nor is he taking an active role outside the academy like the recently convicted Dr. Jack Kevorkian. He's simply pursuing the logical conclusions of his utilitarian philosophy -- a philosophy that happens to constitute a perfectly mainstream field of thought within contemporary academia.

According to Dale Jamieson, a philosophy professor at Carleton University, there are several prominent philosophers -- from Dick Hare at Oxford to the University of Wisconsin's Dan Wikler -- who are "generally on the same side of these issues [infanticide and euthanasia]." So why is Singer the only one who gets protested?

In part it may be his own willingness to enter the fray of public debate. As New York University philosophy professor Peter Unger argues: "People have gotten the idea that he is a guy who just gets protests." With his 1991 essay for the New York Review of Books chronicling the banning of his work in Germany, Singer cemented his reputation as one of philosophy's only bad boys.

Some might argue that such moves reveal that Singer invites notoriety, but what finally makes Singer unique and controversial is not what he says, but how he says it. Not only does Singer write more lucid and cogent prose than most philosophers, but he also doesn't mince words. He can turn a glib phrase as well as the next media personality, and drive a polemical point home like a seasoned rabble-rouser. One of the chapters in his book "Practical Ethics" is titled "What's Wrong With Killing," and he begins "Animal Liberation" with this ringing accusation: "This book is about the tyranny of human over nonhuman animals. This tyranny has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans. The struggle against this tyranny is a struggle as important as any of the moral and social issues that have been fought over in recent years."

It is such direct, jargon-less prose that sometimes leaves him open to popular attack. Singer obviously wants to be part of the public discourse on these issues. In an e-mail, he admits that protests "can be constructive, if people are willing to discuss the issues openly and honestly." While this is undoubtedly true, Singer, familiar with the hyperbole and distortions of political protests, was quick to add, "Unfortunately, often they are not."

salon.com | July 2, 1999

[rhaazz]

Yeah, Princeton should listen to intellectual giants like you, gotbeer, and not hire him.

[gotbeer]

And good of you to carry on the good work of Singer, rhaazz.

[Quinadal]

hmmm maybe Singer should have been killed at birth. Or is being a complete jackass without a sense of morals not a birth defect?

[gymeejet]

gotbeer, let's stop the silly dramatics. i have no doubts that we could find meat-eaters with just as bad as morality. it has nothing to do with situation at hand. in my opinion, society in general has a tremendous misplaced value system. it is appalling to me that over half of americans think that women should be allowed to abort their babies. the taking of life is wrong. no one has the right to end another's life.

[alaskaman]

Putting aside for a moment the fetid Dr. Singer, lets look again at the colon cancer issue. On pp 175-76 of "life without bread" we see that a1998 Australian study showed that on high-fat diet, all of the markers of potential cancer were BETTER than the highly touted lowfat diet. There's a line in an Alan Arkin movie, "The return of Captain Invincible" where the president says, "is that all I'm going to get, gentlemen? BullS---?"

[gotbeer]

gymeejet, do you really want to add abortion as an issue to this thread? Talk about silly dramatics!!!

[Lisa N]

it has nothing to do with situation at hand.

Frankly, I believe it does. Here you have a person who on the one hand is gravely concerned with the pain and suffering of animals who then on the other hand states that he feels there is absolutely nothing morally wrong with taking the life of a disabled infant based on the fact that he does not believe that infant to be rational, self-aware or autonomous. Based on that reasoning, most animals are neither rational nor self-aware so killing them would not be morally wrong. Furthermore, based on that reasoning, no infant would fit that criteria so killing any infant (healthy or otherwise) would not be morally wrong if the parents felt that it was necessary to do so, say, for convenience sake or the lack of monetary resources.
What I'd like to know is how you can rationalize concern for the pain and suffering of animals and then turn around and condone infanticide. IMHO, there's something very wrong with that set of ethics.

[beachmum]

What do you do when cockroaches invade your house? Kill the one running across your bed? Put out the poison so they can die a painful death? Just wondering (and LOL).

And if cockroaches aren't sentient enough, how about rats? Probably as sentient as a rabbit, which the French love to eat.

Hope you're not offended by these questions. It's just that we have a lot of cockroaches here in coastal SC.

[gotbeer]

Singer's seemingly insane results (pro-animal and anti-impaired-infant) do have a pseudo-rational basis in minimizing suffering: animals DON'T suffer in their (normal) lives (he thinks) so DON'T kill them, but impaired infants DO suffer in their (abnormal) lives (he thinks), so DO kill them. In this limited way I see his position as consistent but scabrous nevertheless.

Unfortunately for Singer and his cadre of sycophants, his errors are legion.

First, he assumes that animal domestication and/or death equates to animal suffering, when in fact, domestication efforts are unsuccessful without the acquiescence of the animal, and most animal slaughter is done with an eye towards minimizing their pain. If I were a cow, I'd rather die from a quick blow to the head in a slaughterhouse than have my throat ripped apart by a lion.

Second, as Lisa noted, he elevates animal suffering to be an evil equal to (or greater than!) human suffering. I like my own species a bit better than I regard others, when push comes to shove - a good thing in biological (species survival) terms, legal terms, and theological terms, whichever one may prefer.

Third, he assumes a painful human life is a worthless life. As it turns out, humans can lead meaningful, happy, valuable lives despite their pains and handicaps. Extreme pain, in some cases, may make one want to choose death for oneself (and oneself ONLY), but morphing this personal decision into a societal policy is a huge, tyrannical leap. Singer thus eschews our society's tyranny over animals yet touts a new societal tyranny over our own malformed infants? What the hell is that? I guess in his own twisted terms we could breed calves to be malformed and pain-wracked so that killing THEM would give us tasty and guilt-free veal. (Just deprive the pregnant cows of folate and the resulting neural tube defects in the calves would do the trick nicely.)

Fourth, he ignores the collateral damage caused by his beliefs - vegetarianism results in agricultural practices that create animal suffering and death on a scale that is a million to one greater than that of the pastoral grazing of food animals. Furthermore, the extinction rate of domesticated species is zero, while undomesticated species vanish every day - free those cows, and they might die out.

[Shellyf34]

Don't listen to Gymeejet, he doesn't even believe lowcarb is ethical! :rolleyes:

I believe you have just joined this forum to cause problems, right? Like a good arguement, correct? You have the audacity to bring up the abortion issue...As to what women go through, you have no idea and you never will. Don't even go there. Aren't women on birth control guilty of killing millions of sperm? Gee, shame on them for stopping them from their "special purpose" in life...

As for me? I like vegetarians...taste like chicken.

[gotbeer]

another article on Singer: this time, by a disabled disability lawyer on her face-to-face meeting with him..

Unspeakable Conversations

Harriet McBryde Johnson asks, should I have been killed at birth?
In "Unspeakable Conversations," she presents the case for her life.

By HARRIET McBRYDE JOHNSON NY Times 2/16/2003

link to article (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0B1EFD3A5F0C758DDDAB0894DB404482)

He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it's . . . almost fun. Mercy! It's like ''Alice in Wonderland.''

It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called -- and not just by his book publicist -- the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that's not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn't consider them ''persons.'' What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.

At this stage of my life, he says, I am a person. However, as an infant, I wasn't. I, like all humans, was born without self-awareness. And eventually, assuming my brain finally gets so fried that I fall into that wonderland where self and other and present and past and future blur into one boundless, formless all or nothing, then I'll lose my personhood and therefore my right to life. Then, he says, my family and doctors might put me out of my misery, or out of my bliss or oblivion, and no one count it murder.

I have agreed to two speaking engagements. In the morning, I talk to 150 undergraduates on selective infanticide. In the evening, it is a convivial discussion, over dinner, of assisted suicide. I am the token cripple with an opposing view.

I had several reasons for accepting Singer's invitation, some grounded in my involvement in the disability rights movement, others entirely personal. For the movement, it seemed an unusual opportunity to experiment with modes of discourse that might work with very tough audiences and bridge the divide between our perceptions and theirs. I didn't expect to straighten out Singer's head, but maybe I could reach a student or two. Among the personal reasons: I was sure it would make a great story, first for telling and then for writing down.

By now I've told it to family and friends and colleagues, over lunches and dinners, on long car trips, in scads of e-mail messages and a couple of formal speeches. But it seems to be a story that just won't settle down. After all these tellings, it still lacks a coherent structure; I'm miles away from a rational argument. I keep getting interrupted by questions -- like these:

Q: Was he totally grossed out by your physical appearance?

A: He gave no sign of it. None whatsoever.

Q: How did he handle having to interact with someone like you?

A: He behaved in every way appropriately, treated me as a respected professional acquaintance and was a gracious and accommodating host.

Q: Was it emotionally difficult for you to take part in a public discussion of whether your life should have happened?

A: It was very difficult. And horribly easy.

Q: Did he get that job at Princeton because they like his ideas on killing disabled babies?

A: It apparently didn't hurt, but he's most famous for animal rights. He's the author of ''Animal Liberation.''

Q: How can he put so much value on animal life and so little value on human life?

That last question is the only one I avoid. I used to say I don't know; it doesn't make sense. But now I've read some of Singer's writing, and I admit it does make sense -- within the conceptual world of Peter Singer. But I don't want to go there. Or at least not for long.

So I will start from those other questions and see where the story goes this time.


That first question, about my physical appearance, needs some explaining.

It's not that I'm ugly. It's more that most people don't know how to look at me. The sight of me is routinely discombobulating. The power wheelchair is enough to inspire gawking, but that's the least of it. Much more impressive is the impact on my body of more than four decades of a muscle-wasting disease. At this stage of my life, I'm Karen Carpenter thin, flesh mostly vanished, a jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin. When, in childhood, my muscles got too weak to hold up my spine, I tried a brace for a while, but fortunately a skittish anesthesiologist said no to fusion, plates and pins -- all the apparatus that might have kept me straight. At 15, I threw away the back brace and let my spine reshape itself into a deep twisty S-curve. Now my right side is two deep canyons. To keep myself upright, I lean forward, rest my rib cage on my lap, plant my elbows beside my knees. Since my backbone found its own natural shape, I've been entirely comfortable in my skin.

I am in the first generation to survive to such decrepitude. Because antibiotics were available, we didn't die from the childhood pneumonias that often come with weakened respiratory systems. I guess it is natural enough that most people don't know what to make of us.

Two or three times in my life -- I recall particularly one largely crip, largely lesbian cookout halfway across the continent -- I have been looked at as a rare kind of beauty. There is also the bizarre fact that where I live, Charleston, S.C., some people call me Good Luck Lady: they consider it propitious to cross my path when a hurricane is coming and to kiss my head just before voting day. But most often the reactions are decidedly negative. Strangers on the street are moved to comment:

I admire you for being out; most people would give up.

God bless you! I'll pray for you.

You don't let the pain hold you back, do you?

If I had to live like you, I think I'd kill myself.

I used to try to explain that in fact I enjoy my life, that it's a great sensual pleasure to zoom by power chair on these delicious muggy streets, that I have no more reason to kill myself than most people. But it gets tedious. God didn't put me on this street to provide disability awareness training to the likes of them. In fact, no god put anyone anywhere for any reason, if you want to know.

But they don't want to know. They think they know everything there is to know, just by looking at me. That's how stereotypes work. They don't know that they're confused, that they're really expressing the discombobulation that comes in my wake.

So. What stands out when I recall first meeting Peter Singer in the spring of 2001 is his apparent immunity to my looks, his apparent lack of discombobulation, his immediate ability to deal with me as a person with a particular point of view.

Then, 2001. Singer has been invited to the College of Charleston, not two blocks from my house. He is to lecture on ''Rethinking Life and Death.'' I have been dispatched by Not Dead Yet, the national organization leading the disability-rights opposition to legalized assisted suicide and disability-based killing. I am to put out a leaflet and do something during the Q. and A.

On arriving almost an hour early to reconnoiter, I find the scene almost entirely peaceful; even the boisterous display of South Carolina spring is muted by gray wisps of Spanish moss and mottled oak bark.

I roll around the corner of the building and am confronted with the unnerving sight of two people I know sitting on a park bench eating veggie pitas with Singer. Sharon is a veteran activist for human rights. Herb is South Carolina's most famous atheist. Good people, I've always thought -- now sharing veggie pitas and conversation with a proponent of genocide. I try to beat a retreat, but Herb and Sharon have seen me. Sharon tosses her trash and comes over. After we exchange the usual courtesies, she asks, ''Would you like to meet Professor Singer?''

She doesn't have a clue. She probably likes his book on animal rights. ''I'll just talk to him in the Q. and A.''

But Herb, with Singer at his side, is fast approaching. They are looking at me, and Herb is talking, no doubt saying nice things about me. He'll be saying that I'm a disability rights lawyer and that I gave a talk against assisted suicide at his secular humanist group a while back. He didn't agree with everything I said, he'll say, but I was brilliant. Singer appears interested, engaged. I sit where I'm parked. Herb makes an introduction. Singer extends his hand.

I hesitate. I shouldn't shake hands with the Evil One. But he is Herb's guest, and I simply can't snub Herb's guest at the college where Herb teaches. Hereabouts, the rule is that if you're not prepared to shoot on sight, you have to be prepared to shake hands. I give Singer the three fingers on my right hand that still work. ''Good afternoon, Mr. Singer. I'm here for Not Dead Yet.'' I want to think he flinches just a little. Not Dead Yet did everything possible to disrupt his first week at Princeton. I sent a check to the fund for the 14 arrestees, who included comrades in power chairs. But if Singer flinches, he instantly recovers. He answers my questions about the lecture format. When he says he looks forward to an interesting exchange, he seems entirely sincere.


It is an interesting exchange. In the lecture hall that afternoon, Singer lays it all out. The ''illogic'' of allowing abortion but not infanticide, of allowing withdrawal of life support but not active killing. Applying the basic assumptions of preference utilitarianism, he spins out his bone-chilling argument for letting parents kill disabled babies and replace them with nondisabled babies who have a greater chance at happiness. It is all about allowing as many individuals as possible to fulfill as many of their preferences as possible.

As soon as he's done, I get the microphone and say I'd like to discuss selective infanticide. As a lawyer, I disagree with his jurisprudential assumptions. Logical inconsistency is not a sufficient reason to change the law. As an atheist, I object to his using religious terms (''the doctrine of the sanctity of human life'') to characterize his critics. Singer takes a note pad out of his pocket and jots down my points, apparently eager to take them on, and I proceed to the heart of my argument: that the presence or absence of a disability doesn't predict quality of life. I question his replacement-baby theory, with its assumption of ''other things equal,'' arguing that people are not fungible. I draw out a comparison of myself and my nondisabled brother Mac (the next-born after me), each of us with a combination of gifts and flaws so peculiar that we can't be measured on the same scale.

He responds to each point with clear and lucid counterarguments. He proceeds with the assumption that I am one of the people who might rightly have been killed at birth. He sticks to his guns, conceding just enough to show himself open-minded and flexible. We go back and forth for 10 long minutes. Even as I am horrified by what he says, and by the fact that I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether I ought to exist, I can't help being dazzled by his verbal facility. He is so respectful, so free of condescension, so focused on the argument, that by the time the show is over, I'm not exactly angry with him. Yes, I am shaking, furious, enraged -- but it's for the big room, 200 of my fellow Charlestonians who have listened with polite interest, when in decency they should have run him out of town on a rail.

My encounter with Peter Singer merits a mention in my annual canned letter that December. I decide to send Singer a copy. In response, he sends me the nicest possible e-mail message. Dear Harriet (if he may) . . . Just back from Australia, where he's from. Agrees with my comments on the world situation. Supports my work against institutionalization. And then some pointed questions to clarify my views on selective infanticide.

I reply. Fine, call me Harriet, and I'll reciprocate in the interest of equality, though I'm accustomed to more formality. Skipping agreeable preambles, I answer his questions on disability-based infanticide and pose some of my own. Answers and more questions come back. Back and forth over several weeks it proceeds, an engaging discussion of baby killing, disability prejudice and related points of law and philosophy. Dear Harriet. Dear Peter.

Singer seems curious to learn how someone who is as good an atheist as he is could disagree with his entirely reasonable views. At the same time, I am trying to plumb his theories. What has him so convinced it would be best to allow parents to kill babies with severe disabilities, and not other kinds of babies, if no infant is a ''person'' with a right to life? I learn it is partly that both biological and adoptive parents prefer healthy babies. But I have trouble with basing life-and-death decisions on market considerations when the market is structured by prejudice. I offer a hypothetical comparison: ''What about mixed-race babies, especially when the combination is entirely nonwhite, who I believe are just about as unadoptable as babies with disabilities?'' Wouldn't a law allowing the killing of these undervalued babies validate race prejudice? Singer agrees there is a problem. ''It would be horrible,'' he says, ''to see mixed-race babies being killed because they can't be adopted, whereas white ones could be.'' What's the difference? Preferences based on race are unreasonable. Preferences based on ability are not. Why? To Singer, it's pretty simple: disability makes a person ''worse off.''

Are we ''worse off''? I don't think so. Not in any meaningful sense. There are too many variables. For those of us with congenital conditions, disability shapes all we are. Those disabled later in life adapt. We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own. We have something the world needs.

Pressing me to admit a negative correlation between disability and happiness, Singer presents a situation: imagine a disabled child on the beach, watching the other children play.

It's right out of the telethon. I expected something more sophisticated from a professional thinker. I respond: ''As a little girl playing on the beach, I was already aware that some people felt sorry for me, that I wasn't frolicking with the same level of frenzy as other children. This annoyed me, and still does.'' I take the time to write a detailed description of how I, in fact, had fun playing on the beach, without the need of standing, walking or running. But, really, I've had enough. I suggest to Singer that we have exhausted our topic, and I'll be back in touch when I get around to writing about him.

He responds by inviting me to Princeton. I fire off an immediate maybe.


Of course I'm flattered. Mama will be impressed.

But there are things to consider. Not Dead Yet says -- and I completely agree -- that we should not legitimate Singer's views by giving them a forum. We should not make disabled lives subject to debate. Moreover, any spokesman chosen by the opposition is by definition a token. But even if I'm a token, I won't have to act like one. And anyway, I'm kind of stuck. If I decline, Singer can make some hay: ''I offered them a platform, but they refuse rational discussion.'' It's an old trick, and I've laid myself wide open.

My invitation is to have an exchange of views with Singer during his undergraduate course. He also proposes a second ''exchange,'' open to the whole university, later in the day. This sounds a lot like debating my life -- and on my opponent's turf, with my opponent moderating, to boot. I offer a counterproposal, to which Singer proves amenable. I will open the class with some comments on infanticide and related issues and then let Singer grill me as hard as he likes before we open it up for the students. Later in the day, I might take part in a discussion of some other disability issue in a neutral forum. Singer suggests a faculty-student discussion group sponsored by his department but with cross-departmental membership. The topic I select is ''Assisted Suicide, Disability Discrimination and the Illusion of Choice: A Disability Rights Perspective.'' I inform a few movement colleagues of this turn of events, and advice starts rolling in. I decide to go with the advisers who counsel me to do the gig, lie low and get out of Dodge.

I ask Singer to refer me to the person who arranges travel at Princeton. I imagine some capable and unflappable woman like my sister, Beth, whose varied job description at a North Carolina university includes handling visiting artists. Singer refers me to his own assistant, who certainly seems capable and unflappable enough. However, almost immediately Singer jumps back in via e-mail. It seems the nearest hotel has only one wheelchair-accessible suite, available with two rooms for $600 per night. What to do? I know I shouldn't be so accommodating, but I say I can make do with an inaccessible room if it has certain features. Other logistical issues come up. We go back and forth. Questions and answers. Do I really need a lift-equipped vehicle at the airport? Can't my assistant assist me into a conventional car? How wide is my wheelchair?

By the time we're done, Singer knows that I am 28 inches wide. I have trouble controlling my wheelchair if my hand gets cold. I am accustomed to driving on rough, irregular surfaces, but I get nervous turning on steep slopes. Even one step is too many. I can swallow purees, soft bread and grapes. I use a bedpan, not a toilet. None of this is a secret; none of it cause for angst. But I do wonder whether Singer is jotting down my specs in his little note pad as evidence of how ''bad off'' people like me really are.

I realize I must put one more issue on the table: etiquette. I was criticized within the movement when I confessed to shaking Singer's hand in Charleston, and some are appalled that I have agreed to break bread with him in Princeton. I think they have a very good point, but, again, I'm stuck. I'm engaged for a day of discussion, not a picket line. It is not in my power to marginalize Singer at Princeton; nothing would be accomplished by displays of personal disrespect. However, chumminess is clearly inappropriate. I tell Singer that in the lecture hall it can't be Harriet and Peter; it must be Ms. Johnson and Mr. Singer.

He seems genuinely nettled. Shouldn't it be Ms. Johnson and Professor Singer, if I want to be formal? To counter, I invoke the ceremonial low-country usage, Attorney Johnson and Professor Singer, but point out that Mr./Ms. is the custom in American political debates and might seem more normal in New Jersey. All right, he says. Ms./Mr. it will be.

I describe this awkward social situation to the lawyer in my office who has served as my default lunch partner for the past 14 years. He gives forth a full-body shudder.

''That poor, sorry son of a bitch! He has no idea what he's in for.''

Being a disability rights lawyer lecturing at Princeton does confer some cachet at the Newark airport. I need all the cachet I can get. Delta Airlines has torn up my power chair. It is a fairly frequent occurrence for any air traveler on wheels.

When they inform me of the damage in Atlanta, I throw a monumental fit and tell them to have a repair person meet me in Newark with new batteries to replace the ones inexplicably destroyed. Then I am told no new batteries can be had until the morning. It's Sunday night. On arrival in Newark, I'm told of a plan to put me up there for the night and get me repaired and driven to Princeton by 10 a.m.

''That won't work. I'm lecturing at 10. I need to get there tonight, go to sleep and be in my right mind tomorrow.''

''What? You're lecturing? They told us it was a conference. We need to get you fixed tonight!''

Carla, the gate agent, relieves me of the need to throw any further fits by undertaking on my behalf the fit of all fits.

Carmen, the personal assistant with whom I'm traveling, pushes me in my disabled chair around the airport in search of a place to use the bedpan. However, instead of diaper-changing tables, which are functional though far from private, we find a flip-down plastic shelf that doesn't look like it would hold my 70 pounds of body weight. It's no big deal; I've restricted my fluids. But Carmen is a little freaked. It is her first adventure in power-chair air travel. I thought I prepared her for the trip, but I guess I neglected to warn her about the probability of wheelchair destruction. I keep forgetting that even people who know me well don't know much about my world.

We reach the hotel at 10:15 p.m., four hours late.


I wake up tired. I slept better than I would have slept in Newark with an unrepaired chair, but any hotel bed is a near guarantee of morning crankiness. I tell Carmen to leave the TV off. I don't want to hear the temperature.

I do the morning stretch. Medical people call it passive movement, but it's not really passive. Carmen's hands move my limbs, following my precise instructions, her strength giving effect to my will. Carmen knows the routine, so it is in near silence that we begin easing slowly into the day. I let myself be propped up to eat oatmeal and drink tea. Then there's the bedpan and then bathing and dressing, still in bed. As the caffeine kicks in, silence gives way to conversation about practical things. Carmen lifts me into my chair and straps a rolled towel under my ribs for comfort and stability. She tugs at my clothes to remove wrinkles that could cause pressure sores. She switches on my motors and gives me the means of moving without anyone's help. They don't call it a power chair for nothing.

I drive to the mirror. I do my hair in one long braid. Even this primal hairdo requires, at this stage of my life, joint effort. I undo yesterday's braid, fix the part and comb the hair in front. Carmen combs where I can't reach. I divide the mass into three long hanks and start the braid just behind my left ear. Section by section, I hand it over to her, and her unimpaired young fingers pull tight, crisscross, until the braid is fully formed.

A big polyester scarf completes my costume. Carmen lays it over my back. I tie it the way I want it, but Carmen starts fussing with it, trying to tuck it