A new animal rights media campaign has started here in Australia.
This new approach has been extremely controversial and confronting.
I'll reserve my opinion but I think it's going to be very effective.

Have a listen.

I'll reserve my opinion also.

I guess after seeing so many pictures in the Rendo gallery of happy cats and dogs. we all go off to eat our ham and bacon without a thought of where it  comes from.
I'm not a vegetarian or vegan, but I stop once in a while to think about these things.
Down in the small, bottom, left-hand corner of the square I live in, is an animal suffering for no reason.
I just can't blot it out whatever I do.

I eat meat & I'll eat meat till the day I die. :D

Me too **Lucifer_The_Dark.
I guess it;s more how your conscience plays out, and where you draw the line between what you do and your innate morality..
This is anything but  a simple issue.
Just shades of grey, like everything else.
**

I had a little theory about health that might relate to animal cruelty.

Us humans have some similarities with pigs, if one is to examine a pig's internal organs, they are almost the same as ours. A human being if suffering in emotional stress and experiencing alot of pain, his endocrine glands secrete alot of chemicals and hormones to the blood to enduce reactions to the body. Surely the pig does the same, imagine when the pig is suffering everyday in a pitiful cage or when it knew he is going to be killed when the butcher is slicing its throat to fill a bucket with its blood before the pig gets cut open, its organs run in high alert in its struggle to survive and pumps all these chemicals to its blood.

I am not sure if this affects us or not but we rather eat meat than pig hormones right?
That's why I think when you kill a pig for its meat, the humanely way to do it is to knock them off with an electric prod to the brain might be a good way.

Antibiotics, growth hormones, stimulants, steroids and God knows what else, plus the lousy feed, dead cows, sheep, pigs and chickens being fed to cows, sheep, pigs and chickens. Meat literally is poison. Enjoy.

Its not good to be vegetarian though. I tried once to eat veggies but I get hungry again after a few hours. No wonder our ancestors hunt for meat because it lasts longer in our stomach.

Considering there isn't a single mass-produced edible item on the face of the planet that is truly free of chemicals of one sort or another meat isn't the only poison. Where does the fertiliser for all the veggies come from?

This is what you get for being cheap: You get crappy food that's bad for you (and in this case, bad for your food too). Overengineered vegetables, meat filled with hormones, junk food full off fat and sugar but devoid of nutrients. It may ruin your health, but hey, it was on sale!

Quote - Its not good to be vegetarian though. I tried once to eat veggies but I get hungry again after a few hours. No wonder our ancestors hunt for meat because it lasts longer in our stomach.

Not just that.  Being a vegetarian (or vegan) is actually rather difficult because there are very few places on the planet where there are a sufficient variety of plants that provide sufficient nutrients, including fats, that both can grow there and are available year round.

Being a vegetarian in most of the world means you are as dependent, if not more so, on modern technology, transport, and food preservation as anyone who eats meat.

And in some parts of the world, there is no such option.  Before air transport, there was no such thing as a vegetarian Inuit.

Quote-"Where does the fertiliser for all the veggies come from?"

Let's see, salmonella on peppers and tomatoes from Mexico suggest they're using human feces. Veggies genetically modified to produce their own internal pesticides have decimated the domestic bee population. Yum. If you can, grow your own or buy from local farmers that you know. Anything else is just playing Russian Roulette. The FDA and CDC care not a whit for the consumer, they are the producers protectors.
skuts

It's interesting to watch films which show what animals do to each other.  But it's not about morality with them -- it's about eating because they're hungry.

On the other hand, anyone who's ever seen a cat play with it's still-living and panicked prey, or who's seen what a large dog can do to the cat in its turn -- anyone who's seen that might be inclined to think that animals are morally (snort) cruel.

We eat animals because we are a part of the same natural system that they are.  It's just that we happen to sit at the very top of the food chain..........and some people feel that it's just not fair that we occupy that position.

There's also the "fluffy & cute" factor when it comes to humans and animals, and the value that humans place upon animal life.  People are absolutely horrified when they see videos of cats and dogs used for medical experiments in labs -- but most of those same people won't bat an eye when they savagely crush a tarantula or a scorpion.

And thirdly: there's the "Disney Movie" factor when it comes to people's attitudes towards animals in the modern era.  From their early childhood up, people have been influenced by seeing animals sympathetically portrayed as having human emotions, and human thoughts.  Hey -- they even talk, don't they?

Hint: your cute little purring kitty cat would eat you, if she was big enough to do it.

No, I don't believe in cruelty to animals: and I despise people who hurt animals for no reason other than the pure sneering vileness of sadistic human nature.  However: killing and eating animals is as natural for us as it is for a tiger or a lion.  In spite of what some say, we weren't designed to eat grass.  Strict vegetarians are prone to certain health issues.

Of course, everyone knows that Hitler was a vegetarian, and that he was nice to his dog.  So you can't always judge a man's character 100% by how kind he is to animals: or by whether or not he eats them.

Anyone saw the CNN website lately? Says Puppy killed 2 year old kid.

Makes me wonder what the kid was doing to the puppy.

Yeah, I heard about those. >.>  I know several people who are now trying a vegetarian lifestyle as a direct result.

While the ads are undoubtedly powerful, I suspect they have lost a little of their effectiveness since people are too busy thinking about the consumption of pork as opposed to how these animals are treated prior to slaughter.

Yeah, but you probably wouldn't wonder that if it was your kid. 

Just a thought, having had to once save my then 11-year-old nephew from a neighbor's "he'll never bite" shepherd.  Kid is now almost 30, still terrified of dogs, even having served in the army.

Just a thought, no disrespect intended.

Quote - However: killing and eating animals is as natural for us as it is for a tiger or a lion.  In spite of what some say, we weren't designed to eat grass.

Except that nobody kills their own meat anymore. Instead, we cowardly offload the dirty work to underpaid workers or machines and buy shrink-wrapped chemical-loaded products in styrofoam dishes.There is nothing natural about how the meat industry works.

The natural way would be livestock that gets to see the sunlight and eat its grass directly from the ground until man hunts and kills it for direct consumption.

Quote - ... until man hunts and kills it for direct consumption.

Which, given the size of the human population, isn't a very efficient way of doing things.

Not that the current system is the best, it just happens to be more efficient for the scale of the operation.

Attached Link: http://www.realtruth.org/news/061103-005.html

We have more than enough meat and manyof us eat more of it than we should. There is no need to furher industrialize meat unless you really want to trade our health for financial savings. Even the financial savings of cheap food loaded with meat are questionable since they come back to haunt us as medical expenses. For health reasons, LA just passed a law to stop more fast food chains from opening - fast food chains that typically serve cheap meat.

Obesity is linked to more than just food and I wish the powers that be would understand this. I don't care what you do or how little you eat we live in a totally automated world. We ride everywhere, we have remotes for the TV, to control the ceiling fans, to open and close drapes and so one. Gas powered everything mowers. hedge clippers, etc. We are no longer hunter/gathers, we are no longer an agrarian society, we are no longer a society where most of its inhabitants do manual labour jobs. Most do not take part in outdoor activities the tube, PC and video games have taken most of that away.  So why would not obesity be out of control? Hitting the gym for an hour isn't enough to trim us back to the days before automation. People of my grandparents generation work long, physical days and weight control wasn't an issue.

I am also tired of hearing it is fast food and food producers faults for obesity and child obesity. Come now take responsibility for yourselves no one puts a gun to your head to fill your stomach day after day of fast food, pizza hut and the like. And it's up the parents to control what their children put in their mouths not McDonald's, not Wendy's, not pizza hut and not the food manufacturers themselves. As long as people buy into their garbage food they will continue to produce it and not change a thing. You and you along make the choices and to blame others is a lack of personal responsibility and weakness.

Personally, I eat meat sparingly, I haven't eaten at a fast food chain in years, I grow my own veggies, I don't use gas powered lawn tools I have an old rotary blade push mower and manual hedge clippers and edger. And while I don't work as my parents or grand parents did I made the choice to be more active I made the choice in what I put into my body I MADE THE CHOICE and if I do things to myself I AM TO BLAME.

And you can't trust government with your safety look how many times here in the U.S. tainted food has made it into the market places? Just recently it was suppose to be tomatoes, then it wasn't, then it was fresh spinach, then lettuce and so on. I agree with Stewer there are far too many additives in our food but until we as consumers stop buying processed foods and demand changes from the food producers it will not change and government is in no hurry to change that. Again, responsibility falls upon yourself and one shouldn't blame others for one's results.

Hells bells people we can't even be civil to each other on this planet so how does one expect people to be civil to animals? Just my take on this but I am just one person.

Obesity is also a matter of pure genetics in some cases.  I had a roommate in college -- he was 6'-2" and he weighed around 360 lbs..  Whereas I was as skinny as a rail.  My roommate ate like a bird -- one meal a day at lunchtime.  And he barely ate anything then.  He'd get a very modest amount of food on his plate, and he'd end up throwing half of that away.  He never touched things like candy bars, ice cream, cake, or other types of desserts.  At the same time, I ate like a horse.  It didn't matter how much I ate: I stayed skinny no matter what (back then -- things started to change in my late 20's ).  It wasn't unusual for my roommate to go on 2-week-long fasts, where he literally ate nothing during that entire time.  And yet he weighed what he weighed, with rolls of fat hanging off of his body.

He talked about getting "stomach stapling" surgery......I don't know if he ever did or not.  But frankly, with his already-light eating habits, I tended to question just how much good getting his stomach stapled would have done him.  Plus I've known some people to have such surgery, and then their health totally fell apart afterwards.

So it's not always eating tons of Big Macs that leads to obesity.  In spite of what often gets said: sometimes certain people just can't prevent it.  Their genetics are not kind to them.

As with so many other areas in life, when it comes to diet the keywords are "balance" and "moderation".  We aren't designed to eat grass: but neither are we strict carnivores, either.  We are omnivores, and we need a balance of foods to keep us in optimal health.  But like it or not: meat is most definitely a necessary part of a healthy diet for humans.

I recall hearing of a recent study which indicated that young children under age 3 whose parents put them on a strict vegetarian diet suffered various health & developmental problems as a result.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4282257.stm

Of course the vegans deny that it's true -- because the research results don't fit into their pre-selected ideological template: so the clear results are dismissed.

BTW - as to another topic that's been touched on in this thread: it's always good to remember that back in the days when food sources (and most everything else) truly were "natural", the average life expectancy for human beings was ~35 years.  Now that everything is loaded with chemicals, processed, and refined: life expectancies of humans are constantly going up, well beyond twice the length (and increasing) which humans 'enjoyed' while they were living in harmony with 'peaceful' (snort) nature.

When applied in the right way: technology & the mass production of food are good things.  Hmmmmm......I wonder if anyone ever suffered from salmonella back during eras when food markets consisted of totally free-range, 100% organically-grown foods with flies buzzing around them?  Maybe we can get a big government research grant to find out..........

"I guess after seeing so many pictures in the Rendo gallery of happy cats and dogs. we all go off to eat our ham and bacon without a thought of where it  comes from."

Ham and bacon doesn't come from dogs or cats.

Err, yeh.
I guess it doesn't.

That's what you think.