If not already; go Vegan! Or encourage others to do so. For animal products people and other animals suffer, the rainforest gets cut down, water and food gets wasted, it's bad for the environment and your health etc... Even vegetarianism already helps a lot! Would be curious how much people you could change :) An idea from vegan

I think this idea is bad. I would rather harm an animal for a minute, and regain health, energy and stamina out if it, than eat all the plants that animal needs. Leaving him to starve to death.

I'm afraid this comment shows that you need to learn more about the topic. It takes the information, to understand the idea and have sympathy for it. The shortest version I can find for you, that's relatively easy to ingest is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTS2Yp-UgI0&feature=related
Of course, this is just a synopsis, feel free to increase your knowledge on the subject in your own way. There's enough info out there ;)

Global Warming - Did You Know?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTS2Yp-UgI0

Here's a website on the topic: http://meatthefacts.org/wp/

Dear Maarten, I respect that veganism might not be part of your top priorities, we're all different and we all focus on other ways to make the world a better place and I think you're doing a wonderful job. However, being a vegan myself, I hope you do at least seriously consider this idea. Your post didn't seem very well informed.

For starters, animals sadly aren't harmed just "for a minute", they are generally treated in ways that cause a lot of suffering and distress for the animal. The same goes for animals that aren't bred for meat, but for other products. An example is the "production" of eggs: the male chicks get killed right away because they aren't useful for the egg industry and sadly the cheapest way of killing them isn't always the least harmful way. The female chicks usually get locked up in cages that are, despite labels stating better conditions, still much smaller than chickens naturally need. Their beaks are cut off to prevent them from hurting each other and themselves, a natural reaction to the stress caused by their overcrowded living conditions. Chickens often suffer diseases and/or get hurt, making them suffer a great deal before they, too, eventually get slaughtered when they're no longer considered productive, which means they get killed at a pretty young age, whereas chickens can became way older than that. This is just one example, sadly there's stories like this about just about any animal product you could think of. If you would like to know more about this, you could consider watching the documentary "earthlings", which you can legally stream online for free. However, this film is not for everyone, it contains very graphic images of animal cruelty, you need to decide whether that's something you want to see or not.

The second part of your argument doesn't make as much sense as you'd think either. The animals you eat, aren't wild animals that need to provide for their own food (assuming you're not one of the very few people in this country who live on hunting wild animals.) They are animals bred especially for the meat, egg and dairy industry in way bigger quantities than what's sustainable. Big-scale farming poses health and environmental risks and the lives of the animals are hardly natural. If more and more people stop consuming animal products, and eat more plant-based products in stead, that doesn't mean that loads of animals will starve, it just means that, over time, less animals will be bred, which would solve several problems related to big-scale factory farming.

You might think that there simply aren't enough plants to supply everyone with plant-based food. However, as you mentioned as well, animals need food too, and there's a lot of animals being bred to supply our meat. Much land is used to grow plants that are meant for animal consumption, if that land would be used to grow plants directly for human consumption, a lot more people could be fed. As an example, most people tend to associate soy with vegan and vegetarian products like tofu and soy milk. However, most soy (I believe it was about 90 percent even, but I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure of that - it's definitely most soy though) isn't used for human consumption. A lot more soy is used to feed factory-farmed animals. Imagine how much soy has been used to feed the pig your bacon is made from! And imagine how many people we could feed if we would directly use all that soy for human consumption.

For me personally, and for most vegans that I know, my decision to not eat animal products is an ethical decision based on the principle that causing suffering to a living being merely for the sake of eating things that I like the taste of (because, nutrition-wise, you can live healthily off plant-based foods) is simply not okay. I do, however, realise that not everyone feels that way and I often hear from people that they don't think killing animals for meat or other products is necessarily a bad thing. If that's your conviction, I would still urge you to significantly lower your intake of animal products out of environmental and health concerns, and if you care about animal welfare, I would urge you to buy any animal products you do decide to eat as much as you can from local and organic sources. Even though for me a world without slaughterhouses is the ideal, I much prefer people eating a reasonable portion of organic meat every now and then to people not changing anything at all about their eating habits because total veganism or vegetarianism seems like too big of a step.

If you do at some point decide to take up the idea, feel free to e-mail me (I assume that, being the site admin, you can see my e-mailadress, right?) to ask more information and practical tips about what you can eat, where to find good vegan ingredients, etcetera. Verena gave some links already, I don't have the time to look at them right now but I hope they're helpful. If you would like some more resources, a good site in Dutch is www.vegetarisme.be, you can find loads of information and recipes.

Have a great day and good luck with your next challenge, whatever it's going to be! :)

If everyone would turn vegan?
I dough the world would be a better place.
People would have to produce more vegetable.
For sure, what men do, to control and increase the production, an not environmental friendly ( and an-moral..) of animals for diet propose, they would likewise do with vegetables.
What I mean is, the mass production of vegetable would increase and products of such. I believe that the target would change but the cannon would still shoot.

@ Lize: I am almost certain that the Maarten who posted is not the same Maarten who is administrator of this site.
@ rita: the point is -exactly! - that there would not need to be more production of vegetables, because we eat less vegetables then animals to ingest the same amount of nutrition (protein, etc). "Producing" nutrition by way of animals is just very inefficient ;) If you don't believe me, watch the feature I posted and google the rest yourself :)

That's right. The Maarten of this site is not using electricity for a month (I hope it will be less) , so he has not posted anything since 11 days.

Oops! Well, this Maarten is welcome to ask questions too if he wants to. ^^

Wauw Lize I didn't expect such a comment! Thank you for your time.
So in short eating animals takes a lot of land, and wastes therefor possible nature. In the process animals are put in prisons and harmed. We should not kill for taste, but a total loss of eating habits is too extreme as well.
I must say I am disgusted by mass production of animals, but still I like the idea of eating animals. What is sushi without fish? Or German food without the bratwurst? Cultures accually would disappear.
A lion does not need the approval of the lam before he eats it, but the lion only hunts when he is hungry for flesh.
I support that idea. I hold back on buying meat, and I only buy eggs with 3 stars (which is more expensive).
On the other hand, when my uncle in Russia tells me that he has two options in the winter: shooting the bear or prepare for a refrigerator assault, I support his first choice!
He made me a real Russian hat from fur of a wolf for my 18th birthday. I love that hat. Had to give the size of my head.
Last, as a Business Administration student, I have to tell you that if we switched from soya production from animal supply to human supply, we would not feed the hungry with that soya.
The only reason that the hungry are hungry, is because they have no money. The production that would be a surplus, will vanish within years. Farmers are not going to work hard and produce for nothing!
In the end, personally I will never give up eating meat, but I onderstand that we can't exploit animals.
I don't wish to insult anyone with my response, I see that it might could be a bit confrontating.

@ Maarten: "The only reason that the hungry are hungry, is because they have no money. "
I wish it were that simple.
But I guess they don't advertise it much at university? Or maybe it's only an optional course (at best)?

Anyhow, I'll leave it up to you if you want to figure that one out :)

(If you like, you could start with the word 'fairtrade'.)

Oh and the way you describe things spikes my curiosity btw: 'wastes therefore possible nature' implies that you haven't processed the information that actual rainforest is cut down to produce food for animals (that are bred for meat). That is not 'possible nature' in my opinion and it is more then waste...

But of course these are just words and communicating by written language alone can create so much misunderstanding.

In the end, I guess we don't visit this website for nothing, right? Doesn't it imply that we too want to make the world a better place? Everyone in it's own way :)

True Verena. I came hear to see what can be done ;).
I made a summary of the correlations and causations. I'm sorry I have no problem with writing the sensitive harsh, direct and abstract. I do understand what I am talking about.
Only by doubt, you find the truth right?

Exactly :)!

No worries, I don't feel insulted. :) I can imagine it seems really extreme to you to radically change one's eating habits like that. If you would've talked to me about veganism five years ago, I would've said the same thing I guess! Turns out that once you're convinced on an ethical level, this change comes pretty naturally, at least that's how it was for me. I don't feel deprived of anything, I don't feel like my eating pattern has become boring, I think I probably enjoy cooking and eating even more than I used to before I was vegan.

I get your idea about food being part of a culture, but then again culture and food habits do change a great deal. When we think about "typical Dutch food", it's generally not the food that used to be eaten here centuries ago. Potatoes come from America, a lot of fruit and veggies that we consider normal everyday food don't naturally grow in our climate, and the habit of eating meat every day is fairly recent too, a century ago only rich folks could afford daily meat, for others it was a luxury product. We might think that, say, a plate of boiled potatoes with some steak and a tomato salad is a normal Dutch dish, but it's not as normal and as Dutch as you'd think. Even more recent changes in our eating habits are things like lasagna, nasi and shoarma. These dishes are normal enough for us, but even a few decennia ago they were considered really exotic food. I'm just saying that cultures and food habits are way more fluid than we tend tot think, they change all the time and get influenced by many different cultures, so why not by vegan/vegetarian cooking? :) (By the way, vegan sushi does exist, and not just as some weirdo vegan invention you can only get in crazy hippie restaurants, most sushi restaurants serve rolls with cucumber or advocado or some other vegetable in them, I personally find them really tasty! ^^)

Hmmm, I just noticed it's getting pretty late and I've got loads of work to do so I should probably cut my tendency to write ridiculously long posts about veganism right here and get to work. ;) Might come back to some things you said later though. Bye! :)

If u follow the logic, eating less animal products is the way and, eventually will most probably be forced upon humanity - just as we are starting to pollute less, and treat other sexes and races more equally - with more and more people on the planet, we are forced to be smarter and more loving - or self destruct.

Lovely thought for the far future, has little to do with the practical world right now..

Would it be too annoying if I said - "the future starts right now" ?
We are the world - It is my beliefs that make me see the world as I see it, and it is our collective beliefs and actions right now that will build tomorrow's world. (aka: karma)

Forced to be more smart and more loving, does not mean eating animals is over. Instead, it could be the beginning of fair food for human and animal. You don't know what the future brings.