I'd thought about it, a lot actually. It's the reason I tried to go vegan for a while before I started hunting. I think the answers to ethical questions that arise when contemplating ones diet, will be different for everyone. I don't run around telling people what they should or should not do, but I will ask them to think. Ask questions. Do some research. Be honest.
Deciding to add the latest ingredient for a healthy diet just may seem like a brilliant idea, but may be creating complicated shock waves where the food is produced http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/01/quinoa_bad_for_bolivian_and_peruvian_farmers_ignore_the_media_hand_wringing.html
Are we supporting our local environment, and our local food producers through our choices? Are we supporting ethical and sustainable methods of production? We can close our eyes and take a big bite of that steak in front of us... and really, that's what happens at billions of tables every meal. Society today is so far removed from the realities of survival: finding food, finding drinkable water, creating shelter from the building blocks around us. We used to be punished rather quickly by our environment when we made bad choices, but now being so detached from the environments producing our food, we ravage with impunity.
If you eat meat, where does it come from? Luckily the situations shown in the video below are not necessarily the worldwide norm, but the very idea of factory farming sends alarm bells ringing in my head. I was once scolded by the wife of one of my clients for hunting. She's a self professed animal lover, and spends her weekends volunteering at an animal shelter. Over dinner at their house, she asked me how I could kill animals. If I wanted meat, there was plenty of it at the supermarket she said. It was ironic that she asked me this as we were eating beef.
I told her that it was to fill the freezer, and to feed the dogs. I decided a while ago that it was more ethical to eat an animal that had been free its entire life, to live naturally and organically in the wild, suffering for perhaps the last few minutes while being hunted by me, than to cage an animal for its entire life, feeding it processed feed, and pumping it full of medication, in an environment that is often abusive and brutal.
Deciding to add the latest ingredient for a healthy diet just may seem like a brilliant idea, but may be creating complicated shock waves where the food is produced http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/01/quinoa_bad_for_bolivian_and_peruvian_farmers_ignore_the_media_hand_wringing.html
Are we supporting our local environment, and our local food producers through our choices? Are we supporting ethical and sustainable methods of production? We can close our eyes and take a big bite of that steak in front of us... and really, that's what happens at billions of tables every meal. Society today is so far removed from the realities of survival: finding food, finding drinkable water, creating shelter from the building blocks around us. We used to be punished rather quickly by our environment when we made bad choices, but now being so detached from the environments producing our food, we ravage with impunity.
If you eat meat, where does it come from? Luckily the situations shown in the video below are not necessarily the worldwide norm, but the very idea of factory farming sends alarm bells ringing in my head. I was once scolded by the wife of one of my clients for hunting. She's a self professed animal lover, and spends her weekends volunteering at an animal shelter. Over dinner at their house, she asked me how I could kill animals. If I wanted meat, there was plenty of it at the supermarket she said. It was ironic that she asked me this as we were eating beef.
I told her that it was to fill the freezer, and to feed the dogs. I decided a while ago that it was more ethical to eat an animal that had been free its entire life, to live naturally and organically in the wild, suffering for perhaps the last few minutes while being hunted by me, than to cage an animal for its entire life, feeding it processed feed, and pumping it full of medication, in an environment that is often abusive and brutal.
When I had dinner with this family again a few weeks later, the wife had her rebuttal prepared. "When you kill an animal in the wild, you are killing a mother or father or baby!"
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