On his thoughts on vegetarians: “They make for bad travelers and bad guests. The notion that before you even set out to go to Thailand, you say, ‘I’m not interested,’ or you’re unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don’t understand that, and I think it’s rude. You’re at Grandma’s house, you eat what Grandma serves you.”

On his loathing feelings toward vegans: “I don’t have any understanding of it. Being a vegan is a first-world phenomenon, completely self-indulgent.”

Good lord. Really? It’s the hezbollah thing all over again. How hard is it to realize that there’s nothing more “completely self-indulgent” than killing and eating animals when you don’t have to?

Is it just me or has Anthony Bourdain always felt like the phoniest of the phony celebrity chefs? His persona seems so overtly manufactured. Like, I feel that Gordon Ramsay is pretty close to what you get on Kitchen Nightmares. But Bourdain has always come off like a fake jackarse mugging for the camera.

(original link via Mom)

Just to get it out of the way: yes, the story has the expected issue of focusing on abuse rather than use, but I’m going to focus on the positive effect a piece like this could have. Here’s why I think that, obvious problems aside, the airing of this piece will be positive in the long run:

1. It aired on a mainstream news program (actually, programs)

This piece aired on ABC during prime time on World News Tonight and later in the evening on Nightline. The former is a news broadcast my dad watches (he’s not one for overtly political leaning newscasts in either direction). That’s mainstream. And they’re showing footage from Mercy for Animals. That’s pretty impressive. Sure, it’s happened before, but when this sort of footage gets in front of a mainstream audience, the idea of veganism seems a little more normal to these same people.

2. A dairy farmer dug his own hole

Did you catch the dairy farmer they interviewed? He started off by giving the standard “it’s in our best interest to treat them well” line and shortly thereafter was stumbling all over himself defending tail docking and horn clipping as “standard industry practice” (which it is) and saying, “Of course I wish we didn’t have to do it…” It was enough to make you feel sorry for the guy. Almost. Except for the whole exploiting animals for personal gain thing.

I don’t think too many people can get behind docking cow’s tails or cutting their horns. (Except for those who convince themselves it’s not a standard practice.)

3. The artificial insemination footage

It was only about two or three seconds long and it only aired on the Nightline version of the story, but I think the very brief shot they showed of a farmhand elbow deep, artificially inseminating a dairy cow could be the most important piece of footage. I think the majority of people still kid themselves with visions of happy bovines humping in meadows of green grass. I’m also pretty sure the sentiment that “well, the cows have to be milked” is still prevalent. This very short piece of footage, though, is like a slap in the face: no, these dairy cows are not naturally pregnant and happily giving their milk to us. We’re raping them, confining them, and then stealing the milk meant for their offspring, all so we can have our next hit of cheese.

I’m hoping that short bit of video replays in people’s minds when they sit down with a glass of milk or a bowl of ice cream.

And, yes, there are some problems…

While the majority of the piece focuses on these cruel practices that are going on every second of every day, there’s just enough of the welfare message that I can certainly imagine someone coming away with the idea that, “Hey, that’s awful, but at least they’re starting to phase out those practices. Now I can feel OK about consuming milk.” And that’s the big downside of championing welfare legislation as a victory: a marginal welfare improvement becomes marketing fodder for the dairy industry.

And in case there’s any doubt that this is the message that people are getting, one need look no further than the comment section on the web version of the story (or a blog entry from before the story aired). Skip past all of the “gee, thanks for only showing one side of the story!” comments and you get to ones like this:

“I pledge to drink water and hope everyone that reads this will do the same. We can live without milk, until the humane society can get this straightened out.”

It’s a shame, because if that quote ended after “We can live without milk,” it’d be perfectly fine. But I’m sorry to say: if you wait for the Humane Society to “straighten it out,” there’s a problem. Everyone has to stop waiting for someone else to fix the problem. You can help fix the problem right now, this instant. Stop drinking milk, stop eating cheese, stop eating ice cream, stop consuming dairy. There’s no magic welfare wand that can be waved that will make it all OK. I hope that soon people will start coming away from stories like this thinking, “That’s terrible and I’m not going to be a part of it” rather than “That’s terrible and, boy oh boy, someone should do something about it!”

(If you haven’t seen the story, here’s the shorter version that aired on World News Tonight. A longer version appeared on Nightline, but doesn’t appear to be archived online.)

“What is the essence of pig?” Virginia farmer Joel Salatin asked an audience of about 200 University students and Charlottesville residents last Thursday.

Dubbed “high priest of the pasture” by The New York Times, Salatin said life for his pigs is a “Hog Heaven.” His 550-acre farm, Polyface, Inc., is like an animal sanctuary, he said…

Sounds pretty nice, right?

Until you read the second paragraph of “Holy cow!” from The Cavalier Daily (VA) in full:

Dubbed “high priest of the pasture” by The New York Times, Salatin said life for his pigs is a “Hog Heaven.” His 550-acre farm, Polyface, Inc., is like an animal sanctuary, he said, created to produce high-quality pork, beef and poultry that his consumers can trust.

Wash my mouth out with vegan soap, but: what the fuck?

It gets worse:

As he describes in his latest book, “Holy Cows and Hog Heaven,” Salatin believes that the journey “from farm to fork” is a sacred one. Beginning the lecture with a quote from the Book of Genesis, he said the road to success in the agricultural world is rooted in Christianity. The reflection of Christian values onto the land and the happiness of the animals is one of the main focuses of Polyface, Inc., Salatin said.

A self-described “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic-beyond-organic farmer,” Salatin promotes six principles he believes every farmer should follow: order, forgiveness, peace, relationships, honesty, humility and healing. These principles develop a peaceful, beautiful environment and a food system consumers can appreciate.

So, apparently the ideas of “peace” and “healing” involve slaughtering animals based on something in scripture and then selling it as happy meat.

“I’m in the healing industry,” Salatin said. In his opinion, healing is one of the most important and enjoyable aspects of farming, meant to nurture the land and livestock with the utmost care and respect. His ultimate goal is not to increase productivity and efficiency, but to “make an animal sanctuary.”

Dude, if you want to build an animal sanctuary, build a place where animals, you know, have sanctuary.

If he was just promoting happy meat, that probably wouldn’t even be worth mentioning here. But Salatin’s assertion that what he provides for animals is “sanctuary” is offensive to the truly compassionate people that run actual animal sanctuaries, the people that do what they do for the animals and not for the financial benefit that comes from their death.

I think I’ll close with this quote from Salatin, a question he should ask himself a little more carefully:

“There is a respectful, righteous way and an evil way to produce — which one are we feeding?” Salatin asked.

• Covered two pigs head to tail in spray paint and tagged a third on his nose,
• Marked two heifers on their sides and rears, and
• Marked a cow’s genitalia.

But here’s the thing: the animals are being used “for show” and eventually are sold for meat. Of course the commenters on the story are saying things along the lines of “Show some respect for the animals!” Newsflash: if those animals weren’t being contained in cages at a school and used like objects, they wouldn’t be getting spray painted.

This is not to say, of course, that the kids that did it shouldn’t be caught and punished, but let’s save the holier-than-thou attitude. The confinement, use, and eventual murder of the animals is much worse abuse than the vandalism, yet the program is viewed as noble and worthy of praise and defense.

The inane, low-IQ banter is too much to take. I’m not even going to provide any commentary because, really, it’s Fox News… you know what you’re going to get.

Forget “Polly wanna cracker.” Polly wants to boogie. Or so say scientists in a pair of papers in the April 30th issue of the journal Current Biology. They found that some birds, especially parrots, can bob their heads, tap their feet and sway their bodies to a musical beat.

It’s long been thought that dancing is a uniquely human hobby. Chimps don’t move to the groove. And when was the last time you saw Fido or Fluffy shake their furry booties? But Snowball the cockatoo is another story. That bird’s got rhythm. Researchers found that Snowball can adjust the tempo of his dance moves to coincide with the speed of the music. In this study, the tune was “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys, one of the cockatoo’s faves.

But Snowball’s not the only bird who likes to boogie. In a separate study, researchers searched YouTube for videos of dancing animals. Of the 1,000 they turned up, only 15 critters actually moved in sync with the beat. Fourteen of those were parrots, one was an elephant. Pachyderms, parrots and people are all vocal mimics. So the neural circuits for vocal learning may also enable moving to the beat.

Of course, I always knew that birds could get down.

Also interesting, an article linked below the podcast, “Bird Brains: Are Parrots Smarter Than a Human Two-Year-Old?“

This is a local story about a horse that suffered a fatal heart attack just strides after winning a race. The account of his final moments is sad:

At the March 21 Piedmont Foxhounds Point-to-Point in Upperville, a fatal heart attack at the finish wire sent Quick Line, the winner, careening into the homestretch tailgate parking area.

Rider Noel Ryan, huntsman with Loudoun Hunt, was smiling as the 13-year-old gelding crossed the wire, ears pricked, easily in hand and clearly not distressed.

All that changed a stride later.

Attending veterinarian Ian Harrison of Harrison Equine in Berryville was standing near the finish line, watching Quick Line as he crossed the line.

“The horse finished well,” Harrison said. “I’d say he suffered a heart attack in the next stride,” lurching to the right, while Ryan struggled to keep his mount from veering into the course’s outer rail.

The gelding crashed through the plastic snow fence marking the course, landing between two parked cars. Ryan was thrown clear and — but for a cut on his cheek and a sore hand — was uninjured. The force of the falling horse toppled several spectators who had an instant before been cheering the runners.

According to several people involved, the horse was fit and suffered a heart abnormality that no one knew about.

“There is no blame to be placed on a horse that dies that way. The rider is not to blame, nor the course, nor the race. This just happens. It is terribly rare, but it happens to fox hunters, it happens to pleasure horses, it happens to backyard horses. It happens in people, and it can happen in racehorses. It is very sad, but there was certainly nothing anyone did wrong, and there was nothing that could have prevented it.”

Perhaps it’s true that the horse would have suffered a heart attack at some point in his life whether he was racing or not, but I find it hard to believe that one can claim that “there was nothing that could have prevented it” when he died a stride after finishing a race. My thought, obviously: they shouldn’t have been racing the horse and that would have prevented the horse from dying on that day, at that time. Or am I just talking crazy talk?

Seventy percent of all antibiotics in this country go to livestock like pigs and chickens. And concern is growing about drug-resistant bacteria that sprout up in crowded livestock facilities and may spread to humans. Now researchers suggest that a vector for that spread may be the common housefly.

Scientists from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health collected samples of both flies and poultry litter at chicken houses along the Delmarva Peninsula. That’s the region where Delaware, Maryland and Virginia meet up, and it has the highest concentration of what are known as broiler chickens in the U.S.

They isolated and analyzed antibiotic-resistant enterococci and staphylococci from both groups. The samples showed that the bacteria in both the flies and the litter have similar characteristics and genes for resistance. The researchers caution that they haven’t shown conclusively that flies are in fact spreading the diseases. But more than 30,000 flies might enter a poultry house over six weeks. And flies are known to be vectors of viral and bacterial diseases such as cholera. Another study to add to the growing pile of research suggesting our cheap meat is not as cheap as it seems.

… as in the Oxfam that provides animal donations (sorry for the PETA link)? The one that allows people to give sheep, baby chicks, goats, and more as if they were just things via their online store?

I don’t like picking apart the ways a person lives to find inconsistencies with their stated philosophies (I’m sure I’ve got plenty of my own), but things like this just baffle me. If you believe in animal sentience and rights, then you don’t donate money to a group that treats animals as commodities, clear even in the wording on their own web site.

Then, of course, there’s this gem:

I remember one of my high school teachers saying I would make a good lawyer because I kept arguing with whatever he said. I’ve never had great respect for conventions, and maybe that’s something to do with my upbringing or the period in which I came of age, the ’60s.

Well, it’s a way of answering the question of what makes it so seriously wrong to kill a being. Once you get rid of the idea that it’s just being a member of a particular species, namely homo sapiens, I argue that can’t be the answer and you need to find something else. You could say it’s wrong to kill a being whenever a being is sentient or conscious. Then you would have to say it’s just as wrong to kill a chicken or mouse as it is to kill you or me. I can’t accept that idea. It may be just as wrong, but millions of chickens are killed every day. I can’t think of that as a tragedy on the same scale as millions of humans being killed.

What is different about humans? Humans are forward-looking beings, and they have hopes and desires for the future. That seems a plausible answer to the question of why it’s so tragic when humans die.

Karen Davis replies in the comments:

Peter Singer needs to retire. Whatever fire burned in him for animals in the 1970s has burned out. He repeatedly cites chickens as exemplars of animal inferiority, not based on logic or evidence, which he has constantly repudiated, but because he personally doesn’t like chickens. He has even argued that removing the wings and brains of hens is good “welfare” if by doing so they will “suffer” less in industrial conditions. This is not animal rights or even welfare. It’s the shallowest level of ethics.

And if numbers are what partly determine the “tragedy” of innocent suffering, then the millions of people in African nations and elsewhere being tortured and murdered suffer less because there are so many of them.

(… and later…)

I’d like to add to my previous comment the concern that arises over the idea that the scale and routineness of innocent suffering somehow diminishes the significance and importance of that suffering. Just think how such logic can be used to numb ourselves to victims of war and other mass killings. Like deciding that human infants matter less than human adults because the infants aren’t “persons,” in Singer’s philosophy, this line of thought is destructive and pitiless.

This interview with the former executive chef at the ’21′ Club is interesting for this bit (emphasis added):

What’s the first thing you look at when you work on a failing restaurant?

I walk into a place and assess the damage. First of all, the food, the menu. Engineering of menus is very important. They have to have diversity: chicken, fish, vegetables. It has to please a vast majority of people with different tastes. Vegan dishes are becoming especially important.

Vegan? Really?

It seems more and more, if there is a vegan at the table, they will dictate the order. So you need to be prepared.

I can’t say I feel like the vegan Mussolini (Get it?  Order dictator?  Har!), but I was really happy to see vegans being talked about as an actual target market and not “a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.”

(via SuperVegan’s twitter feed)

Of course, the sole comment on the story is completely trollish:

(August 12, 2008 11:32 PM)

What a waste. Those animals could feed homeless people and other hungry humans. These animal "rights" activists should be ashamed of themselves. There’s a place in this world for ALL of God’s creatures — right next to the beans and mashed potatoes.

I submitted a reply, which hasn’t been approved yet:

You know what else could be used to feed homeless people and other hungry humans?  Money spent on pointless wars.

Compassion for animals and compassion for humans aren’t mutually exclusive.

I know, I know, don’t feed the trolls.  And the “pointless war” thing is kind of played out, but at its most basic level, it’s still true, no?

In addition, the station’s blog entry received its own trollish comment:

Alexandria, VA

I can’t believe that in this day and age some people are still working for the “rights” of animals. My goodness — have they run out of CONSTRUCTIVE things to do? Next thing you know they’ll want legal rights for potted plants. This is what happens when overprivileged brats lose focus in life and forgot what’s truly important: watching out for the welfare of PEOPLE.

I replied to this one as well:

It’s always funny to me how people like Adam seem to assume that a person’s belief in animal rights somehow means they’re anti-human. Animal rights and human rights are inextricably connected, as they recognize (rather than ignore or capitalize on) the suffering of “the other.”

I’ve found that those that accuse others of “wasting” time on “unconstructive” things like animal rights really aren’t doing much of anything to advance any cause other than their desire to hear themselves talk.

Anyway, I’m happy to see Poplar Spring get such good coverage on local news.  And it sounds like Karen Dawn’s book has that Skinny Bitch mainstream appeal that will get new people thinking and talking about animal issues.

(For those in the DC area, two dates to mark on your calendars: First, on Monday August 18 from 5-8:30pm, Karen Dawn will be doing a signing for her book at the sanctuary. Then, on Sunday August 31, Great Sage restaurant will be donating 10% of the day’s profits to the sanctuary.  Go get some tasty eats and support the farm.)

Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family’s hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon’s roof rack. He’d built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

I echo Chris’ sentiment of “WTF?”  Who the heck puts their dog on the roof of their car?  And we’re supposed to be all “Wow, he’s so caring about his dog!” when he builds a windshield for the carrier?

Here’s some news for Romney: dude, your dog isn’t a piece of luggage.  If the family were to get into a car accident, the dog wouldn’t stand a chance.  At least inside the car he has the protection of the vehicle’s frame.  What if the carrier came loose and fell off the car?  Again, the dog has no chance.

This is just another example of “animals as property” that so pervades our lives.  To Romney, the family dog isn’t worth space in the car.  Having him dangerously perched on the roof as they fly down the roads at 65mph is a risk that’s reasonable to him.  Would he consider that same risk with his kids?  Of course not.

Want another example of how Seamus gets treated as property?  OK.

A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

Animals rarely get much respect from the oval office.  Sure, President Bush’s dog Barney gets a nicer home page than most people have, but he’s also used to create stupid White House promotional videos.  Then, of course, there’s the debacle that is the presidential turkey pardon at Thanksgiving.  But if Romney were to become president, Seamus would be the worst-treated First Dog since Warren G. Harding’s lab named Seat Cushion.  (That last sentence was said in a manner imitating Jon Stewart.  Imagine me looking coyly at the camera.)

How you treat animals is usually a good indicator of how you treat people.  Perhaps we should keep that in mind when looking at presidential candidates.

Nina Planck is the author of “Real Food: What to Eat and Why.”

I wanted to start with the byline.  Please note that this was written by somebody with something to sell.  She has no formal training in nutrition (note: neither do I, but I’m not writing books about the subject).  Just saying.

I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.

This is purely anecdotal evidence, but everyone I’ve ever met who was “once a vegan” either a.) really wasn’t a vegan or b.) did it for a couple weeks for health purposes (never mind that veganism is an ethical way of life and not just a diet).  I’d like to hear a little bit more about her stint as a vegan.  I’m really curious because she must have been doing something pretty wrong in her own diet to conclude that it was “irresponsible” to be a pregnant vegan.

There are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long run.

Source please?  I suspect it’s less a reason of a vegan diet’s adequacy and more a reason of availability, control of food production, or reliance on historical/cultural precedent.  Our current world is much different than it was even 100 years ago.

Besides, if she says a vegan diet’s not adequate in the long run, she might want to read up on Donald Watson.  I’d say mid-90s classifies as the “long run.”  And what’s interesting is that I’m still trying to find these vegans with deficiencies.  It’s a lot easier to find omnis suffering from excesses.

Protein deficiency is one danger of a vegan diet for babies. Nutritionists used to speak of proteins as “first class” (from meat, fish, eggs and milk) and “second class” (from plants), but today this is considered denigrating to vegetarians.

I believe that this idea of “first class” and “second class” proteins goes along with the outdated notion of protein combining en vogue in the 1970s.  As long as you’re eating a varied diet of primarily whole foods, protein’s not an issue.  Back in 1982, Francis Lappe updated her classic Diet for a Small Planet to note that “In all other diets [other than fruit-based, tuber-based, or junk food-based], if people are getting enough calories, they are virtually certain of getting enough protein.”

A vegan diet may lack vitamin B12, found only in animal foods;

A lot of this is due to the pesticides we use when growing vegetables, which makes them unsafe to eat unless they’re thoroughly cleaned.  However, a simple supplement takes care of this without much problem.

usable vitamins A and D, found in meat, fish, eggs and butter; and necessary minerals like calcium and zinc. When babies are deprived of all these nutrients, they will suffer from retarded growth, rickets and nerve damage.

Vitamins A and D as well as calcium and zinc are easy to get in a vegan diet.

Yet even a breast-fed baby is at risk. Studies show that vegan breast milk lacks enough docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, the omega-3 fat found in fatty fish. It is difficult to overstate the importance of DHA, vital as it is for eye and brain development.

Most people can properly convert the Omega-3s in flax seed into EPA and DHA, but even for those that can’t, there are a number of vegan sources.

A vegan diet is equally dangerous for weaned babies and toddlers, who need plenty of protein and calcium. Too often, vegans turn to soy, which actually inhibits growth and reduces absorption of protein and minerals. That’s why health officials in Britain, Canada and other countries express caution about soy for babies. (Not here, though — perhaps because our farm policy is so soy-friendly.)

Again, I’d like to see a source quoted here, but I’m willing to bet it’s somehow tied to the dairy industry (as most anti-soy studies so far have been).  John Robbins has some useful info about mineral absorption and soy:

It is true that soybeans are high in phytates, as are many plant foods such as other beans, grains, nuts and seeds, and it is true that phytates can block the uptake of essential minerals, and particularly zinc. This would be a problem if a person consumed large amounts of phytates; for example, if they ate nothing but soybeans or wheat bran. But the phytic acid levels found in a plant-based diet including a serving or two of soy a day are not high enough to cause mineral absorption problems for most people eating varied diets. Furthermore, when soy products are fermented – as they are in tempeh, miso, and many other soyfoods – phytate levels are reduced to about a third their initial level. Other methods of soy preparation such as soaking, roasting and sprouting also significantly reduce phytate content.

While phytates can compromise mineral absorption to some degree, there is absolutely no reliable evidence that vegetarians who eat soyfoods “risk severe mineral deficiencies.” The complete adequacy of vegetarian diets is now so thoroughly proven and documented that even the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has acknowledged the legitimacy of meatless diets. In an official statement, these representatives of the beef industry declared, “Well planned vegetarian diets can meet dietary recommendations for essential nutrients.”

Back to Ms. Planck:

Historically, diet honored tradition: we ate the foods that our mothers, and their mothers, ate. Now, your neighbor or sibling may be a meat-eater or vegetarian, may ferment his foods or eat them raw. This fragmentation of the American menu reflects admirable diversity and tolerance, but food is more important than fashion. Though it’s not politically correct to say so, all diets are not created equal.

‘Tis true, but take a look at a whole foods vegan diet versus any of the fad diets and you’ll see one major difference: a vegan diet is sustainable for a lifetime while most others aren’t.

An adult who was well-nourished in utero and in infancy may choose to get by on a vegan diet, but babies are built from protein, calcium, cholesterol and fish oil. Children fed only plants will not get the precious things they need to live and grow.

I think someone needs to make a t-shirt based on the quote “Babies are built from protein, calcium, cholesterol and fish oil.”

Pieces like this one by Nina Planck seem to exist not to foster any sort of serious discussion about nutrition and diet, but for other purposes (selling books, selling papers).  Without citing any sources, it’s hard to take any claims that Planck makes seriously.  If you go out there and do the research, you’ll find that a well-planned vegan diet can be every bit as healthy as a well-planned omni diet.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

We all need to look at what we eat.  It’s not a “vegan thing.”  If you shovel food down your gullet and don’t have any concept about what’s good for you, it doesn’t matter if you’re omnivore, vegan, or breatharian — you’re going to have problems.

I’d challenge Ms. Planck or anyone else looking to cash in on the latest “VEGAN PARENTZ KILL BABY, OMG~!!” headline to debate with a dietician like Vesanto Melina or a vegan nutritionist so people can make up their minds based on facts rather than a piece of marketing fluff masquerading as an op-ed piece.

ARGH.

Some variation of this story pops up about once a year in the mainstream press.  You may remember the baby that died thanks to his supposedly vegan parents that fed him cod liver oil (NOT VEGAN).  Or the fruitarian parents who were spared jail after their baby died.

The thing is, if you look at this story, the fact that the parents were raising their children vegan has no bearing whatsoever on the story.  The child didn’t die because he wasn’t eating meat, he died because he was (allegedly) fed only soy milk and apple juice.  I’ve got news for you: if you feed your child only cow’s milk and apple juice, they’re going to die, too.

Veganism is not the issue here.  It’s poor parenting.

But thanks to the obsession with making vegans look like crazy loons, readers will continue to take away the wrong message from the story.  Instead of it being a terrible tragedy (allegedly) brought on by neglectful parents, it becomes a sweeping generalization about vegans.  In fact, as I was writing this post, an e-mail came in with a link to the story, followed by this witty comment:

Save a cow …. Kill your baby!
Vegans are sick SOB’s

As regular readers surely know by now, it can be perfectly healthy to raise a child as a vegan.  In fact, all of the vegan kids I’ve met have been healthy, vibrant, and well-adjusted.  Yeah, parents need to do a little research to make sure their child’s nutritional needs are met, but that’s not limited to vegans.  Every parent needs to read up on diet and nutrition.

Unfortunately, these unfair portraits of vegan (or supposedly vegan) parents are catchy news fodder for press and pundits.  It’d be nice if the press would leave “vegan” out of the story (and here, the headline) if it doesn’t have any real bearing on the story itself, but that doesn’t generate the same kind of buzz.

(This is fair warning: I’m not going to let this degrade into a flurry of idiotic comments.  If you’re commenting on the story, bring your A-game.)

However, GM scientists are actively investigating ways to remove the stress and aggression gene from animals, effectively turning them into complacent zombies.

The professor said it might become technically possible to produce “animal vegetables” – beasts which are “highly prolific and oblivious to their physical and mental status”.

DAMN IT. Seriously. When will we stop acting like idiots trying to invent sentience-free animals and just, you know, stop eating animals that don’t want to be eaten?!

(via BoingBoing)