*cracks open a beer and sits back down on bleachers*

The question I've yet to see answered ... I don't remember whether I heard this here or elsewhere ...

Vegetarians, and particularly vegans go on and on about not harming animals, not using animals, etc ... yet how do they justify farming and food production methods that result in the deaths of lotsa little critters, like slower and more stupid fieldmice (Rats of NIMH, anyone?), squirrels, etc. that get gnashed and run over by the combine at harvest time?

I had posed that same question but it was lost in The Crash. Farmers create habitats and ecosystems with their fields, prime homes for critters, where they build nests and burrows, and most small critters are year-round baby producers so at any given time there could be hundreds/thousands of families in, say, a field of wheat. If they're there come harvest day, there could be lots of little ghosts rising behind the reaping machine.

I knew I heard that argument somewhere ...

I don't think they do justify it, anymore than they would justify killing a squirrel that runs in front of their vehicle and can't be avoided. Falls under the "unfortunately, shit happens" category. I don't think PETA members should be expected to levitate harmlessly above the earth and slowly starve to death just because they take an ethical position against intentional killing/injuring of animals.
I also don't think they should spout off about the human health aspect of eating animals when clearly their agenda is about ethics. It seems almost unethical to me...

Jains do, kinda. I think they are on the wacky side too, but they do go a lot further in terms of "living their beliefs" than anyone from PETA ever would, IMHO.

Speak for yourself.

Don't all PETA members have to maintain a hand-planted and organically grown garden in order to support their moral dietary habits? Aren't mass-production food corporations inherently evil, too?

I heard the only meat they're allowed to eat is HUMAN BABY FLESH

Jeez, CB, getting a bit nasty, are we? It's a sad fact of life that pretty much everything we do to survive is going to have either a real or a percieved deadly effect on some other organism or third world nation - take your pick. I suppose in an ecologically correct world, man would never have gone beyond the hunter-gatherer phase. You'd eat the occasional woolly mamouth that you and/or your nearest and dearest had brought down yourselves and you'd take the moral responsibility for it (a lot of "primitive" peoples thank the animals whose lives they take in order to survive themselves). What we've got instead is life as cells in a cancer tumour upon the earth in the 21st century. All you have to do is take a deep breath of polluted air or catch a few rays under the hole in the ozone layer to realize that this is true. We in the US chow down on an ungodly amount of the world's resources and energy, and most of us never stop to think twice about it. Somehow we believe that technology will get us out of this mess that technology has put us into. Good luck on that one, everybody. Agribusiness in the form of meat production is one of the better ways we are busily depleting this planet's resources. Never mind what it does to the environment in the form of pesticides and chemical fertilizers; it is also an extremely wasteful way of sustaining life. Dine at the top of the food chain off of meat, and you're living on a pretty exclusive mountain peak whose base is quickly crumbling. Man is not excempt from extinction. We are still no different than any other species in that regard. I take a sort of comfort in this realization,

And you're telling <i>me</i> I'm getting nasty?

You just called me a tumor cell!

And I was joking!

Yeah, I guess you're right. Every now and then cynicism (or reality - take your pick) gets the better of me. Sorry 'bout that.

She's coming to the "wrong conclusions" simply because she happens to disagree with you. Her argument is factually accurate--you even admit that. She just has a different opinion than you do. All the meat eaters on this forum are so quick to say "don't force your opinions on us." Hey, it goes both ways.

watch it garnet - get everyone all wound up and they may hunt you down and eat you.

You're right, some animals are injured or killed through farming. There's absolutely no way around that. But there is a way around brutally slaughtering millions of animals everday--by choosing not to eat them. If a boat is sinking, and you know you can't save everybody, should you give up and let everyone die? NO, you do as much as you can to help.

Let the vegetarian insults begin!