Urban Hat€monger ?

You should add an L to the end of your bands name.

It makes it flow of the tongue better.

Or at least it does when I don't have nice juicy steak stuffed in my mouth anyway.

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LoathsomePete

*Wipes BBQ sauce from mouth*

yo

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Guybrush

Welcome to MusicBanter, Erica!

I think I'm the only one here except you with a degree in biology (not 100% sure though) and I'm currently working on a master thesis on wind dispersal of terrestrial invertebrates like mites and springtails on Svalbard (norwegian high arctic). What is it you do?

edit :

By the way, people are gonna ask you about this for forever, so I might as well be the first to do so here Why did you become a vegan?

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VEGANGELICA

Hello people,

Thank you for all your unique and interesting ways of welcoming me. I’ll respond to your recent comments in the order in which they were made.

DAC, you said “wat?” when learning about a vegan vegetarian band. At the bottom of this post, in answer to Toretorden’s questions, I describe what it means (to me) to make vegan vegetarian music. If you’d like to learn more, please scroll down (and down and down and down).

JACKHAMMER, thanks for the welcome. You are correct--there isn’t much meat to my music. It’s more like boiled kale...kind of tough, makes you chew a long time, and tastes rather bitter, but (I feel) is actually very healthful when digested!

THE UNFAN, you wrote: “Every time you sing a song about how precious a cow’s life is I’m going to eat a hamburger. Edit: Jesus Christ, get out of my state please.”

Ahhh...this was an interesting comment. As an atheist, I am flattered that you have apparently mistaken me for Jesus Christ, since many people think he was quite admirable...someone who cared for the meek, the children, the women, and all those given little social regard back when he apparently lived.

I am rather taken aback that I will from now on have so much power over what you put in your mouth. That is a great honor. It is a little unsettling, though, to know that I could make someone’s stomach explode!

Of course, in reality if you want to eat a hamburger, it is your choice to do so or not. It is still legal to eat hamburgers...at least for *NOW*, that is...bwaa haa haaa, BWAA HAA HAAA, BWAA HAA HAAAAA!!!! (Evil vegan laughter). Seriously, though, I am curious, Unfan...if my singing about the preciousness of a cow’s life causes you to eat a hamburger, then when I sing about the slaughter and eating of dogs in China, or primates and other “bush meat” in Africa, or human children in North Korea during the 2002 famine, will you also be searching for these foods to consume in retribution? And if not, what are your reasons?

Your comments are a common negative response one hears when some people are confronted with veganism...that is, by someone who is pointing out that people have the choice not to eat animal products, and there are many good reasons to make this choice. I understand that no one wants to be told what to do/eat. I agree it is unpalatable to be deprived of autonomy. If that is the case for you, Unfan, then I should think whatever anger you have toward veganism should be magnified at least 50-fold and directed at all the people who, I assume, gave you no choice at all about becoming a meat-eater. If you are like the typical omnivore, then family members and schools probably gave you meat without any option. Similarly, the animal industry has been telling you repeatedly to eat meat, dairy, and eggs.

If you feel your freedom of choice is being attacked when people simply sing about the positive reasons for eating plant-based diets, and the negatives of eating animal-based diets, then why are you not angry at all the people who have forced meat and a meat-eating culture on you since you were a baby? And, are you really from Iowa? Do you know other MB Iowans?

URBAN HATEMONGER...I agree with you that “vegangelical” does flow better than “vegangelica." Vegangelical is a recent (pejorative) term for a vegan who is trying to inform people about reasons for choosing a plant-based diet (among other lifestyle choices)...which is the motivation for my songs, so in that regard it would make sense to name our band “vegangelical.”

However, we picked “vegangelica” because...
(1) Angelica is a genus of fragrant herbs with edible roots often considered a protector of children and women, and is within the carrot family...carrots, of course, being the universal symbol of vegetarianism;
(2) Angelica is also a sweet dessert wine made from grapes, the universal symbol of earth’s fecundity and bounty.

POBODYS NERFECT (clever name!), BBQ sauce, which you are wiping from your mouth, is actually usually derived from inorganic compounds and plants (herbs, etc), and is...VEGAN! I know, I know...shocking. Maybe you are a closet vegan if you are enjoying BBQ sauce. It’s okay...you can confess it to me. I’ll understand.

Last, but not least, TORETORDEN: thanks for your welcome and your questions! I looked up mites and springtails in the tundra and was surprised to learn that mites are one of the most common invertebrates there. Plus, they are a wonderful example of natural selection with their ability to synthesize glycerol as a natural antifreeze to survive -40 C temperatures! What amazing and tough little animals you are studying up there in Norway. I remember sitting on some rocks in windswept, grassy areas somewhere in Norway and observing lemmings when I was 18. I didn’t realize it was probably crawling with mites.

You asked about my biology work. I’m a research associate at a university where I study the genetics of maize cultivars that have amino acid ratios similar to those of cow’s milk. These maize cultivars are grown in some developing countries to help combat world hunger, because in many parts of the world people rely on maize as their main protein source. Plant-based diets with few animal products in them are very efficient, maximizing the number of people who can be fed off a given area of arable land, and minimizing freshwater consumption. We are trying to learn more about these cultivars so that it is easier for people to breed them to suit their local climate needs.

Toretorden, you asked why I became vegan. Thank you for asking. In order to make sure we’re talking about the same thing, I first want to clarify what being vegan means to me. As a vegan I try to reduce the suffering of sentient beings and also help them live their lives with autonomy as long as their lives can naturally extend. I nourish myself with plants and synthetic vitamin B-12, and use products made from plants rather than animals.

I also try to treat human beings (who are animals, after all!) with kindness and respect. For example, I support genital integrity for children, which means that I oppose non-therapeutic genital cutting (i.e. circumcision) of all children, both boys and girls, so that they can grow up to make their own choices about their most private of body parts. I support equality for people regardless of ethnicity, gender, gender identity or lack thereof, and sexual preference.

All of these causes, which are described in my song lyrics, are part of veganism as I view it. Being vegan is simply trying to treat others kindly. I believe everyone, when singing/making music, has some message or emotion s/he wishes to convey, and usually some reason for wishing to share it through music, one of the oldest forms of emotional communication. In my case, the motivation and the content of the songs is based on veganism. Living in Iowa, the home of animal agriculture, I always have a lot of inspiration for writing songs.

Toretorden, you asked me why I become vegan. The answer: I realized that other animals have feelings and lives that are important to them, and so I did not want to be responsible for ending their one chance to live. Because I enjoy living so much, I do not want to deprive another sentient being of this joy.

If you think about how you may have felt about some animal (such as a dog or cat) whom you cared about and wished well for, for her own sake...and then broaden the sphere of compassion to more and more species, this is the process I think many people go through as they choose to become vegan.

My first vegan leanings began when I was 5 years old. Some French relatives took me to a aquaculture fishery and told me to scoop up a fish using a basket. I thought we were getting a pet and so, looking into the murky, fish-filled water of the artificial pond, I naively scooped up a fish and took the fish to a woman employee. The woman grabbed the fish and, to my horror, took out a hammer and WHAM WHAM WHAM bashed its head in. I was appalled that she had killed this poor fish, who had done her no harm and was no threat to her.

That night I told my relatives I did not want to eat the fish for dinner. They told me I either had to eat the fish or have no dinner. I chose to have no dinner.

I never lost that basic, intuitive feeling I had at age 5 that it is unkind to kill someone who has feelings. I became ovo-lactovegetarian when I was 18, and vegan at 28. Before I became vegan I remember thinking vegans were far-out and extreme. Then I realized that a 25-year supply of vitamin B-12 costs only 4 dollars. Rather than support the killing of hundreds and hundreds of animals to get vitamin B-12, I could simply eat synthetic vitamin B-12. Ironically, pig producers actually feed synthetic vitamin B-12 to pigs...whom people then claim you need to eat to get vitamin B-12!!

Now that I’ve been vegan for 12 years, the fact that I once felt vegans were extreme always makes me smile. I would say that the lengths to which the animal industry goes to raise, slaughter, chill, package, and ship animal products...and try to convince consumers that they need them...is much more extreme than buying a $4 bottle of synthetic vitamin B-12.

–Erica

Guybrush

Hehe, I'll admit I think vegans are quite extreme myself. I can understand it's a moral point of view where you think it's immoral to end lives of other creatures. I don't agree with you though, like I don't think it's immoral for a lion to kill an antilope, I don't think it's immoral for me to go out and fish or catch crabs to eat, a couple of things I like to do in summer on occasion. Not living off animals seems a little unnatural considering how important it's been for our own evolution. I understand that now we don't have to so it's a kind of luxury, but I still think animals killing animals is perfectly natural.

However, I do get a lot of the other arguments, particularly the one that you can feed so much more people with plants than you can with animals. I applaud the work you do, something like that has the potential to help a lot of people I'm also against needless animal cruelty which you have a lot of in the meat industry. I do try to be an aware consumer in regards to where my meat comes from.

I'm fortunate to live in Norway. Here, there's a lot of land which is not suitable for agriculture, but which is suitable for keeping animals like cattle or sheep. Also, a pig has many more rights than I do and I think standards for many animals are relatively high here. All grazers get a lot of time out by law and once I even visited this very cool cow barn where the cows milked themselves They were lying on mattresses, could get free scrubs from these rotating brushes, could go out if they wanted and whenever the udders started aching, they could walk into this milking machine that attached automatically. Surprisingly, they claimed the production was higher than in a "normal" barn too.

There's very few vegetarians here as a result, I think, but I do know quite a few from Svalbard where there are a lot of international students. I think it's often an interesting discussion and some of the people up there who are vegetarians in their home country home would even eat meat that had been hunted up there on the basis that hunted animals have lived a natural life up until the moment where they were shot.

Anyways, these days it's just a matter of time (okay, maybe quite a bit of time) before advances in stem cell technology makes it so we can start growing steaks out of petri dishes. I guess that should help with some of the moral concerns!

edit :

Ohh and about the mites, they are sturdy little fellas, that's true. Some of the springtails also have very interesting cold/drought adaptations .. Onychiurus arcticus has a water permeable cuticula and when it gets cold and ice starts forming, water leaves it's body to join the surrounding ice particles. This dries the animals out, making the concentrations of solubles like salts, sugars and so on higher and higher the colder it gets. The result is the animal shrivels up and can survive extremely low temperatures in this dehydrated state for years.



So yeah, there are many tough little creatures up there ..

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VEGANGELICA

Hi, Toretorden,

That is a mitey nice picture of a plump and a shriveled, solute-concentrated springtail! (I know they aren't mites, but I thought I'd try to throw in the "mitey" pun anyway).

Thanks for sharing what the situation is like for livestock animals in Norway and also discussing where our views coincide and where they do not. I enjoy civil discussions about contentious topics like religion, vegetarianism, ethics, politics, etc., so thank you for engaging in one with me! I see that we are similar in that we think about this issue of how people choose to treat animals.

I think you are very right that Europe is much more concerned with the ethical treatment of non-human animals than in the U.S. Europe's animal welfare laws are much more progressive. I am glad for that, and for the care given to cattle and pigs in Norway.

The question I then would ask, though, is this: when one acknowledges that these animals have feelings including pleasure (enjoying mattresses, scrubbing, etc.), what makes it ethical or not ethical to end their pleasure (through slaughter)? There is no right or wrong answer, just different answers, as with any ethics question.

Tore, I agree with you completely that animals killing animals is natural, and so humans killing animals is natural. I also agree with you that humankind has evolved with the capacity to kill and eat other animals.

However, I see several difficulties with basing what we feel is ethical behavior on what occurs in nature:

(1) Many natural behaviors are ones that most people would not feel are ethical (would not want people to emulate).

If we are to look to nature as a guide for what we feel is ethical behavior, and therefore conclude that it is ethical for humans to kill other animals, then shouldn't we also be emulating the male lion's actions when he takes over a pride after killing or driving off the previous lead male? The new male lion typically kills and eats the children of the predecessor, and then impregnates all the females. If we aren't going to emulate the lion in its child-killing behavior, then why should we emulate it in its antelope-killing behavior?

This is an example of why people may not want to use nature as a guide for what they wish to consider as ethical, unless we wish to condone and support murder, infanticide, rape, male domination over female, etc. etc.

(2) Humans generally develop a greater capacity for complex moral reasoning than other animals, as best we can tell, and so it is fair to hold humans to a different standard.

For example, when a lion kills an antelope, I agree with you that the lion is not acting immorally because as far as I know the lion is not capable of thinking about its food, which it must eat to survive, in ethical terms. This is not to say lions don't feel affection, love, devotion, kindness, etc. (for other lions, for example), but they probably do not have these feelings for their prey. Humans, meanwhile, naturally can have feelings for other animals, and have the capacity to care about them, and so if a human were to go out and kill an antelope I would not judge that using the same ethical ruler I use when observing the lion's behavior.

Similarly, with human children, we do not expect them to have learned or developed the moral capacities of older adults. This is reflected in the legal repercussions that result when children vs. adults break a law: the punishment is usually lighter for a child. It is not as unethical when a child hits me on the leg as it is when a full adult, whom we expect to have developed the ability for speech and self-control, punches me. So, if a dog goes out and kills a cat, I will be less upset with the dog than if a teenage son goes out and kills a cat, because the latter behavior suggests a scary lack of compassion for another being...(unless the animal is a pig..then most people condone it...but why the difference?). I will feel equally sad for the cat, in both scenarios.

(3) A third problem I see with using nature as a guide for ethics: When something occurs in nature (such as predation), this does not mean it is "good" or "bad"...it could be both.

For example, whenever my child and I watch a nature show and we see a lion killing an antelope, I explain the situation (the lion needs to eat other animals in order to survive), and I say, "When the lion kills the antelope, this is good for the lion and bad for the antelope." Whether something is ethical usually depends on whose viewpoint one is taking :-).

Tore, I feel you make the very valid point...which is one of the strongest arguments in support of people eating animals products...that for many people in the world where the land is not suitable for agriculture, given that people live there, then their only current option may be to eat animal products they get from grazing animals.

Like you note, though, in Norway presumably much food can be imported (vegetables, fruits), and so one *could* import more beans/grains if people wished to be vegan. I am thinking more of the developing countries where due to poverty people can afford to buy very little and may depend on cattle for their survival. That situation is much more similar to the lion and the antelope.

It is true that I would feel more likely to drink a domesticated cow's milk or eat eggs if I were assured the animals were happy, able to express their natural desires, form family and friendships, etc....plus be allowed to live out their lives in full. I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian for such a long time because I didn't realize that people kill all male chicks of egg-laying breeds, or kill the male calves of dairy cows, etc.

I've enjoyed discussing with you the age-old topic of humanity's relationship with, and responsiblity for, other animals!

--Erica

Guybrush

Hehe, I love serious and civil discussion too and it's some of what I like to do the most here It's appearant you've obviously thought about this a lot because there's validity to every point. I still see some points where I disagree a little, so :

Of course I never meant that we should emulate lions, only that from some point and up until recently in the course of our evolutionary history, we relied on animals for food - just like lions or wolves. It was a comparison.

I think a lot of our morals come from our own biology as social animals. Humans have great care for eachother, especially those they consider part of "us" and not "them". We've evolved for living in groups who cooperated and made it together, no doubt with a lot of family relations. If you could look at very primitive societies and their culture, I don't think child killing, murder and rape would be as dominant and accepted as you insinuate and it's our own primitive behaviour, not that of the lion, that we would "emulate" through hunting.

Though you could for good reason say it's not really "emulation" because we haven't changed that much biologically since then. I know it's a popular myth that humans are an awful, hateful species but I don't agree. I think it's up to the "us" (meaning people whom your fitness is partially dependent on - or that you treat as such) and "them" (the people you are in a competition for resources against, such as those from another tribe or social group). I think generally, most treat those they consider "us" very well.

Of course, there are exploitation strategies in nature (rape, vampire bats only taking and not sharing blood, sneaky f*cker fish that infiltrate dominant males harems and look like females), but no animals except the exploiters benefit from those and counter-strategies usually evolve, so I think those are besides the point. A population that only had exploiters would do much worse and might die out completely and generally, they do better the less exploitation there is. That's also a "moral" lesson one could learn from nature.


I agree that we have more capacity for moralistic concern, at least intellectually, than other animals. And also your points about children!


I agree that good or bad is entirely relative .. Unless you were out in nature and starving and could catch and eat a salmon. Then catching and killing the salmon would be a good thing, at least most people should agree

However, of course I do know that most of us are not out there starving in nature.

I don't think it would be good for Norway to stop animal farming because then those farmers would go out of business or do something else, Norway would lose some of it's autonomy and there's a lot of culture tied up in animal farming. Norway is not part of the EU and a big part of that is because we want to protect our agriculture from the outside markets from which they can't compete with. We all agree to pay a little more for our typical farm products so that it's possible to make a living being a farmer. It may sound ironic, but hundreds and hundreds of years of animal farming also has created some of our rarest habitats (particularly sheep grazed mountaineous areas and islands in the west) and these are in danger of getting lost to reforestation and other successive events taking place when you remove grazers, so you could say from a point of view, there's even an ecological concern.

There are of course a lot of factors playing in how we view things. I'm guessing that for you, being a vegan is a very emotional choice - examplified by the story about when you were 5. When I was a kid, my father taught me how to fish and gut fish, how to fish crabs and so on so all this is, for me, entirely natural. However, I'm not entirely sure what else it means to be a vegan. For example, vegans are against milk - but as you know, breeding has turned cows into animals that produce a lot of milk and if you don't milk them, they are not happy (which is why the automated barn works, the animals choose to get milked). You then have to admit that you using milk doesn't have to go hand in hand with animal suffering, there are exceptions. As long as there are cows, there's milk so we won't get rid of it until there are no more cows and if we do get rid of it, that would have a massive impact on culture such as cooking or even religion.

Now I'm extrapolating to the point where it's ridiculous of course but I guess what I'm wondering is are you against milk when you think it causes suffering or are you always against it? If you had one industry which caused suffering to cows and one that had happy cows, could you as a vegan support the good one?

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333

I've enjoyed your discussion very much, Toretorden and Vegangelica. It has enlightened me to a more personal aspect of the Vegan lifestyle and biology as well.

To answer your question, Erica, I am still a student. I'm currently in the process of transferring from one college to another. I am in my second year at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC. My next stop is Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. My initial goals involved Anatomic Pathology because of a long-time fascination I've had with diseases, the human body and death; however, after two years of education in a mediocre school that hasn't provided me with enough challenges, I had more spare time than ever. I used this time to do a little introspective searching and found a new passion for plants. I consider myself fairly new to all this, so bear with me now. I, then, began looking into Phytopathology, which I feel I still know nothing about. I'm 21 years old, and feel that I've a good amount of time to decide and the best thing to do is place myself in an appropriate environment to pursue my goals.

That said, Tore, I believe you are the only one on MB that holds a degree in biology, aside from Erica now. I did not know this, and am beginning to realize why I was so intimidated and put-off by you. A new respect has begun as I read about your research work and I send my apologies for any negative energy I've sent your way. Mostly, I'm thrilled to have met two very knowledgeable biologists who share a passion for music that I can look up to.

Stone Birds

wow you 2 could write a freaking novel

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VEGANGELICA

As the novel continues...

Hi, 333! I'm glad you've enjoyed the discussion and hope you have a good journey to Washington as you shift your educational interests. There are a lot of nasty ways plants die due to disease and infestation...so phytopathology is an area that will always be of major interest in biology and industry...especially if the impacts of climate change on diseases (of humans and plants) are as predicted. I'm glad you are able to have the freedom to figure out just where your interests are. I did my masters on soybeans' hypersensitive response, in which leaves undergo localized death around the site of infection to try to prevent the spread of bacteria (an interesting example of cells "sacrificing themselves" for the sake of the whole organism).

TORETORDEN...
Thanks again for the thoughtful reply. I've been visiting with my Norwegian and Swedish-American inlaws and, now that I have returned, can put more time into answering your questions and replying to your post.

ON THE ETHICS OF USING DOMESTICATED ANIMALS:
You asked: "Now I'm extrapolating to the point where it's ridiculous of course but I guess what I'm wondering is are you against milk when you think it causes suffering or are you always against it? If you had one industry which caused suffering to cows and one that had happy cows, could you as a vegan support the good one?"

When I was ovo-lacto vegetarian for 10 years, I made peace with drinking milk and eggs because I assumed cows and chickens weren't killed and were treated well, both of which I learned were incorrect for parts of their, or their children's, lifespans. Unfortunately, both the dairy and egg industry currently are based on harming animals...and I'll explain the reasons in a moment.

If cows didn't suffer in any way, then, yes, I'd be less against people using them...except there would still be the issue of their loss of autonomy, their inability (due to humans) to form their own family and friendship relationships as they wish. For example, does Norway actually let cow mothers and children live together? Here in the U.S. dairy farmers take *all* of the mother's milk, not allowing her to nurse her calf for the full year or so calves normally want to suckle.

You wrote: "You then have to admit that you using milk doesn't have to go hand in hand with animal suffering. As long as there are cows, there's milk."

The reality is that cows do not give milk continually, Tore, unless two things happen:

(1) The cows are impregnated (in U.S. dairies, people generally do this artificially, collecting sperm from prime animals and impregnating females). If a cow has given birth, then within a year her milk supply starts to fall, and so people must impregnate her again if they want more milk from her. Cows are impregnated once per year to ensure they produce "enough" milk for human desires.

(2) After the calf is born, the calf is taken away so that people can take the milk. Female calves are taken away after several days and raised to be dairy cows. Male calves, alas, since they won't ever make milk, and weren't bred to put on weight efficiently = cheaply (like "beef" animals), are a "byproduct" of the dairy industry. The veal industry arose to create some "use" for male dairy calves. People kill male dairy calves when they are just 7 or so weeks old. In the U.S., they can still be housed separately (no physical contact at ALL with other animals). The EU requires group housing of "veal" calves, if I recall correctly.

So, wherever you have dairy cows, you will have a veal industry. I checked: Norway has veal industry.

(3) As you noted, domesticated cows produce a lot of milk. This shows the wonderful genetic variability that people have exploited, *not with the best interests of the cows in mind,* by selecting generation after generation of cows to suit human needs. Because domesticated dairy cows give so much milk, their other body systems generally suffer. By age 6 or 7, their milk production begins to drop. The dairy cows are no longer "worth their inputs," and so people show their thanks to the cows by killing them, although a cow could naturally live 15 - 20 years. All that is in a glass of milk.

So "as long as there are cows, there is milk" is a simplification, and one I didn't know about until I was 27 after years as an ovo-lacto vegetarian who hadn't done a lot of research...and perhaps didn't want to, because I liked yogurt and cheese. In fact, if people simply stopped their human-cow sexual relationship (a strange form of bestiality, I'd say, in which people milk the sperm from cattle, and impregnate females...which is typical for domesticated animals here in the U.S.), within several years the domestic cow population would plummet.

The story for eggs is similar. In an eggshell: people impregnate chickens; the chickens lay massive numbers of eggs; they are incubated in machines; the eggs hatch; half of them are male and are not useful for raising for meat (too expensive due to low feed-meat conversion efficiency), and of course these male chicks will *never* lay eggs. They are considered useless and so are crushed to death. In the U.S. this is what people do to approximately 8 million baby male chicks within days of their hatching, per year...something I can't help but notice the "Incredible Edible Egg" industry doesn't advertise to the public.

Meanwhile, the female egg-laying chickens, producing far too many eggs for their health, are "spent" after just a year (egg-production drops so it isn't worth feeding them), and people, again, showing their infinite mercy and sense of justice...kill them. Iowa is a lead egg-producing state in the U.S.

The reasons these animal exploitation schemes continue are, as in most human endeavors, given by two words: MONEY; TRADITION. And...people will do almost anything to satisfy their taste. Taste trumps all other concerns for most people.

ON HUMAN LOVE:
Yes, I agree with you completely that people are very compassionate toward those they consider to be "us." Human bands (existing long ago)...essentially an extended family...were very helpful and kind to those within their band. Apparently if a member of two bands met, they'd sit down and try to figure out if they had any relation in common. If they did, all was fine and they'd go on in peace. If they didn't, they'd try to kill each other.

The world of humanity currently suffers greatly from this us/them mentality (example: Israel/Palestine), and from people making choices that do not include equal voices for all members (again: Israel/Palestine situation...beginning back when certain countries created Israel).

And, unfortunately, people sometimes see "us" and "them" within the same family. Worldwide, women and children suffer the most from malnourishment because many males (and cultures...so women will do it, too) see women as being of less value, and so don't allow them or the kids to eat as much food, get educations, etc. Or we can look in history at, for example, Carthage. The god Baal (a human creation, I would say) demanded people sacrifice their firstborn babies...which they apparently did with gusto...and so now, around 20,000 pots containing newborn babies' charred remains are buried at Carthage, and appear to support historical records saying that people there practiced child sacrifice. (Sometimes families would take pity on their own children and so would buy slave children to sacrifice. Ugh).

All this points to the extreme flexibility of human behaviors. We are by nature capable of great compassion, I agree. And we are very social creatures, as demonstrated by the existence of MB, for example! To whom we direct that compassion is part of our culture, and as a vegan I support and argue for people broadening that circle of compassion to more and more sentient beings.

ON CULTURE/TRADITION:
You wrote, "There's a lot of culture tied up in animal farming." This is very true; however, I would argue that not all cultural traditions are necessarily ones that one should wish to continue based solely on the fact that they are traditions (which I know you are not doing...you pointed, out, for example, that the fairly short human history of animal domestication has led to altered, but unique, ecosystems, that have intrinsic value, as do domesticated animals themselves).

I would prefer to look at each tradition individually and critique it according to whether it is one I feel should be perpetuated or not. I will use an example that is very close to home for you in Norway. According to all I've read, Norway and Norwegians continue (in defiance of United Nations rules) to kill around 2,000 Minke whales per year (out of a Minke whale population of 107,000 individuals) for the sake of "tradition." Norwegians generally kill the Minke whales (says Wikipedia, at least) using "explosive penthrite grenade harpoons." So here's a question: is this good or is this bad behavior toward whales? Is this a tradition that would best die, or should be continued for the sake of a few whalers and some tasty whale meat dishes?

The killing of whales by Norway, Iceland, and Japan (the latter for "scientific reasons" that somehow appear to always result in the whales being eaten...how *convenient*) is not a huge economic industry. The countries' GNP would scarcely be affected if whaling were stopped...but people continue it...and from what I have read, Norwegians in general defend whaling staunchly...for the sake of tradition...much like many people in the U.S. West defend raising cattle there (despite gross environmental damage).

So, what do you feel about whaling? Is this, indeed, a hot topic in Norway?

Bye for now,
--Erica