I used to be a vegetarian, longer than I have been vegan, for nearly 10 years, because I was under the wrong impression of needing protein from eggs, milk and cheese to live healthy.

I came to the conclusion that as a vegetarian I'm still contributing to needless animal suffering, because it turns out that the dairy and egg industries are the two cruelest businesses out of all of them, and even then they are closely tied to meat production.

Male chicks being thrown by the bucket load into blenders and grinders because they are no use. The egg laying hens in the dark to save electricity costs, inside cages where they cannot move, or have fencing for a floor. Wings clipped, beaks chopped or burnt off. When they stop laying or collapse from exhaustion they get killed for meat anyway.

It's the same for the dairy industry, horns cut or burnt off, if they're born male they get turned into veal. Female cows constantly impregnanted to force milk production until they stop or collapse, then get turned into meat anyway.


I don't think I've called anyone a murderer, torturer or rapist. But people seem to love telling me that I do.

If anything I would be calling you an accomplice, since I doubt you are the one doing it. I wouldn't be doing it to make myself feel better, I'd be doing it because it's true. You're paying someone else to torture, and kill totally unnecessarily - There is no reason to eat any animal product for the majority of people on this planet.

I've put this out there in the past, and it still counts - if anyone can give me one good logical reason to eat any animal product, I'll eat a raw bloody steak on youtube.

Upvoted when it started lip... beak? syncing.

I'm not disagreeing with you that there are farms where the animals are treated well in comparison. But the majority of food does not come from these farms. Like you said these are usually small scale operations like your aunt. We're talking 50-60 billion animals a year. Millions of animals per hour in the US alone. They simply need to kill them as young as possible to even meet the demand, through industrialized means. They call it factory farming for a reason.
And no factory farmers don't care about the well-being of animals. Any minor growth benefits of happy animals are easily outweighed by a few hormone injections. It's cheaper and faster. If they cared: They wouldn't rip piglets balls off with their bare hands to neuter them. They wouldn't keep "cage less" chickens in the dark to save on electricity. They wouldn't hold a chickens head to a sander or iron to de-beak them. They wouldn't grind up baby male chickens in a blender alive. They wouldn't cut off pigs tales without anesthetic. So on and So on. Your food might comes from some nice farm like your aunts, but for most of people it does not.

You're right that eating animals that died of old age is probably the only truly ethical way you could eat them. Though they'd have to have reproduced naturally too.

I'm not a fan of the eat less concept because of the morality aspect. It might work for some people, and it's probably not a bad short term stepping stone to get to people thinking about the consequences. But it just doesn't add up to me ethically: I wouldn't go from kicking a dog 10 times a week to just 3 times a week, because it means I'm kicking 7 less dogs. It's still a terrible thing to do, so why even be part of that cycle.

Because most people are raised as meat eaters, I think their perspective is completely wrong, as was mine. When they talk to vegans they always give reasons to not give up animal products. But to me the question really is: What is the reason TO eat any animal products at all?


Health wise it's a no-brainer there are a ton of good books about nutrition, like "How Not To Die" by Dr. Michael Greger, or any book by Dr. Neal Barnard, Dr. Cadwell Esselstyn, or Dr. John McDougall. ( all their work is based on thousands of peer reviewed and published research papers ).

Animal compassion wise it's a no-brainer. Animals want to live and be happy period. Everything else is just an excuse to keep exploiting them.

With documentaries like Cowspiracy and Earthlings coming out, it's people are becoming aware that we're all on one planet and if people went vegan overnight, that's 1/2 of the global warming gone. That's 1 football field a second of rainforest (and all of the animals and unique species ) being destroyed. That's the fish not going extinct in the next 10 years. That's GMO's not killing the pollinating bees and earthworms (which are necessary part of the ecosystem, we'll die without them).

So what reason is really left to eat any animal products?

Taste. People don't want to become vegan because they think they are giving up something and it's not true. It's more like trading a bad habit for something truly great. And it's free. And it has the potential to change the world.

I'm yet to hear a good reason to eat any animal product.(from anyone I mean)

That's a little on the nose, given the situation. Or is it on the beak? I'm not going to let Russia's propaganda machine stuff me with their lies. I just won't gobble it. Put a fork in me; I'm done!

OK, his studies beat my anecdotal bias.

...That being said, I will continue to eat breakfast cereal with milk pretty much every day (as I have since I was very very young), and be strongly tempted to attribute my own lack of having ever broken a bone to that.

The other anecdote I have in my favor is coming from a farm family that raised chickens. I grew up in a prairie grassland area (converted to irrigated farmland thanks to aquifer access), while my cousins lived a couple hours away in limestone hills ranchland. Both of our families raised free range chickens.

Our chickens produced very thin-shelled eggs, and displayed behavior to suggest they were calcium-deprived. For example, our chickens wouldn't cannibalize their own viable eggs, but if we threw empty shells to them they would fight to eat the shells. Same but to a lesser extent for leftover bones, etc. (I assume they fought less over these because bones are harder to near impossible to break down with a beak). On the other side of the table, we sometimes exchanged eggs with my cousins, and their chicken's eggs were always extremely thick-shelled and hard to crack open.

When I asked about that, my folks told me (and later my Biology teacher confirmed) that was because the sod/soil around my home and flora and fauna growing from it contained very little natural calcium. Chickens raised in our area would often be supplemented with commercial feed that contained extra calcium, but we let ours range for food and eat table scraps; almost never supplementing their food with any commercial stuff. But the limestone (aka calcium carbonate) around my cousin's house contained very high amounts of natural calcium, which was naturally infused into the plants / grains / insects that their chickens ate, giving them incredibly thick shells.

So, I guess that while calcium intake apparently doesn't have a very statistically significant impact on human bone growth, I think that it must have a much more significant role to play in egg thickness if you happen to be a chicken... At least if you compare extremes of low natural calcium diet versus extremely high natural calcium diet.

Watch it in .25 slow motion. It snatches it out of his mouth with its beak right before he bites.

I can only go with the information I have, and not being familiar with your local crows and ravens, googled them

The pages I found said that you tell them apart by tail (shown, but unclear), size (not shown), and habitat (too lazy to look up). None of them said to differentiate by head shape of beak.

Conspiracy theory? No... Going with information supplied with video? Yes! Unless provided with snowmen or reindeer to the contrary. Possibly mistaken? Certainly!

That's the funny thing. We're both looking at the same thing but seeing different things. To me that's much more a wedge shape than a crow's short and straight.

But more importantly, the underside of the tail in a frame or two from an angle isn't as telltale as the up-close-and-personal HD view of the birds beak and head from multiple angles.

There's no question about how "ravenous" they are, and you're still not expressing any thoughts on those features.

You're avoiding all the clear evidence pointing to the obvious, indisputable truth, and hanging on with a death grip to the only slim, inconclusive evidence that you claim supports your unlikely theory. (Are you a 9/11 and moon landing conspiracy theorist?)

In the words of Elsa, let it go... Let it go! Can't hold it back any more. Turn away and slam the door already because here I am in the light of day. And you know what? The cold never bothered me anyway.

To me the shape of his tall, hook-nosed beak and his large, bulging forehead suggest he's definitely a raven. (Plus, it's a bad angle to examine his tail, but that also looks to me like a raven's.)

That's a big beak. This is why cyclists should wear helmets!

This would be typical, they're sticky beaks.

I went into this meaning to use the sarcasm button and say something idiotic in "police apologist" rhetoric, but he pushed her so hard, she was not actually touching the ground until she hit the concrete "bed". He meant for her to hit the wall. Hard.

She's like 90lbs soaking wet, and he's a healthy 200. I don't care if she was beaking off non-stop, there is no context that puts this thug in a good light. He needs a career change, immediately.

A silly beak? O rly?

Yo, hey, uhhh, crow. I got something to tell you. You got a flower in yo beak.