Go vegan instead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9nNa81dSoY
IT'S EASY! Just take a few weeks to get informed, don't jump into it. Read the books suggested below.

Vegetarian is a nice thing to do, but it should be really be only a stepping stone on your path to fully plant based diet. Plant foods are hearty delicious foods like pizza, burgers, lentil shepherds pies, pastas. You just swap out one or two ingredients that are from an animal origin, add more spices/herbs and you have a filling & healthy meal. You can stuff your face, and lose weight, lose the type 2 diabetes and heart disease as well. It's win win.

What many vegetarians don't know is that the milk and dairy industries are often more cruel, than farms that just use animals for meat, and often they are also intertwined. For example, for a cow to produce milk, it must be pregnant. Where do all of the offspring go? Veal if they are male. Or they become milking cows if they are female - destined to be constantly impregnated for their short 4-5 year lives until they die of exhaustion, or can no longer produce milk from exhaustion, and turned then eventually into meat. There are plenty of videos online where a cow gives birth and the calf is dragged away by it's hind legs. They both cry out to each other for days until they're voices give out.
Also cows milk GIVES people osteoporosis because it siphons out calcium from your bones, since it is so acidic. If you measure the amount of calcium in a glass of milk, let someone drink it, and then measure the calcium in their urine, then the urine contains more calcium than what went in. And it's being leeched from the bones.

It's a similar story for chickens. Male chicks get thrown into a grinder ALIVE. Because they're no use if they can't lay eggs.


The toxic waste produced the by milk and egg industries (animal poo etc) destroys environments.

The antibiotics used to keep all of those animals of course ends up in the environment and it will eventually make a super bug which medicine cannot kill.

The job loss portion seems silly, since anyone farming animals is capable of farming plants like rice, potatoes, wheat and grains etc. Those are some seriously nutrient and energy dense foods, and very efficiently produced, and very healthy. Carbs have just gotten a bad reputation thanks the Atkins people. And well we know that Atkins died of a heart attack, he had a history of heart attacks infact. He died overweight.

It is much easier just to go "cold turkey" for 3 or 4 weeks, and become completely plant based since it means your taste buds will adjust and you'll never crave animal products again. Everyone wins, the planet, your health both physical and mental, and of course the animals.

There are plenty off great books with recipes that are familiar and hearty that can help people get started, it's easier than you think. Books such as:
The Starch Solution, Dr. John McDougall.
Negative Calorie Effect, Dr Neal Barnard.
Power Foods for the Brain, Dr Neal Barnard.
Engine #2 Diet, Rip Esselstyn.

That didn't look like a stinger to me but it's hind leg. I think it was just an optical accident. It would be interesting to find out from the guy videoing what happened to the spider.

It's worth keeping in mind that when you slaughter an animal for food, the process is often :
a) Hit it in the head
b) While it's dazed hang it by its hind legs
c) Cut its throat, and let it bleed out *alive* (so that the heart pumps out the blood, so the meat doesn't taste like liver.)

During which the animal will come-to, and stare at you, and you can read its expression pretty clearly. As a creature that's only ever been fed by you, and lived seemingly among you, the betrayal is rather stark.
I say this from life experience, not anecdotes read on the interweb.
(I'm not a vegan. However, if I'm not gonna finish my meal, I make sure to at least finish the meat.)

TBH, not enough people are taught about life and death.
If I had my way, every child would have to slaughter at least one animal and eat it (seeing as hundreds will be slaughtered over their life time just to feed them personally - it's a business they're already personally involved in. So they should have the respect to look their food in the face at least once.).

Then they can make an informed decision about their food.
And maybe even about things like war, or careless driving, etc. Seems like everyone is a tough guy, and everything is "all fine, don't worry"... so long as death is just 'something actors pretend with on TV'.

-scheherazade

Never seen a kangaroo walk slowly like at the end of the clip, where it is literally being used as a hind leg, and the actual hind legs become middle legs.

If it was upset about it, it'd be using its hind legs to kick the living christ out of it.....seems it likes having its head in tiny places

Yeah, he's about as straight as a dog's hind leg.

The most reasonable explanation is that the cat has been front-declawed, but not rear-declawed and knows it, so the most damage it gets is from its hind legs.

>> ^rychan:

The advice might be good but the reasoning they're using to justify it is false. Things are much more complicated than they make out.
Why not take their third grade reasoning to the extreme and propose that you should run with zero bounce? If you tried this you'd find it requires very unnatural and inefficient movements.


Things don't need to be complicated if you don't go into the metabolism side of things. Running is different from walking in that both of you feet are off the ground at the same time. You're basically flying through the air most of the time, or should be. Bouncing too much shows that you make contact with the ground for too long. By simply landing on the balls of your feet (not your toes or, worse, your heels) without trying to push yourself forward (i.e. with legs straight down under you at the instant your whole foot is contacting the ground and then pulling the foot up instead of pushing out with your toes), you can create a spring like reaction in your leg muscle that will give you just enough vertical energy to stay level with the ground, reducing the bounce to a theoretical minimum of zero. What makes you advance forward is your previous momentum combined with gravity making your slightly forward-leaning body fall at an angle (the lean will need to be more pronounced the faster you want to run). With good form, you can easily create a very constant stride without bounce since you do not rely on your leg muscles to propel yourself, but only to keep you up in the air for the longest possible proportion of time (resulting in less friction, more energy transfer from gravity, etc.). Look at horses : their hind legs are bent backwards for propulsion, yet they still have no bounce (we feel a bounce because we ride in the middle, but in absolutes they do not bounce). Plus, their front legs always hit the ground at a 90 degree angle right under them. In human terms, the front legs are our legs, the hind legs are our slight forward lean. If we had not adapted this way, we'd either be running like kangaroos, i.e. by actually bouncing, or we'd not be able to run at all, like monkeys.

tl;dr : landing on the balls of your feet keeps you in the air at a stable, constant height; leaning slightly forward allows gravity to pull you forward.

Walking though is very different. Here you want the pendulum effect created by the arms to conserve energy, but the same principle applies for maximum efficiency : land with the legs at 90 degrees to the ground, under your center of gravity and don't push with your toes. Of course there are ways to walk/run faster with less efficiency, it all depends whether you're in a marathon or a race.

>> ^Sagemind:

After ripping my knee out in a dirt-bike accident (think snapping a chicken wing in two), I don't run.
Having said that, I think it's crazy that man has reduced a basic function of the human body down to scientific knowhow! Should we tell our tribal ancestors they've been doing it all wrong all this time??


On the contrary, they're the ones who have been doing it right all along. Mass consumerism + fad marketing destroyed our feet with "running" shoes. Plus, scientists have assumed for a long time that everyone knows instinctively how to run properly. They were wrong. Just as we learn how to walk we must learn how to run. Some can learn on their own, some copy others like Angua1 and some just can't run or end up copying bad running forms from people who "unlearned" how to run thanks to padded "running" shoes. Our ancestors learned how to run properly because for them it was a vital skill, just like using a bow, a knife or a sling. Plus they didn't have padded shoes, medical treatment or motorized locomotion so running badly was not an option if they were to survive long enough to reproduce.

That said, the video is bullshit. Go look for the POSE method of running for accurate information. This method also addresses the crossover problems.

Its similar to the way that dogs will wag their legs if you scratch them on the belly, the cat is used to having its hind legs in that position when its head is that low to the ground. The leg automatically jumps up over its head.

>> ^ponceleon:

Edit: weird thing there towards the end, where it kind of lays down. I wonder what the thought process is there? Was it trying to act dead so it could jump up and scare them more?


After having raised a squirrel I can tell you that laying down flat like that is how they "Sit". My squirrel did that all the time. I would say evolution taught them that laying down makes them harder for prey to spot, while conserving energy versus sitting up on their hind legs. He must have been there a while.

Also, they are much more intelligent than people give them credit for. There are videos of dogs protecting other dogs that were hit by cars. It wasn't just because of a scent. Squirrels are as intelligent as an average dog. I would say this squirrel knew something was wrong with the other squirrel and was trying to protect him. Just like it looks.

Human Meddling in the process of natural selection disgusts me to no end.

Natural selection is a hard thing.

I feel that if an animal cannot live long enough to reproduce, humans included, then it obviously does not pass on it's genes ergo; it does not pass the test of nature.

My opinion of selective breeders is, they disgust me on both a guttural and rational level. These hoity toity rich white people base their whole breeding on outdated and unscientific opinion on how a dog should look

I see a strong working dog as the peek of its breed. I see a show dog as a farce of nature.

Pure breeding is not something to be liked. Biodiversity and Genetic Diversity is something that nature naturally seeks, and it is proven time and again that breeding with a small gene pool with no diversity will ultimately lead to extinction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection

I also find the Eugenicist argument about Pure Bred people completely warped.

My knowledge of biology is only as a hobby, and maybe a slight obsession. It was my favorite class in High School, and would probably have been in college had I majored in it.

On a more sentimental note an old German Shepard or Deutscher Schäferhund of mine died of complication that resulted from Hip Displasia. Here is a quote from the wikipedia on German Shepards:

In 1899, Von Stephanitz was attending a dog show when he was shown a dog named Hektor Linksrhein. Hektor was the product of many generations of selective breeding and completely fulfilled what Von Stephanitz believed a working dog should be. He was pleased with the strength of the dog and was so taken by the animal's intelligence and loyalty, that he purchased it immediately.

A genetic disease that is so common in German Shepherds that one could, speculatively argue that it is the cause of selective breeding. After watching the dog degrade into dragging it's own hind legs around for weeks, and then shitting on herself regularly, because she couldn't lift herself up to shit properly, it was time to euthanize the dog. I can't help but wonder what the breed would look like if it had a bit of diversity.

It is wondrous to think what the world would be like if humans had no developed the current human brain, and still only had the reptile brain.

For a unique understanding of evolution and natural selection read some of these:


The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1976. ISBN 0-19-286092-5.
he Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Free Press (United States), Transworld (United Kingdom and Commonwealth). 2009. ISBN 0-593-06173-X.
The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1986. ISBN 0-393-31570-3.


The Blind Watchmaker was the most complicated read in my opinion.

Imagine how fucking cool it would be if cats walked around on their hind legs all the time. I'd put mine in a little top hat (like Schmawy).

The problem people have with this seems to be that humans are being more cruel to animals than nature is.

I've watched a lioness in the masai mara kill a zebra. I hope to the bottom of my heart that when I go it's more like these chicks at the hands of the nasty humans than like the zebra at the hands of the lion. Suffering? You haven't got a clue...

The thought that the natural world is somehow better, more caring or whatever you people think is just wrong. The natural world is pragmatic and practical, but not kind in the slightest. Lions hunt buffalo, but they're scared of the horns (as they should be). They deal with this by not dealing with the horns. They attack the rear of the buffalo until it can't stand any longer. Then they start to eat it. Not need to go near the head to kill it, it can't get you, just eat the hind legs first and work your way forwad. It dies after an hour or so of being eaten alive.

I personally don't eat meat produced this way. I think it can be done better, but I also think some people here need to get a sense of perspective. What is going on here is very, very natural. What vegans propose is very, very unnatural.

My mother claimed that she knew of someone who had a "crabbit" and I couldn't convince her otherwise. Of course, such a thing is impossible. (Shades of the jackalope. . .)

Pprt is correct. I once owned a Manx that I named Bugs (after Bugs Bunny) for the very reason that he had large hind legs (six toes on each paw) and this peculiar way of walking and running that was reminscent of a rabbit.

>> ^Fletch:
I can do that.


Rofl