>> ^Skeeve:

Further, the Least Harm Principle suggests that living a vegan lifestyle actually kills more animals than if we subsisted strictly on ruminant animals. So I think I'll stick with beef


Skeeve, I just read a quick summary of LHP and it has some pretty obvious holes in it:

- It counts exposing rodents to predators (when crops are harvested) as "killing" them. Obviously, predators would be eating rodents anyway. A loss to mice is a gain to buzzards.

- It bases deaths of wild animals caused by agriculture on decline in numbers compared to before the area is farmed. This is pretty flawed, since animal numbers would plummet when the land was claimed but level out afterwards. Some of the animals would move nearby and some would cut down on reproduction rather than dying in some great massacre.

- It goes by pure numbers, counting a fieldmouse the same as a cow. Now I don't want to see mice getting squished, but an animal with a pinhead brain does not have the same capacity to suffer as a large grazing animal like a cow or a pig. Otherwise you might as well count aphids in the death toll. (I appreciate that this was countering a hard-line vegan argument, so I suppose the equal treatment is valid in that particular context).

- It lists pesticides as a cause of death, but seemingly ignores the possibilities of organic farming. When was the last time you met a vegan that was keen on pesticides?


Sorry, that was really preachy. I'm kind of riled up because I'm lacto-ovo vegetarian and therefore indirectly responsible for those chicks getting minced. Not a nice feeling.

P.s. Props to Throbbin. I have a great deal of respect for people who have killed for their meat. If everyone had to slaughter an animal before they could buy KFC there might only be a small increase in vegetarianism, but at least there would be a large decrease in hypocrisy.

Yeah, and don't even get me started on Jews - I made a Kosher meal for my Jewish friends and when I went around to dinner at their place they wouldn't make me bacon and pork chops! It's almost as though they had deeply held beliefs on a subject I never bothered to think about.

P.s. Mitchell & Webb actually balanced this quite nicely with the cat killing joke - My whinging is directed at the pitchfork brigade, who jump at the chance to complain about tiny minorities who impinge on their lives in the slightest, most easily tolerable ways.

I thought I'd add my tuppence-worth from a different perspective (British):

Our police forces recently had the opportunity to roll out more widespread taser use and declined, keeping them controlled very much like a firearm (normal coppers in the UK don't carry guns). They felt there was too much financial cost and that they could damage public relations when videos of incidents hit the web. That seems to be exactly what has happened in the US. I appreciate that with widespread gun ownership comes a different policing style, but this incident clearly didn't require the use of any weapon.

I also agree that the cop should be able to keep up with a 14yr old girl. She may well be athletic, but you have to be more than just a bit quicker to get entirely out of sight. Why not just tail her, or even follow at a distance in his car?