A well-known Colorado lawyer and animal rights activist, Jennifer Emmi, 43, is facing an impressive array of charges in an alleged murder-for-hire plot targeting the girlfriend of her estranged husband. While she previously claimed the entire thing was a set up, the host of a Facebook show has now pleaded guilty to a slew of serious charges.
The 35-page affidavit filed in January stated that a ranch hand came to the sheriff’s office on November 2, 2020 with a tale right out of a film noir script. He said that his boss, Emmi, asked him if he could “take care of” her estranged husband’s girlfriend. When he asked if she also wanted her husband dead, she allegedly responded “Just her.” He described her as “psychotic.” Emmi reportedly kept with the discussions, including at least one that was recorded and involved a “middleman.” She also reportedly spoke to a ranch hand who was a former special forces sniper about doing the deed. She was not exactly offering a king’s ransom. The initial down payment was to be between $2,500 to $5,000.
What is interesting is that, as time went on, Emmi warmed to the idea of killing her husband as well. She is quoted as saying “I’m inclined to kill two birds with one stone so to speak” because her husband was the “one leading this battle.”
After she was arrested in January, she told Denver television station KDVR that “I was set up, and I have been repeatedly set up. All I can say is I want the truth to come out. The whole thing is crazy. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Now it is being reported that Emmi pleaded guilty to the murder-for-hire charge in a plea including solicitation to commit second-degree murder, menacing, heat-of-passion strangulation, attempting to influence a judge, violation of a bail bond, retaliation against a witness, and stalking, all of which are felonies. She also pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of child abuse, criminal mischief, reckless driving, and evidence tampering. The plea allows for the dropping of 11 other felony charges and 12 misdemeanor charges Emmi was facing, according to another report.
That is an impressive list of charges and she is clearly looking at jail time.
Emmi will be sentenced on August 16 at 1 p.m.
im going to go there:
shes a lawyer and an animal rights activist
something like this was eventually going to happen at some point
Emmi’s Ennui
Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned.
Some people are using this case to disparage animal rights activism, but it would be wrong to do so. Animal rights activism/advocacy is an overwhelmingly non-violent movement for social and political change, to oppose animal cruelty and bring awareness to the fact that many other species are sentient and emotive beings, like ourselves. Very few animal rights activists believe in violence against other human beings, though I’ve met some who say misanthropic things, though that doesn’t make them violent or murderous. Mark Twain had such thoughts too: “man is the only creature who blushes or needs to.” Saying that didn’t make him a murderer.
The fact that this philosophy has been associated with the radical Left is unfortunate. It should not be, since there are numerous conservatives (including myself) who believe that animal rights, as a philosophical position, has a rational foundation that warrants our respect and attention. Nor it is a movement that should be properly associated with Hitler (as one person notes above); to do so would be like say that because he liked opera, all opera is wrong. Animal rights did not start with Hitler (that’s nonsense since the war he started resulted in an untold amount of animal suffering); its origins are as old as our species’ emotional connection to members of other species. As it turns out, altruism is not unique to our species. Respect for animals can be dated to prehistory, as represented in the Chauvet cave paintings in France. Not eating animals as a spiritual practice was enshrined thousands of years ago with the Jain/Hindu/Buddhist principle of ahimsa (non-harm). There were some ancient Greeks who adopted this philosophy as well. Expressions against animal cruelty and for animal welfare can be found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Its modern version started with the Enlightenment, with opposition to animal experimentation in the 17th century, and then evolved from the principle of inalienable human rights, but as applied to all sentient beings. In the 19th century, the RSPCA was started in England by Christians committed to a social gospel that included opposition to animal cruelty. After the advent of factory farming after WWII, and the reduction of animals to parts in a machine, leading to the industrialization of animal cruelty, animal rights took really took off. I recommend watching the film Earthlings on youtube and reading Empty Cages by Tom Regan. It is true that many animal rights activists are also Leftists, but the Left can’t claim a movement that predates it and the philosophical origins of which stem from Enlightenment individualism (i.e. the idea of rights), and not collectivism.
The rational case for this philosophy has a lot of merit to it. Marc Bekoff the biologist has demonstrated an essential sameness across species, in terms of capacity for emotion, and altruism: it should not be surprising that other mammals and marsupials, and birds (the so-called “higher animals”) are similar to us in certain key ways. Human beings are animals of a kind and as Darwin demonstrated we share the same evolutionary origins. The idea that we are somehow superior and thus entitled to exploit them, due to our different abilities is a rationally insupportable conceit, similar to the thinking that one race is superior to another. Yet this conceit is shared by most human cultures, including the political Left in the West, the vast majority of whom are avid meat-eaters and disparage animal rights activists as “racist.” The fact that this conceit is widely adopted by all human cultures doesn’t make it true, however. It was at one time considered an indisputable fact that races of human beings may be thought of hierarchically, to justify human slavery. The same sort of thinking – discrimination based on otherness – is used today to justify animal slavery.
The fact that an animal rights activist planned to commit murder shouldn’t reflect badly on the whole movement, That would be like saying that because a murderer happened to go to a church, that the entire church is somehow in the wrong. Robert Jay Lifton in his book The Nazi Doctors has a theory of psychological doubling, which says that a person can do normal activities in one part of their life – such as being a responsible citizen or loving parent – and then turn around and do horrendous things in some part of their life, and dissociate the two. They spit their psyche into two parts, so to speak. Most adults are capable of committing murder, but most of us choose not to do so, for both ethical reasons and our own self-preservation (because it is illegal and punishable by the law). I find it irrelevant that this person believes in animal rights. It’s not a philosophy that makes one more murderous. On the contrary, it issues from the feeling that violence against others is wrong. I would be willing to bet that the percentage of animal rights activists who commit violent crimes is far less as than the general population, so I don’t see the relevance of the association except as a curiosity. That’s not to say that animal rights activists are all above reproach. None of us are. As St. Paul said “no one is righteous.” Meaning that we’re all sinners. But it is a philosophy that on the whole argues for compassion and against violence, so to use this one aberration to disparage a whole movement doesn’t make sense.
“. . . animal rights, as a philosophical position, has a rational foundation . . .”
That would be a zebra’s “right” to not be eaten by a tiger? Or perhaps a mouse’s “right” to not be strangled by a snake?
Are those “rights” codified in the baboon’s Magna Carta? Or perhaps in the later version — the chimpanzee’s Bill of Rights? Which, as everyone knows, was the result of a long struggle to overthrow the tyrannical lion king.
Those “rights” are adjudicated where? — in a kangaroo court?
To borrow an expression: Animal “rights” is “nonsense upon stilts.”
“a zebra’s “right” to not be eaten by a tiger? Or perhaps a mouse’s “right” to not be strangled by a snake?”
Your reply is one of the most common and easily refutable responses to those who mock or dismiss the idea that animals should not be harmed by us. Human beings are not carnivores, unlike tigers and snakes. We are omnivores, like other members of the great ape family, and like the other great apes, we as a species lean heavily towards the herbivore and fruitarian end of that spectrum (95% plant-eating) — as distinct too, for example, dogs who are also omnivores but who evolved to lean towards the carnivore side of the omnivore spectrum. This means that we have a choice in what we eat, unlike a pure carnivore. And it is a moral choice:
Human beings can live perfectly healthy and long lives without eating animal products: millions already do. Given that animal cruelty is a moral issue, it stands to reason that our choice of what (or who) to eat is also a moral choice that cannot be excused by reference to the state of nature. Presumably, we have risen above the state of nature through our common project called civilization, on the basis of which we have laws against murdering one another, and against violence of other kinds, including animal cruelty. Except that we make convenient exceptions for violence against certain species for the sake of consuming their bodies, and then engage in cognitive dissonant mental gymnastics to excuse this harm done to them, knowing full well that there’s a strong moral argument against it but trying to excuse it because it’s more convenient to do so.
You mockingly imply that because we are a species that can conceive of the idea of rights, they apply only to us. But you confuse positive rights with negative rights. The right to education or clean water is a “positive right”, according to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The right not to be harmed is called a “negative right.” Animals don’t have the kinds of positive rights that pertain only to human beings, but they do have negative rights, which properly apply to all sentient beings, precisely because they are individuals who feel pain and fear (just as we do). We routinely violate their negative rights: about 70 billion farmed animals are killed per year. A positive right that other animals have is the right to their own habitat – which human beings tend to deny them as well, through mass deforestation and pollution, contributing to the mass extinction of species.
What of the augment that in a state of nature we were hunters to survive? The naturalistic fallacy is the thinking that “is equals ought”, i.e. what is “natural” is therefore good. Rape and murder are natural but not good. Human beings are also moral beings who ought to aspire to a higher standard. We have a moral choice in these matters. That higher standard ought to extend to all individual beings who have thoughts, dreams, and some kind of personhood, even if they are different from us. To not do so is to engage in cruelty and violence against other beings who feel pain and fear when we have a moral choice not to — albeit indirectly, as a consumer, which removes us from the violence that we pay for. We no longer need to hunt to survive, as our ancestors did about in prehistoric times. And nothing could be more unnatural than factory farming, anyway, so it’s not a good argument from any angle.
Let’s put it this way: you have a choice to eat a dog or not. Nearly everyone in the West reading this would consider it wrong to harm a dog, but not a cow. Why? Both are sentient emotive beings like ourselves. But we know that dogs’ lives matter. Why love one species but eat another just like it? It defies reason. if aliens arrived, and they were more intelligent than us, would they be morally right to enslave and eat us? Would we be morally entitled to enslave and eat them because they’re a different species? This thought experiment should reveal that being of a different species is not grounds alone for discrimination against other beings. If we would not enslave or wish to be enslaved by these alien beings, then we should reconsider doing the same to other species just because they are different than us.
As for animals not having the same kind of intelligence like us, that too is easily refuted by pointing out that mentally inferior humans should have no fewer rights than the most intelligent. Nazis thought that mentally handicapped people should be exterminated; most of us would look upon that moral choice as morally wrong, even evil. Yet the same argument for rejecting the right of other sentient beings to live out their lives is just assumed to be true.
Some people object to this kind of comparison because to be compared to an animal is considered an insult in our society – which only reveals the degree of discrimination they routinely face and also ignores the fact that homo sapiens are animals of a kind. Our socially conditioned thinking against them is so deeply embedded in us that animal names (dog, pig, snake, shark) are used routinely as insults, which is telling. The comparison is not meant to denigrate humans but to elevate other species who are similar to us in many important ways that should matter.
Rejecting animal rights cannot be done rationally without getting entangled in endless contradictions and cognitive dissonance. The only reason people reject the rights of other species to live out their lives without harm is that they enjoy eating other animals, not because their position is rationally or morally defensible.
One more point: what about domesticated animals like cows, pigs, and sheep, who’ve been bred to our consumption and who cannot exist in the wild anymore? Consider the argument against slavery again: a human slave is bred for captivity and is dependent on his master, but that doesn’t make his enslavement right. He still needs to be emancipated. Animals bred for consumption need not be bred any longer but allowed to die out humanely, which would mean far less environmental pollution, not to mention fewer heart attacks and cases of cancer for us. For those who sincerely want to learn more about this, read Tom Regan’s book Empty Cages.
“. . . they enjoy eating other animals . . .”
Yes, eating a ribeye steak is delicious. That you want to deprive man of such pleasures is evil.
“. . . not because their position is rationally or morally defensible.”
That’s nonsense. The concepts “morality” and “rights” were created by, and apply only to, man — the creature with a *conceptual* consciousness. Your side tears those two concepts out of their context, and attempts to apply them to creatures who can’t even understand what the hell you’re talking about.
You wrote: “The concepts “morality” and “rights” were created by, and apply only to, man — the creature with a *conceptual* consciousness. Your side tears those two concepts out of their context, and attempts to apply them to creatures who can’t even understand what the hell you’re talking about.”
There are two important points here: (1) strictly speaking, other animals species are ‘moral patients’ and possess all the traits necessary to be called persons of a kind; (2) and some other animal species have rich emotional, socially complex, and *moral lives* that many of us are simply unaware of. All animals are moral patients and some animals are moral agents as well.
(1) Moral patients
What is a moral patient? There are some human beings, who because of accidents of birth or cruel happenstance, lack ‘conceptual consciousness’ and cannot act as moral agents. These would include the very young, the very old suffering from acute dementia, the severely mentally handicapped, those in a coma, etc. Yet in a civil society we nonetheless regard them as moral patients – that is, deserving of moral consideration, despite their inability to understand or be conscious of morality or rights. If rights applied only to those who understand them, these moral patients would be considered expendable – as indeed they were under Nazi rule, said to be “life unworthy of life” and “useless eaters.” In a decent society, all individuals who are “persons of a kind” are thought to matter. I would submit to you that many other animals species are persons of a kind – just not our kind. Anyone who has ever loved a dog or cat knows this. To use religious language, they have souls — according to theologian Rev. Dr. Andrew Linzey. His books explore this in detail.
Personhood transcends species. Species is a purely arbitrary trait, like skin color or height. It does not of itself endow that individual with rights. We do not say rights accrue only to some human beings but not others because of race; in the same way, if certain animals possess the traits by virtue of which they may be considered moral patients, species should not matter. The thought experiment of extraterrestrial beings should illustrate that point. Mr. Spock, were he to exist, would possess rights as a person. He is both a moral patient and agent. If rights are specific to one group of sentient beings but not another and are not universal, they mean nothing at all. Their entire meaning is continent on their universality to all individuals who possess certain traits. What are these traits?
To define this universal sense of personhood and rights, Regan refers to what he terms “subjects-of-a-life”: “They have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with the feelings of pleasure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals, a psychophysical identity over time; and individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independently of their utility for others and logically independently of their being the object of anyone else’s interests. Those who satisfy the subject-of-a-life criterion themselves have a distinctive kind of value- inherent value- and are not to be viewed or treated as mere receptacles” (Regan, 1983: p243).
Homo sapiens are certainly subjects-of-a-life, but so are many other species. If we do not view them as having these qualities, we are simply mistaken. It’s an old and very common prejudice to dismiss them in this way, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of their inward lives and social behaviours. The evidence from the field of animal ethology, amassed in the 20th and 21st centuries is overwhelmingly in favor of Regan’s assertion.
(2) some other animal species are also moral agents (moral decision-makers), who practice altruism
We now know that some animals are in fact capable of moral decision-making (being also moral agents), and have displayed acts of altruism. For instance, rats chose to save fellow rats from the pain of electrocution rather than eat foods they liked, in one experiment. There are numerous anecdotes of dogs saving human lives. Biologist Marc Bekoff has compiled hundreds of anecdotes and experiments demonstrating this in his book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals.
Bekoff writes that “the staggering amount of information that we have about animal intelligence and animal emotions brings us much closer to answering the larger question raised by her behavior: can animals really act with compassion, altruism, and empathy? The skeptics’ numbers are dwindling. More and more scientists who study animal behavior are becoming convinced that the answer is unequivocal “Yes, animals really can act with compassion, altruism, and empathy.” Not only did Binti Jua [a gorilla] rescue the young boy, but she also liberated some of our colleagues from the grip of timeworn and outdated views of animals and opened the door for a much-needed discussion about the cognitive and emotional lives of other animals … social animals.
“We show that these animals have rich inner worlds—they have a complex and nuanced repertoire of emotions as well as a high degree of intelligence and behavioral flexibility. They’re also incredibly adept social actors. They form and maintain complex networks of relationships, and live by rules of conduct that maintain a delicate balance, a finely tuned social homeostasis … Some animals seem to have a sense of fairness in that they understand and behave according to implicit rules about who deserves what and when. Individuals who breach rules of fairness are often punished either through physical retaliation or social ostracism.”
“[A]nimals have [. . .] a high degree of intelligence . . .”
Wake me when a zebra writes the “Principia Mathematica.” Or when a monkey and a giraffe team up to write “The Federalist Papers.”
“animals species are ‘moral patients’” — and the rest of those nonsense formulations.
Your wishes notwithstanding, inserting a word into sentence does not create a fact of reality.
Intelligence is not a proper criterion for moral considerability. If it were, only intelligent people would be considered deserving of moral consideration. But unintelligent people are also moral patients, and properly so. Most human beings are not that smart, but we don’t say it’s okay to enslave, harm, or kill them for that reason. So, yes the concept of the moral patient is important and for the reason stated above, their different cognitive abilities are not a sound basis on which to discriminate against them.
Furthermore, it must be stated that certain animals other than homo sapien are in fact intelligent – though perhaps not in the way you define it. They don’t do abstract math but there is a preponderance of scientific evidence that’s been collected that demonstrates their intelligence in other notable ways. Dolphins and chimpanzees are obvious examples. Dolphins have the use of language, for example. They can also understand our sign language, as can other primates. Crows are known to have dialects and share complex information. Some animals species — some mammals and birds — have been seen using tools. Mammals have the full range of emotions that we do, including love, grief, joy, despair, etc. Which makes sense, as we are mammals too. Preferring our type of intelligence over their is an example of an in-group bias.
In short, their intelligence, both cognitive and emotional, is quite real though often of a different type that ours. Our type of intelligence, for instance, is characterized by our ability to use technology to change our environment, and not always the better for it: being able to annihilate all life on Earth is not a mark of very great distinction.
Most people are still unaware of the wealth of evidence of animal behavior demonstrating the truth of their inner lives and complex behaviors, demonstrating a depth of emotion, intelligence, and moral decision making that previous generations knew nothing about. Many people intuited it from experience but it was not established scientifically until the modern age. And it’s still not widely known, because we have a very unintelligent trait ourselves as a species, which is the tendency to demonstrate bias and prejudice against those of whom we have no knowledge. This bias is learned but deeply ingrained and culturally reinforced. It’s easier to go along with such a bias than to examine it under the light of reason and divest oneself of it. As Frans de Waal asks in the title of one of his books, “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?”
Other such popularizations of animal ethology include “The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness” by Sy Montgomery; “The Genius of Birds” by Jennifer Ackerman; “The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter than You Think” by Brian Hare; “Inside Animal Hearts and Minds: Bears That Count, Goats That Surf, and Other True Stories of Animal Intelligence and Emotion” by Belinda Recio; “When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. And Bekoff’s books, noted earlier.
I got it, already.
Animal “rights” activists hate Man.
When animals act naturally, it’s good.
When Man acts according to his nature (by being productive), it’s evil.
No, I am not a misanthrope, unlike those who may be attempting to depopulate the world (eg. Bill Gates). I oppose those efforts and am outspoken against them. Bigger families and more economic prosperity are good! I am a conservative & classical liberal thinker who supports capitalism and Donald Trump’s presidency and disagrees strongly with cultural Marxism and Communism. But I just also happen to agree with scientists and philosophers and theologians who use facts and reason to argue that animals’ lives matter and they should not be treated so cruelly and with such reckless abandon.
Animal rights is not a left-wing cause, or the domain of loons and misanthropes (though I have seen a few in the movement, to be sure). This philosophy has persuaded some rational thinkers and conservative people. I am against animal cruelty, as most decent people are, and see major industries that exploit animals (eg industrial livestock operations) as egregious examples of it. When humane alternatives to these products exist, why not use them?
Another conservative thinker who is for animal rights is Matthew Scully, a Republican insider at one time, who wrote a book “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy,” In it he writes, “We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don’t; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us.” As a movement, animal protection has been regarded as a left-wing concern, but should not be.
As for “acting natural”, the very foundation of civilisation is the renunciation of satisfying all our base desires in favour of a social contract based on ethical principles. Hobbes expressed that in Leviathan: man founded civilization in order to guard against the excesses of “the war of all against all”, or the state of nature. Those principles – including egalitarianism – also properly apply to our treatment of beings who are vulnerable and feel pain and fear and have lives of their own. That is why animal cruelty laws were established in England in the 19th century, and also why animal rights as a concept was borne in the same time and pace. For example, the philosopher Bentham said ““The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but “Can they suffer?”
“I am against animal cruelty . . .”
That is a typical, dishonest strategy used by those peddling an irrational, destructive ideology. Start with a legitimate issue, e.g., being against animal cruelty. Then package it with a bunch of irrational ideas (so-called animal “rights”). Then hope that people don’t notice that you’re selling healthy food tainted with poison.
You raise an interesting point, which is to argue that it seems to be a double-standard to argue against man acting “according to his nature” by killing animals, but when animals act naturally by killing one another it’s okay. You suggest that to make this argument stems from hating humanity. But as I have noted before, it’s not necessarily our nature to kill other animals as we’re not carnivores. If you put an piece of fruit and a rabbit in front of a toddler, he’ll eat the fruit and play with the rabbit, not eat the rabbit as a carnivore would.
We can be more productive without factory farms. In fact, there is far greater food production efficiency if we don’t feed all the crops to livestock by a ratio of 11 to 1: meaning that 11 times more food to feed people, to be exact. It could solve world hunger, instead of turning all the food into sewage. So no I don’t “hate Man.” I am for humanity, which is also why I oppose factory farming, which is harming humanity indirectly with pollution and water waste and soil erosion.
I don’t think our nature is to destroy the environment and give ourselves heart disease and cancer through high-cholesterol diets. Our nature is to be responsible moral agents in the world, which is the real meaning of the phrase in Genesis 1:28. דָה (radah) means reign, rule, dominion – which implies responsible use of, not necessarily exploitation. Gen. 1:29 says, “Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” (NIV)
Thanks for the discussion!
“Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food”.
***
What about potatoes?
We are naturally carnivorous. Primates in the wild eat meat and kill each other for for mates, offspring and territory. We are primates.
Primates are not carnivores. They are omnivores who lean towards frugivore status because 95% of their diet is fruit and leaves. A frugivore is a herbivore or omnivore whose preferred food type is fruit. Seeds, roots, leaves, and insects, in the case of chimps – but mostly fruit: chimps, whom we are closest to in nature as a species, are frugivores, eating about 50% fruit. This is also how homo sapiens originally evolved, as frugivores. Hunting and meat-eating are relatively new to our species (in the last 60,000 years out of a million or so year of evolution). This is why we do not have fangs, claws or short intestines like carnivores; instead we have grinders and long intestines like other great apes (also frugivores). This may also be why when we do eat red meat we tend to get cancer and heart disease from doing so. But as I stated somewhere above in another comment, our natural state is not the issue. We’ve had agriculture for 10,000 years as a species, which allowed most of us to stop hunting for a living and create something called civilization. Now civilization is best served by conservation methods in food production, including the elimination of industrial factory farming, which is hugely wasteful of arable land, water, and energy. These limited resources are better used in service to feeding humanity directly. There is no need to raise and kill about 70 billion farmed animals per year when it’s no longer necessary and so wasteful. Every dish that uses animal products can be created with plant-based foods now, and tastes identical in some cases. The world is changing in a lot of ways that are truly bad, but this is not one of them.
“We can be more productive without factory farms.”
Say those who are ignorant of the history of mass malnutrition and starvation *before* the creation of industrialized farms. And who blithely ignore the suffering of people living in Third Worlds, who are clamoring for the productivity of industrialized farms.
Sam, so you claim. But the scientific evidence points in another direction. Industrialized livestock operations (factory farms) don’t solve hunger as much as they contribute to it, by using up all the arable land and finite water supplies to grow food for livestock. This is a hugely inefficient use of those finite resources. Many times more people can be fed with a plant-based diet using the same resources. As the global population grows and arable land and water are at a premium, the global shift to plant-based diets makes more sense — especially when it’s now been proven that it can provide sufficient protein and nutrients to sustain human health (contrary to the myth that it doesn’t). As water supplies diminish worldwide, the cost of raising animals industrially will not be economically or environmentally sustainable for much longer. They’re often bailed out by governments through corporate welfare because they’re so inefficient. Corrupt government officials get kickbacks when they allow ILOs to operate, even knowing it will pollute the local water and air. If these ILOs were fairly charged for the water they use up, they wouldn’t be able to operate. They pollute the land, use up all the water, practice animal cruelty, and contribute to heart disease. Even some small-scale farmers who raise animals for food are against these monstrous operations.
“… grain-based feeding systems are hugely inefficient, with only ten percent of the plant matter consumed by livestock being converted into edible animal protein (Godfray et al., 2010). As a result, land requirements for livestock production are, on average, ten times greater than those for plant production, with fossil energy requirements about eleven times greater (Leitzmann, 2003; Pimentel and Pimentel, 2003). Globally, industrially reared livestock use up about one third of the world’s arable land and its grain harvests (FAO, 2007) … Inefficient feed conversion ratios touch on three major allocations of finite resources – energy (in the form of fossil fuels), water and land – often termed “inputs.” For example, roughly three quarters of all freshwater use is for industrial agriculture and in industrialized nations over half of that amount is used for feed crops (Steinfeld et al., 2006). Far more energy, water and land are used to produce one unit of industrially produced animal-based food for human consumption than is used to produce one unit of industrially produced plant-based food … Pimentel and Pimentel (2003) conclude that “the meat-based food system requires more energy, land and water resources than the lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet.” It is reasonable to suppose that even more energy, land and water would be saved by an entirely plant-based diet. Given that human beings are able to sustain healthy lives without consuming animal-based foods, it could be argued that industrial animal agriculture is one of the most unnecessary and unsustainable types of consumption of finite resources in present-day industrial society. This argument rests on the distinction between luxury and necessary uses of natural resources and the designation of the consumption of animal products – especially those produced by ILOs – as a major source of luxury emissions (“The Environmental Impacts of Intensive Livestock Operations in Canada” Science for Peace, 2013).
Science papers cited above:
Godray, H.C.J, Beddington, J.R., Crute, I.R., Haddad, L., Lawrence, D., Muir, J.F., Pretty, J., Robinson, S., Thomas, S.M. and Toulmin, C. (2010) ‘Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding Nine Billion People.’ Science. Vol 327. pp 812-818.
Leiztmann, C. (2003) ‘Nutrition ecology: the contribution of vegetarian diets’ American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, American Society for Clinical Nutrition, Sept. 2003. Vol 78, No 3. pp 657-659.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) (2007a) FAO Statistical Yearbook 2005-6, Issue 1 – Cross-section by subject, FAO, Rome.
Pimentel, D. and M. Pimentel. (2003) ‘Sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment’ American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.Vol 78, No. 3, pp 6605-6635.
Steinfeld, H., P.Gerber, T. Wassenaar, V. Castel, M. Rosales and C. de Haan. (2006) Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
@Sam, considering humans are the only animal capable of working in a coordinated fashion to wipe virtually every other animal from the face of the earth and have single handedly caused a number of creatures to go extinct or near extinct, it would seem distinct from other forms of animal on animal violence, typically based on motives of food or protection, not clothing, greed or profit.
The Ghost & The Darkness is an enjoyable film, but it presenting the lions as trophy hunting human skulls is for dramatic effect. In actuality those lions suffered jaw damage and loss of habitat, leaving humans as their main food source out of desperation.
Facebook: uttBay Book.
Just another star on Facebook who is deranged. Leftist, crazy woman. Member of the bar . . . Ouch!
Hunter Thompson’s quote seems appropriate here: ” Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.”
How does the lengthy planning of murder, not meet the definition of first degree murder.
Because she’s not a right-winger, despite the fact that Adolf Hitler was the father of modern animal rights activism.
I don’t think “impressive” is the best adjective.
My thoughts exactly.