The elephant in the room.
 

I wont to bring up a conversation about the elephant in the room we all know it is there.
I do not wont this thread to be closed by the Mods so we must try to discuss with out it getting to heated, that is if any one replies to this thread.
I have pondered for some time now why I find the sight of raw dead flesh so repulsive and the thought of eating it makes me feel sick.
I cant really think about the cruelty that produced that dead flesh to much as it is to much to think about.
But there are others who in a war like fashion will dismiss my way of feeling how come they see the raw dead flesh so differently from me.

Are we more spiritual evolved as in empathy are they interbred with a reptilian lust for blood.
What's going on.
I suppose my main thing is how can peeps see the sight of raw dead flesh so differently. :icon_flower:

I'm aware that I can be called a vegetarian judgmental snob but that is the risk I am wiling to take for talking about what I see as the the elephant in the room. :biggrin:

Who cares what anyone calls you.

In the times a person ridicule, or blame on someone else, this person does not have to look at him or herself.
Simply, for me after not eating any animal products for many years, the smell of any flesh puts me off. Its natural I feel, and I make a great bow around a sausage stand.

I know this sounds a bit cosmic but I thought about doing a 3 card reading on the elephant in the room but I need some one to post back and say they would like me to do the reading its the way it works .

He he I love the way you say you make a great bow around the sausage stand.:biggrin:

We are all here to bath in the Sun of awareness.
With the good times and the bad.
But I am always glad not sad for what I may of had.

So now is the time or so they say.
When we will see this new kind of reality.
The shift the change to reaerange time and space and welcome into your own personal space, the new way. :cool:

You feel a soul-spirit connection is why. The "elephant" is that until one has experienced this soul-epiphany, it is impossible to understand why and how you could say that, you just sound overly-dramatic otherwise.

People generally think of animals and nature forms as subservient to humans, and in the worst cases something to exploit. Then the human being comes to see animals and nature forms as our wards. Animals and nature forms are in need of humanity's love, empathy and conscious care. They are in essence trapped in humanity's karmic story. They are victims in a sense of our need to incarnate in physical form. And when one comes to understand that, that's when one becomes a vegetarian. Because it's disgusting otherwise. It's as repulsive as the thought of eating another human being; eating an enslaved human being, to be even more exact.

This is the day when the fairy kind [nature]
Sit weeping alone for their hopeless lot...
For the children of clay [human beings] was salvation bought
But not for the forms of sea and air.

This is a snippet from the Walter Scott poem that woke me up in my soul regarding the truth about the human race's spiritual and karmic responsibility to nature. I have weeped tears, several times, reading that poem over the years.

A nice little verse:smile: I think what you feel is similar to myself and other people on this forum who know that love and compassion for all living things is the basis of spirituality...the basics. There are plenty of people who do not see it and that is their own place in time in their own life journey.
You asked if that makes you more evolved...in my opinion I would say if you want to go by the reincarnation route I would say someone with the "compassionate towards all life mentality" has been 'around' a lot longer. (although their are lots of theory's on this)
This does not mean that meat eaters are not intelligent...indeed, I know lots of meat eaters who are wiser than I on a variety of daily subjects...yet the true basics of life if you close your eyes and meditate and truly know... they dont get it....yet.:smile:
I still blame the media for much human distortion, yet I know that I and many other people see right through it.

Some people may laugh but if you can show kindness and compassion to the smallest of creatures..you are wise.

I think you have a way with words that explain things with clarity Baile.
Also the stanza you shared is moving. (I am a poet).

I have been involved with charities for animal rights for a long time...and a few words have stayed with me that I read on an American animal charity advert.

"Unseen they suffer
Unheard they cry
In agony they linger
In loneliness they die"

I still fill up when I read this...it packs a punch for me...to the point and hard hitting.

To my fellow friends on the subject. Do you get ridiculed for your belief in daily life?
I often find myself being the voice of the animals in a room full of people who find it funny to make fun of cruelty. I am seen as a "tree hugger" ....but I say let them talk and come at me with their points...I will have a plaster for every sore.:hug3:

Thank you Starlight. And oh my I am choking up here. This is it exactly. These dear innocent animals... What do they ask of the world? Nothing. We could spend lifetimes learning such humility.I consciously and with intent created a life for myself where those types of people no longer exist in my sphere. That is how I dealt with that. I am also conscious of what I talk about when having conversations with others. I do not push my beliefs, I don't even talk about them. I ask people about themselves, that always keeps the conversation away from me and my beliefs. Nobody needs to know. It's been years since I had an encounter with people in the way you describe. Like I said, that's precisely what I set out to accomplish years ago: to eliminate people like that from my life. And it worked, and I'm happy and content.

And your "tree hugger" comment made me smile, fond memories of my youth! I lived in both the far North and the Pacific-Northwest, and was actually called that once by someone. And another drunken someone in a trucker pub called me "girly" (my long hair and headband). My response to things like that? I stopped going to pubs, haven't been in one in over two decades. Those people no longer exist in my sphere, see how that works?

Getting to the heart of the matter.
 

Beautiful,inspiring and informative words.

And when we return to the spirit world and look back it will become as clear as day how badly we have treated are beautiful planet earth and the wonderful animal life and nature around us .:icon_sunny:

Live and let live.
 

I am very much with every thing you say really, I do feel like an old soul and feel I should use my voice.
Yes I feel the media have a lot to answer for, I speak on BBC Radio London late night show I have spoken about spiritual and other stuff they seem o k but mostly the media is just bore'ring news about those in control. :biggrin:

Thanks for the reply Baile, It is hard for me to not be around people who think along other lines as I work with a lot of them. I am an easy target though :smile: as I am quite opinionated if someone starts a discussion there that I dont agree with. I do not push my views if it is not mentioned but as soon as someone talks about cruelty I will give a few home truths...to me criticism is in balance along with praise. It is a duty to address wrong doing. Who else if not people like us will speak for those who have no voice.
It does not really bother me if people see me as a tree hugging hippy or anything else...I have a deep affinity with nature and animals....I like to get my senses in the elements, admiring all the colours in the trees....

I just wondered how other people got along in life. Thank you for sharing. Its nice to see there are good people still around in this world. :smile:

You are probably an old soul yes..and you should use your voice...you speak for those who have no voice..anyone who thinks deeply with empathy and compassion has 'been and seen', in my humble opinion. :smile:

What frequency is the radio station you speak on? It would be interesting to listen too. :smile:

Its 94.9 fm :smile:

Just for the sake of conversation, FWIW many animals eat other animals. Where is the indignation about THAT?

And why do we persist thinking animals are comparitively 'pure' creatures when they are just as likely to kill each other and/or us as we are them?

Why are humans singled out as evil in this, and the animals get a pass?

We as the human race are meant to have evolved from second density to third density. Even so sometimes I doubt that.

In second density to follow your instincts, in third density you are meant to become self-aware, eventually let spirit do the driving, and evolve to 4th and 5th density.

To say it in a very simplified way.

bbc.co.uk/yourlondon

No one on this thread has said that people who eat meat are evil.

We are having a very sensitive discussion and using words like evil does not help.

My heart wisdom tells me its o k for animals to do what they do. :D

Ah yes. Thank you.

Truth always makes me go "Ahhh..." Like a content sigh.

Oops, missed that, and thank you!Speaking of heart wisdom and animal behaviour, one could also ask how is it the lion lay at the feet of the master. The level of dialogue depends entirely on one's desire to raise it up.

Francis' devotion to God was expressed through his love for all of God's creation. St. Francis cared for the poor and sick, he preached sermons to animals, and praised all creatures as brothers and sisters under God.

If one listens closely, they can hear angelic toning while reading this. The music of the spheres. That's how one recognizes heart wisdom and truth. Ahh.

The porcupine in the room...

This past summer a porcupine began showing up every morning around 3 am to scrounge for left-over bird seeds. I'm up every morning at 3 am, and so I began to go outside and put seeds out for the porcupine. And sure enough the porcupine showed up like clockwork each morning.

After 2-3 weeks of this routine, the porcupine was at the door each morning, waiting. I would open the door and it would stick its nose in as if to say, "Hi I'm here, where's my breakfast?" I had to carefully open the door to get out because it wouldn't move! I would step out and walk over to the feed area, and the whole time the porcupine would be following along 3-4 feet behind me.

FallingLeaves, you ask why people persist in thinking animals are "comparitively 'pure' creatures". This story is why.

I share a vibe with the foxes in the garden down stairs from my kitchen window I just give out the vibe and they look in my direction and we gaze at each other and then when I look away from them they instantly look away as well.
What I do is I take on there vibe first and it kind of vibrates through my body and then they take on my vibe we just look at each other for a little while but they can not see me from my kitchen window but they look directly at me. :icon_cool:

They can sense you. Its amazing isnt it. I love natures wonders. :smile:

A Real Man.
 

You can always tell something about a man by the arrangement of his flowers .
Or by his gun which gives him special powers.
And by the way he spits you in the eye, or by the way he's not afraid to cry.

You can always tell something about a man by the way he rules the world in his own kind of way.
And by all the things he never seems to say.

You can always tell a real man by the way he scratches his crutch and says all this hippy stuff is all to much.
And by the way they all laugh at the same old joke, which is always about more sensitive folk.

And how they hold there heads up high proud of the fact they never try to stop the suffering they create......... so there you go mate. :biggrin:

You're right, the predators do eat other animals. The cats in particular, are obligate carnivores which means their physiology requires meat and generally speaking, they respond to their food needs as a matter of instinct and availability. That's why they aren't 'evil'. Carnivore's bodies are designed to eat meat and their function is purely to control herbivore numbers.

Our physiology on the other hand, is actually more like that of herbivores. From the design of our teeth and entire digestive system to the kinds of digestive acids that our bodies produce, we are clearly more like plant eaters.

And here's something to further encourage acceptance of that statement. People who are suffering from heart disease, diabetes, MS, arthritis, some cancers, etc., will usually see a reversal of the disease when they drop the meat and dairy from their diet. But if you drop veggies from your diet, you're health will decline and eventually you'll die. Early explorers discovered that and made sure to bring some kind of veggies along with the salt pork or whatever they carried. So dropping meat and the subsequent return to health indicates that meat is not an appropriate food for us.

Also, while your puppy can chow down on the contents of the cat's litter box with relative impunity, you and I don't have digestive enzymes that are strong enough for us to survive that. They can eat animals that have been dead for a while, but the bacteria would take us out. Hence, they are designed to eat meat and we aren't.

I guess as far as your 'purity' suggestion, wouldn't that point more to their responding only to instinct and immediate need? Whereas we humans have a tendency to make plans that easily ignore not only our own need (peace in the present?) for the sake of a greater gain that may hurt vast numbers of other people, animals or the environment. Now that is evil in my opinion.

I'm sorry but this isn't even remotely true......

Here are excepts from the most recent studies as reported in "Scientific America"

How eating meat made us human.

Science doesn’t give a hoot about your politics. Think that humans are inherently vegetarians??? Sorry, but you’re wrong.

Vegans are absolutely right when they say that a plant-based diet can be healthy, varied and exceedingly satisfying, and that—not for nothing—it spares animals from the serial torments of being part of the human food chain. All good so far.

But there’s veganism and then there’s Veganism—the upper case, ideological veganism, the kind that goes beyond diet and lifestyle wisdom to a sort of counterfactual crusade. For this crowd, it has become an article of faith that not only is meat-eating bad for humans, but that it’s always been bad for humans—that we were never meant to eat animal products at all, and that our teeth, facial structure and digestive systems are proof of that.

You see it in Nine Reasons Your Canine Teeth Don’t Make You a Meat-Eater; in PETA’s Yes, It’s True: Humans Aren’t Meant to Eat Meat; in Shattering the Myth: Humans Are Natural Vegetarians. (Google “humans aren’t supposed to eat meat” and have at it.)

But sorry, it just ain’t so. As a new study makes clear, not only did processing and eating meat come naturally to humans, it’s entirely possible that without an early diet that included generous amounts of animal protein, we wouldn’t even have become human—at least not the modern, verbal, intelligent humans we are.

It was about 2.6 million years ago that meat first became a significant part of the pre-human diet, and if Australopithecus had had a forehead to slap it would surely have done so. Being an herbivore was easy—fruits and vegetables don’t run away, after all. But they’re also not terribly calorie-dense. A better alternative were so-called underground storage organs (USOs)—root foods like beets and yams and potatoes. They pack a bigger nutritional wallop, but they’re not terribly tasty—at least not raw—and they’re very hard to chew. According to Harvard University evolutionary biologists proto-humans eating enough root food to stay alive would have had to go through up to 15 million “chewing cycles” a year.

This is where meat stepped—and ran and scurried—in to save the day. Prey that has been killed and then prepared either by slicing, pounding or flaking provides a much more calorie-rich meal with much less chewing than root foods do, boosting nutrient levels overall. (Cooking, which would have made things easier still, did not come into vogue until 500,000 years ago.)

In order to determine how much effort primitive humans saved by eating a diet that included processed animal protein, Harvard reserchersrecruited 24 decidedly modern humans and fed them samples of three kinds of OSU’s (jewel yams, carrots and beets) and one kind of meat (goat, raw, but screened to ensure the absence of any pathogens). Using electromyography sensors, they then measured how much energy the muscles of the head and jaw had to exert to chew and swallow the samples either whole or prepared one of the three ancient ways.

On average, they found that it required from 39% to 46% less force to chew and swallow processed meat than processed root foods. Slicing worked best for meat, not only making it especially easy to chew, but also reducing the size of the individual particles in any swallow, making them more digestible. For OSUs, pounding was best—a delightful fact that one day would lead to the mashed potato. Overall,researchers concluded, a diet that was one-third animal protein and two-thirds OSUs would have saved early humans about two million chews per year—a 13% reduction—meaning a commensurate savings in time and calorie-burning effort just to get dinner down.

That mattered for reasons that went beyond just giving our ancient ancestors a few extra free hours in their days. A brain is a very nutritionally demanding organ, and if you want to grow a big one, eating at least some meat will provide you far more calories with far less effort than a meatless menu will. What’s more, while animal muscle eaten straight from the carcass requires a lot of ripping and tearing—which demands big, sharp teeth and a powerful bite—once we learned to process our meat, we could do away with some of that, developing smaller teeth and a less pronounced and muscular jaw. This, in turn, may have led to other changes in the skull and neck, favoring a larger brain, better thermoregulation and more advanced speech organs.

“Whatever selection pressures favored these shifts,” the researchers wrote, “they would not have been possible without increased meat consumption combined with food processing technology.”

Humans are omnivorous in nature. According to John McArdle, Ph.D, "The key category in the discussion of human diet is omnivores, which are defined as generalized feeders, with neither carnivore nor herbivore specializations for acquiring or processing food, and who are capable of consuming and do consume both animal protein and vegetation. They are basically *opportunistic* feeders (survive by eating what is available) with more generalized anatomical and physiological traits, especially the dentition (teeth)." Humans have both molars and canines, which means that we as a species, we have evolved to tear meat (with molars) and chew plants (with molars).

Not only this, but look at what vitamins we need for survival. According to Zoologist Matan Shelomi, "Chemically, we lack cellulases or cellulosic symbionts that many herbivores have and in fact don't even have the biological equipment to produce them. We also have lots of proteases and and extremely acid stomach ph that carnivores do. But we do have sucrases that let us digest fruits. Humans require vitamin B12 to thrive, which can only come from animal sources or certain bacteria (vegans must supplement their diet). We also require vitamin C, which is present in citrus fruits and organ meat, the latter probably being our evolutionary ancestor's main source. Interestingly, we have very powerful livers (the detoxification organ) and a very strong ability to smell rot/decay/decomposition relative to other animals. This suggests we may have evolved as scavengers, eating dead (but not too decayed) carcasses killed by other animals."

So back to me: My final point is the most simplest one: Chimpanzees, Sharing more than 98% of the same DNA are our closest biological relatives, are omnivores by nature.

So, yeah. Humans are omnivores and we always have been....and no amount of wishing that away is going to change it. .....we are also the most adaptable animal on this planet and can "make it" eating just about anything so if you want to eat a vegan diet....that's just fine....just remember to take your supplements.

The change into more empaphy and spiritual awareness is taking place, how ever much you fight against it :biggrin: :D :D

Biological Determinism is a waste of time.. it ignores the unique capacity of human beings to make changes and go against ''natural'' perceived norms. I've seen people justify domestic abuse and absurd levels of poverty in the name of ''nature''. And on here, you can see it every day.. ''We can kill and eat animals therefore we should''. It's the sort of rubbish non-argument that in any civilized discussion isn't seen as an ''argument''. It's would be rightly classified as a naturalistic fallacy..

Yes, humans are technically 'omnivores', and yes, it has helped us.. but that by itself are not sole determinants of human behaviour and actions. People who justify meat eating ''because of nature'' or ''animals do it too!'' should apply their logic in all facets of life.. perhaps it is better if they simply go live in the wilds and stop using modern technology and medicine because, by their own logic, it makes them hypocrites going ''against nature''... :D

You can have all the empathy and spiritual awareness you want and that does not change the fact that we are biologically an omnivore.

And again....I'm not telling you or anyone else to NOT be a vegan....if you are happy with it and do well on such a diet....good for you!...and I really mean that!

This guy never gives up, it must be the hunter in him, never happy until the next kill :rolleyes:

Just debunking non-facts with facts..........I'm sorry that you and others here find the facts unpalatable.

All you need is love.
 

:love1: :icon_rendeer:

He is correct. I have a hard time staying silent when I'm correct... meaning I have a hard time staying silent.

And just do the same: sign up to the Fish And Game forum, and start threads on topics like "Seal Protection Season!!!!"

A buddy and I stayed with an Inuit tribe on a hunting trip north of Winnipeg Canada some years ago and some of the Inuit men brought in a seal.

We were sharing a campfire with them and so I tried it just to be polite......and all I can say is YEEECH!!!!

(vegans must supplement their diet)


Yes with the correct kind of food


and as I have said many times before, I don't see myself as vegan, most vegans eat foods I would not touch.

For me, wholefood is the key. Grain only if it has been sprouted.
It doesn't matter what we have been hundreds of thousands of years ago.
This is trivia at best. If one can change a chicken egg to a duck simply by shining a laser light though both eggs, or if a lizard who are carnivores, changing to herbivores in a very short time, something that should not be possible according to evolutionary sciences.
This might indicate the human system is capable of changing in just a few generations.

[quote=Rah nam] Grain only if it has been sprouted.QUOTE]

That sounds interesting :icon_geek:

Well I appreciate that, thank you. That's almost a spiritual story and epiphany. Obviously it's mostly about hunting, killing and eating animals, and belongs on the Canadian Hunting And Ice Fishing forum and not here. But there's a real human element in there, and that's a happy sign.