Is it normal to start hating most people when converting into a vegetarian?

[Daedius]

Know what I hate? People who change their life style who proceed to have a sudden superiority complex bragging how they're "better"/healthier/Etc.

It's second to condescending lefties who only talk to feel good about themselves. Similarly to judgemental religious conservatives that deem it necessary to intefere your life.

It's fucking obnoxious.

[VanishingAct]

Its usual when you go into a belief system to start hating people who don't follow your belief system. To you, your belief and thoughts are nothing less than absolute righteousness and moral authority. Same as any other belief system.

[Techno-Druid]

That's nature for you. That's also why certain people who keep talking about repopulating the earth with apex predators like big cats are fucking retarded.

Not sure how wanting to preserve ecosystems is retarded, especially given the impact they have on our overall planet.

[Celista]

Not sure how wanting to preserve ecosystems is retarded, especially given the impact they have on our overall planet.

Adding more apex predators isn't necessary to preserve ecosystems, you are quite simply just obsessed with them.

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I'll head out to get a bite taken out of me by a bear then... get some of that first-hand experience.

We're not always simply food to predators, but that's neither here nor there.
I've never put animal value above ours. My only claim was that us being better than animals is a facade, we consume and destroy a lot more (and that won't change unless maybe there's some fundamental shift, like reaching a whole other level of intellect). There's nothing wrong with that, it's how the world is, but it's a fact. We do it more selectively, to an extent, but the scale makes that irrelevant.
That video is quite unusual, since it's rare, compared to those of a typical predator eating someone that's still alive.

Also, as far as benevolence goes, humans swing in the other direction much better than animals, too.

Unless you hand raise a predator, you are simply food to them. So, 99.9% of the time, you are food. At best you're something to be feared. I don't think we're better than animals, other animals also show benevolence and intelligence but the fact that we are even debating whether it is right or wrong to eat animals is what separates us from them.

[PC2]

Not sure how wanting to preserve ecosystems is retarded, especially given the impact they have on our overall planet.

It's a bit late for that since the agricultural and industrial revolution have transformed the planet, and now there's 7+ billion people who would like to gain middle class consumption.

[Unholyground]

I have been educating myself to the cruelty of humankind toward animals and have been steadily changing my eating habits to only drink vegetable juice and tofu. Which puts me at odds with most of the world, I can't stand the sight of people eating meat or how meat is distributed anywhere and it is seriously making me furious almost all the time. And I know I can't convince any carnivores to change their ways, and how pointless it is to make some change when the world will never stop eating meat.

It's just all really making me extremely resentful and angry, and I'm wondering if it is normal.

Any time you realize there are major wrongs in the world it sucks because most people just go along with it. How we treat animals as a species is not great by any means so you do your part and don't worry about it, but also don't be mad either, people have lives and want to live them many don't have time to make major changes like that in their already stressful lives but over time things will change.

[PC2]

Adding more apex predators isn't necessary to preserve ecosystems, you are quite simply just obsessed with them.

Pre-human ecosystems? How would you preserve an ecosystem when you remove the top of the food chain? The ecosystem could operate very differently after 30 years with no predators.

[Techno-Druid]

Adding more apex predators isn't necessary to preserve ecosystems

Having (native) apex predators is extremely important to most ecosystems. Look at the return of gray wolves to Yellowstone, where the return of wolves altered the landscape by hunting and shifting the behavior of species like elk and coyotes. The former's behavioral modification to avoid open areas where they could be tracked more easily led to a major regrowth in vegetation which in turn led to the population increase of other species such as beavers, which are themselves a keystone species, even possibly having effects large enough to effect the climate. The dams created by beavers led to pools which increased the amount of fish and amphibians. The population of brown bears also increased, who fed on corpses alongside bald eagles and corvids (crows and ravens) as well as the increasing vegetation.

In the case of the latter, wolves killing coyotes led to an increase in pronghorn antelope as well as smaller mammals such as rodents which went into feeding bird of prey and slightly larger predators.

You cannot just pick and choose species in a healthy ecosystem. Remove the grazing animals from savannas in Africa and they begin to dissapear, remove wolves from North America or Eurasia and deer become more passive and overgraze, something that can not be fully addressed by hunters. This is how the biosphere functions and occasionally it's hit with road blocks, such as when North and South America collided millions of years ago with the Great Interchange taking place, but it balanced itself out, with machairodonts, pantherine cats and bears replacing the outcompeted carnivorous marsupials as apex predators.

Simply put, remove a card in a house of cards and it all comes tumbling down.

you are quite simply just obsessed with them.

I love Earth, animals, plants and people and I'm not ashamed to see say I'm obsessed (concerned would be a more accurate term) with keeping our biosphere as intact as possible, for both biodiversity and us as a species, which currently depend on many of the intricate ecosystems that we evolved with.

[Celista]

Pre-human ecosystems? How would you preserve an ecosystem when you remove the top of the food chain? The ecosystem could operate very differently after 30 years with no predators.

Unless humans die off, we will never be without apex predators on this planet. Ecosystems are constantly evolving, I don't know why high school science classes keep pushing the idea that we need to maintain things as ecosystem change has been in constant transition since well before the dawn of man. Look at what conditions were like during the dinosaur age and our last ice age.

With human population growth, ecosystems will be fine. Wild game is better for us anyway.

[PC2]

Any time you realize there are major wrongs in the world it sucks because most people just go along with it. How we treat animals as a species is not great by any means so you do your part and don't worry about it, but also don't be mad either, people have lives and want to live them many don't have time to make major changes like that in their already stressful lives but over time things will change.

Or better yet, make it a career goal. If animal slaughtering is your cause then go into food science as a profession. I'd bet a person is 100x more likely to make a difference working in the field of agricultural chemistry as opposed to being an angry PETA protester.

[Celista]

I love Earth, animals, plants and people and I'm not ashamed to see say I'm obsessed (concerned would be a more accurate term) with keeping our biosphere as intact as possible, for both biodiversity and us as a species, which currently depend on many of the intricate ecosystems that we evolved with.

Most of your posts have been about returning the Earth to a biodiversity period that has long since passed. Also we pick and choose how we maintain ecosystems all of the time, that's why we have biologists who are constantly monitoring conditions and culling/re-introducing certain species. Unfortunately they do an imperfect job at it, most of the time due to political reasons, but we are constantly engaging in artificial manipulation of ecosystems.

[PC2]

Unless humans die off, we will never be without apex predators on this planet. Ecosystems are constantly evolving, I don't know why high school science classes keep pushing the idea that we need to maintain things as ecosystem change has been in constant transition since well before the dawn of man. Look at what conditions were like during the dinosaur age and our last ice age.

With human population growth, ecosystems will be fine. Wild game is better for us anyway.

Yes lol ecosystems in the abstract sense will be fine, but I think the environmentalists specifically want the pre-civilization ecosystem, which isn't practical.

[Celista]

Yes lol ecosystems in the abstract sense will be fine, but I think the environmentalists specifically want the pre-civilization ecosystem, which isn't practical.

Yeah it's not practical at all, with explosive human population growth.

[Beet]

It's funny when you guys fall for tsugunais bait.

I always wonder how come the obvious ones aren’t banned that constantly do this. I mean Tennisace got banned, but it took years of him constantly being infracted.

[Daevelian]

*looks at thread topic* This HAS to be another tsugunai "bait" thread.

*Looks at OP* Yep, now are they doing their usual routine of making a rant-filled, highly opinionated bait thread that they never say a word in again?

*reads over thread* Yep.

At this point, mods should start looking at banning tsugunai for spamming these forums. Alas, last time i called him out for spam, it was *i* who got banned. Time to test how biased the mods here truly are!

[Techno-Druid]

Yes lol ecosystems in the abstract sense will be fine, but I think the environmentalists specifically want the pre-civilization ecosystem, which isn't practical.

Some ecosystems impact our entire planet such as the Amazon Rainforest or the Mammoth Steppe Ecosystem scientists are trying to restore to slow the melting of the Permafrost, in this case, we should optimally try to leave the landscape as uncultivated as possible.

The endgoal of human industrialization should be to maximize our resource efficiency while working towards the endgoal of a post-scarcity society. I think as time goes on, we will gradually see cities becoming more and more centralized in terms of resources. In this scenario, we would no longer need to extirpate species and we could basically allow any land reclaimed by wilderness to repair itself.

We're not always simply food to predators, but that's neither here nor there.

Just to add to this, predators generally tend to be smarter than the prey that they hunt and they're usually good at learning when and when not to pick fights from experience or their parents.

Predatory animals that live alongside humans generally are wise enough to not prey on humans and sometimes even their pets. Leopards in Mumbai (which actually has a huge leopard density) generally give humans a wide berth and go for stray dogs and feral pigs. Spotted hyenas in Harar, Ethiopia, regularly roam the city at night for meat scraps left behind by butchers and generally won't harm humans.

Certain species will also avoid domestic animals. Bobcats may do this in suburban areas, as well as raccoons and coyotes. In the case of coyotes, whenever they kill dogs or cats it's usually because they perceive them as competition and not food and they usually don't eat them unless pregnant or starving.

Not that this is some testament to the morality of predators or something (please don't go around petting hyenas), but predators can be very adaptable and their behaviors complex.

[Cathululock]

Becoming smug is part of the process of any pointless self-imposed identitarian ideology. See gluten free people who aren't allergic to gluten.

[Bibliomaniac]

I have been educating myself to the cruelty of humankind toward animals and have been steadily changing my eating habits to only drink vegetable juice and tofu. Which puts me at odds with most of the world, I can't stand the sight of people eating meat or how meat is distributed anywhere and it is seriously making me furious almost all the time. And I know I can't convince any carnivores to change their ways, and how pointless it is to make some change when the world will never stop eating meat.

It's just all really making me extremely resentful and angry, and I'm wondering if it is normal.

It's not normal. Recognize that you have not spent most of your life Vegetarian, you ate meat as well, and fed into the slaughter houses pockets. Hate often festers when you start feeling superior to others when in reality we all do fucked up things. Eventually our ancestors will look on these times when we tortured animals for our eating pleasure as one of our greatest moral failings of all time, along side slavery and genocide. To act like we're more morally woke about these things is ignorant. Our eating meat is a product of nature, evolution, culture, and resource availability. It's like a program that eventually needs to be rewritten as we learn more about our world and place in it, along with the progress of our availability for alternatives. Also to get angry and indignant with people about this issue doesn't help, it just makes you and the rest of the vegetarian/vegans look like idiots and assholes.

[Celista]

Know what I hate? People who change their life style who proceed to have a sudden superiority complex bragging how they're "better"/healthier/Etc.

It's second to condescending lefties who only talk to feel good about themselves. Similarly to judgemental religious conservatives that deem it necessary to intefere your life.

It's fucking obnoxious.

Well. I will say that I feel healthier being vegetarian, but not vegan. Vegan is very carb-y. I don't feel BAD when eating meat, but I do feel better when I take breaks from it. YMMV.

[PC2]

but we are constantly engaging in artificial manipulation of ecosystems.

So much so that it's almost the definition of being human vs all other species. Every invention from house making, stone tools, fire, farming, aquifers, etc, is about manipulating the ecosystem. The ecosystem has give barely anything to humanity, nearly every inch of progress was eeked out by subduing nature, not because it ever evolved to cooperate with people in harmony.