I managed to scare the holy shit out of myself in the fifth grade -- with mad cow disease.
Humans can catch it by eating cow meat -- steak, hamburger, anything. It is frequently transmitted by feeding animals infected bone meal -- so anything fed using bone meal from an infected animal, whether it's a chicken, cow, fish, or pig, can and will catch mad cow.
You don't know if you have it until you're symptomatic.
At that point, hope is lost -- have fun while your brain turns into Swiss cheese. Pretty much all they can do for you is restrain you and drug you up (or, if you're lucky, euthanize you).
it's helping the environment whether you eat no meat or meat just two days a week
*nods*
Factory farms and meat processing plants are huge wastes of fuel and water, not to mention the excess waste coming out of the other end that pollutes streams and rivers.
Permalink Reply by Sora on February 23, 2010 at 12:17pm
That's what annoys me about some vegetarians who claim you're not "loyal" unless you swear off meat forever. Most people won't make the sacrifice to give up meat completely-I mean, it can be demanding for some just to get the protein still. So why not encourage people to cut back, instead of asking them to just stop eating it completely?
Well, that's not the only reason a lot of them do it, though. For many, it's an issue of morality. So eating meat every now and then is still violating that.
I think we should encourage people to cut back, most definitely, but there is a difference between doing it because you don't like the environmental impact of it and doing it because of the lack of humanity.
Permalink Reply by Sora on February 23, 2010 at 12:22pm
True, true. I don't like the idea of eating animals, but I mean, that's the way the world's supposed to work. What I don't like is the process and how much waste is produced.