Eating Meat

[Ronald Gregor-Scott]

I am sure this is a tired subject but I was just wondering if people could share with me any advice or resources about buying meat from the grocery store or choosing it in a restaurant vs. the five precepts. I have reduced the amount of meat that I eat by about half but I still do as of right now.

[Stuart Corner]

Hi Ronald,

This paper (although a little old now) sparked some questioning and reflection for me which helped in understanding my relationship with the first precept and food consumption.

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&so...kwwtA_wxtE5xBg

Stu
xxx

[Ronald Gregor-Scott]

I was shocked to hear of how many grass animals are also killed during harvest. I'm not sure if that is more of a demonstration of how unskillful industrial farming is in the State of Oregon or not though. I recently heard a talk Ajahn Brahm gave on Buddhism vs. Pseudo-Buddhism that came up on Facebook. I was for sure thinking that it was going to be proof that my beginning practice was completely off-base but instead I heard that the five-precepts are not black-white rules but guides. That it is up to the individual to decide how skillful if you will, the person wants to be. He also said that no matter where you fall on that path that you are still welcome.

http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/budd...?autoplay=true

So I guess I still have a lot to learn.

[Jerrod Lopes]

Hi Ron,

I am not a farmer, but I grew up in an area of California where indeed a large part of the world's food is raised and grown. My cousins owned a dairy farm and I've trod through the fileds as a kid and earned a couple of dollars here and there picking fruits and veggies as a teen. I can tell you that it is much as reported in the paper Stuart linked to. Thanfully, here in some areas, farmers have gotten better about preserving animal life in the fields with various practices of shooing the animals out and collecting nests of ground birds and ducks/geese before harvest. I sincerely doubt that the practice is widespread yet. So long as large amounts of people rely upon others to produce their food, I think we're kind of stuck a bit with the way things are. The key is to Be content with it as it is and not let such things cause us mental or emotional upset, but to look for ways to reduce our own impact on others. Personally, I have little problem with eating meat from the grocery store. It's already there and it would be sad to me to think that an animal died to be food and went to waste. But I won't eat lobster or crab anymore, nor anything else killed specifically for my benefit. Just my views.

PS I enjoyed that paper Stuart. Thank you.

[Jerrod Lopes]

Come to think of it, I declined an invitation to dinner just last night as it was an oyster bbq. They're cooked alive. Not cool, in my book. Be well.

[Mara Pacers]

Hi Ron, I am a farmer - well I own a farm and have been running it for the last 16 years.

Luckily in Australia we don't have so many of the huge monster farms. I actually practice what I think of as balanced and sustainable farming - it is not as profitable in terms of money - but very profitable in terms of feeling at peace. The trick is to figure out how much you need to be able to sustain the place, and to use that as a guide. ie with all the provision for wildlife as well as the smallest organisms in the soils and rivers etc etc... I use this as a guide to how much stock I keep. It is a difficult and complicated question as far as I am concerned. ALL creatures are beautiful.. the cows and their calves.. the kangaroos and their joeys - the birds, frogs flies and bloody mosquitos.. well maybe not so much the mosquitos. The thing is ALL of the creatures breed. They will all keep breeding until Nature takes over and some starve to death or fight to the death for the available resources. To ascertain and maintain balance is a difficult thing - because no matter what you choose there will be an impact. If you stand back and do nothing you will end up watching nature do the culling. But I think there is hope - a middle way to deal with at least some of the issues.
I've even learnt a totally new attitude to the many snakes that I have here - they are all very venemous, and given how far away from services I live, their bite is most likely to be deadly. However, I have happily adapted over the years, and now I live with all of the creatures in harmony. I even have resident snakes.. it just requires continual vigilence, and altering the landscape around certain areas.

The problem with getting rid of the domesticated animals is the fact that there are no natural environments for them.. so in australia we would be talking about eradication of species. I know of a woman who has the last herd of some kind of special pig. She is getting on in years and she fears that after she is gone - that species will die out. She also went through a lot of soul searching when she finally decided that some of them needed to be killed and sold as meat. There was NO OTHER way for her to sustain her property and the happy life for her beloved pigs. So what is best here?? It is not easy. For a few years I tried a similar approach. I called it 'Otway Ethical Beef'. The cattle had the best life.. until it came time for most of the yearlings to be sold. I personally went to the abattoir that I used, and personally walked the same route as my loved animals would walk. It was ok. I actually thought that of all the ways to go, it wouldn't be too bad. Everything about the way that I raised and kept the cattle was done to give them the most natural, happy and healthy life - much better than it would be in the wild - because Nature is cruel...

Anyway attempt failed, the 'public' didn't vote with their dollars or the small added lack of convenience of having to buy larger portions and freeze the meat (in real life the grass determines when to sell cattle so it is a seasonal thing).

Because I couldn't personally face ordering any animal to their death any more, I switched over to only keeping young dairy heiffers, before they begin breeding and milking.

Having lived here, in the midst of nature for 16 years now - my attitudes to many things have changed. Now the most important thing with regards to eating meat is the gratitude and respect you give to the animal and their meat when you eat it. I get so angry when people throw away food.. some poor cow died for that... some respect please. Or the epitome of ego - to send a dish back because the meat is too tough! outrageous..

My personal solution is to eat very little meat, and to make sure that it is ethically sourced and sold, and then to respect all parts of the animal by using it fully. This is how I have come to reconcile the dilemna for myself. I haven't had to buy any meat yet from a supermarket. I am still living off the last of my lovely beef. In fact it is my favourite steer, number 82. Most people are really shocked about this. I felt that to arrange for a home kill and to really appreciate this sacrifice of the animal it was better that it stayed here than went off. The way it happens at home, is the steer is moved away from the others and put in a small comfortable little paddock - full of clover etc. the man with the gun comes and gives him a bucket of grain, and while he is munching on that he is killed instantly with a large bullet to the brain. I hope that my own death can be as peaceful.. I am not being facetious.. and part of me is regretting writting this post as I anticipate that some people will find it/me immoral... but I think it is important to actually know the reality of things and to discuss them deeply. On this issue no-one could accuse me of acting thoughtlessly, I have spent 16 years wrestling with the issues.

I would never buy standard meat or animal products from a supermarket. I do not want to enable the types of practices common in large scale operations. When I buy these products I make sure, really sure, that they are ethically sourced... free range etc. (this is getting problematic because a number of people exploit the ethical market, and their animals aren't treated better). I happily pay the premium, even if it means I eat less. I think the way some people gorge on meat is pretty awful.. we really don't need much, I probably have meat once a fortnight. The one steer I had in the freezer has fed me and visitors for over 2 years.

Jerrod, I also choose not to eat certain things.. mostly the seafood that takes so long to gain maturity... snapper, lobster, red emperor etc. It is like eating your peer... they take decades to develop, and there is absolutely no need whatsoever, to eat them.... its all ego.

Anyway I hope that my long and rambling post is of benefit to someone... Even if only to show that what often seems simple on the surface can be really complex once you start really looking into it. And just for the record, I have taken the 5 precepts, and I will no longer be the instrument through which any animal is killed (except for cases of real mercy killings when I think it is a kindness).

With respect and Metta

Mara

[Ronald Gregor-Scott]

Thank you Mara

[Jo Tummers]

I stopped eating meat about 7 years ago. I feel that it goes against the first precept. I buy as much as organic food as possible. The regulations for organic food are rather strict here so I guess it is better than eating things that are produced in a huge factory where time and money is everything.

[Ryan Melanson]

I remember Ajahn Sona saying, "It doesn't matter so much what goes in your mouth as what comes out."

[Rory Hudson]

One thing that is important to remember here is that it is characteristic of samsara that all life is in competition. One life exists only at the expense of another. As others have pointed out, the eating of fruit and vegetables can also only take place if other creatures that eat them are killed or forced to starve. There is no way to stay alive other than by eating food, be it meat or not, that has been produced by the killing of other living beings. That, I believe, is why the Buddha refused to make a rule enforcing vegetarianism for monks - it would have represented a failure to appreciate the nature of samsara. The only honest path for somebody who wants to avoid all killing is the Jain way of suicide through self-starvation. I believe the proper Buddhist course must be to avoid direct involvement in killing, by either doing it oneself or directly asking others to kill on one's behalf. And this is what the Buddha taught.

Having said that, I do sometimes wonder if there may be said to be a hierarchy of life, in the sense that a human life may be said to be more valuable than a dog's life, a dog's life more valuable than a worm's life, etc. A vegetarian diet might be said to save more of the higher forms of life, though costing more of the lower forms of life. But I can see that the proposal would open up an enormous can of worms. Just musing....

[Jerrod Lopes]

Interestingly, to me at least, I have heard that the arahants, upon enlightenment, tend to lose interest in food and eating altogether.

Not claiming to be an arahant or any such thing, I can relate in that as time goes by, more and more, I am losing interest in likes and dislikes as far as food goes, while many of my friends seem to be caught up in whatever gourmet food craze comes out from time to time. Sorry to steer it off topic, sort of.

[Mara Pacers]

Rory, I enjoyed your post... musing is great :-) food for thought :-)

Back a long long time ago.. when I was in uni.. in a philosophy class often a conundrum of who/what to save was posited. They always said that the human life was more important.. I never really agreed with that. Sentience - on human terms - can only be perceived by other humans, but they/we are only capable of sensing what our sense organs can sense, and we can only make sense of this data as a result of processing through our deluded mind. How egotistical to think that because humans/we can't sense or know something, that it doesn't exist! :-)

[Stuart Corner]

Hi Rory,

I think that you are on to something. There seems to be a karmic hierarchy to what you kill. So killing an insect karmically affects us much less than killing a large mammal, which in turn has less karmic potency than killing a human. Killing with the highest potency are things like matricide/patricide or killing an arahant, which (according to the suttas and along with injuring a Buddha or causing a schism in the Sangha) prevent us from gaining any of the stages of enlightenment in this life.

I think that (regardless of being a vegetarian or meat eater) when we look at the sheer amount of killing involved in feeding over many lifetimes, then the priority becomes ending rebirth (or at the very least securing sotapanna) rather than making a priority of trying to limit the relatively small amount of killing involved in a single life. But if you can do both, then great! 😁

Stu
xxx

[Rory Hudson]

Hi Rory,

I think that you are on to something. There seems to be a karmic hierarchy to what you kill. So killing an insect karmically affects us much less than killing a large mammal, which in turn has less karmic potency than killing a human. Killing with the highest potency are things like matricide/patricide or killing an arahant, which (according to the suttas and along with injuring a Buddha or causing a schism in the Sangha) prevent us from gaining any of the stages of enlightenment in this life.

I think that (regardless of being a vegetarian or meat eater) when we look at the sheer amount of killing involved in feeding over many lifetimes, then the priority becomes ending rebirth (or at the very least securing sotapanna) rather than making a priority of trying to limit the relatively small amount of killing involved in a single life. But if you can do both, then great! ��

Stu
xxx

Hi Stuart, hope you are well and thankyou for your thoughts. However, the can of worms that I can foresee is the issue of how to determine which life is more valuable than which other. What entitles us to say that one animal is more valuable than another? All life is, after all, interdependent. And if we do decide to go down the track of making some kind of hierarchy, then it's a very slippery slope that easily leads to the opportunity to say (for example) that my life is worth more than yours, or a white man's life is worth more than a negro's, or a man's is worth more than a woman's, or the life of an intelligent person is better than the life of a fool - it's not difficult to find rationalizations for any such distinction we feel like making in order to justify killing people. The Nazis thought the Jews were subhuman and so it was okay to kill them; Americans said of Vietnamese that they weren't really human, they were just monkeys - and so on. Man's inhumanity to man throughout history is correlated with such rationalizations. And then there's man's inhumanity to animals, which has assumed horrific proportions. So I really don't want to go down that track. Who knows what it might lead to? I do agree with you that the thing to do is to prioritize the ending of rebirth, and in the meantime develop loving kindness and good intention towards all living beings, and not to deliberately harm them oneself. I also agree with Jerrod about minimizing cruelty as much as one can.

Metta

Rory

[Stuart Corner]

Hi Rory. Yes things are pretty good at the moment. Hope all is good with you too.

Good points. In terms of determining which to value above another, I think that all unenlightened beings will subconsciously order their own hierarchy anyway based on the pleasantness or otherwise of the feelings that we have when we encounter a particular group of beings (species or race). In general I think that the ones closest to us are the ones that we value most. It's a lack of equanimity. So maybe this habitual tendency to create hierachy is something that we must be aware of, and abandon to allow unconditional love to flow freely.

On the other hand, I think that I've heard that even monastics are allowed to clear (kill?) mould.

Tricky stuff this ....

Stu
xxx