Is going veg a good idea?

You must have lobbied very well if only your Uncle within your family continues to eat meat.  Well done....  Maybe he will join the 1% of vegetarians currently in this country.  Then maybe he can take a trip over to Somalia and wave some roast beef under the noses of the poor little creatures only to rip it away and say 'oh no you can't have that, we must all follow a vegan lifestyle'.  Sorry but it is unrealistic to think that all people will turn to the vegan lifestyle.  Period.  What AA needs to lobby is that all meat is grown and processed in the most humane way possible.  That is a realistic goal.  Cheers

Lars I would never hurt a cow either but I would pull the trigger to slaughter it for consumption.  There is a difference.
And as for your assumption that I am a 'hard arsed dumb farm girl'.  Cheap shot my girl.
There are 'cowboys' in every game and sadly this grazing industry is not exempt from that. On the whole though we on the land do respect and care for our animals.  We are not all redneck bogans with buckle bunny attitudes.  Interestingly I heard an interview recently by an African woman who had moved with her family from Brisbane to a rural town and she said that her family had encountered far more racism in Bris than their new town.  Anyhow I digress.  If you still think I am just a mad shootin' maverick then perhaps I am wasting my time here on this forum.

I would like to ask you what experiences you have had with people on the land to have resulted in such harsh views on us.

"Like it or not we are at the top of the food chain and we humans are carnivores from forever ago. If it weren't for the human race the animals would self distruct. Fact."

The only animals which would "self destruct" would be the billions of farm animals raised for meat, and considering they're bred to "destruct" I'm not sure what exactly the point you're making is. You could count on one hand the number of wild animals in Australia that have benefited from humans.

Also, don't call people extremists. It's just stupid. Nobody on the forum is planning a terrorist attack. If you have valid points to make you'll have no trouble making them without resorting to emotive buzzword tactics.

erm, you just took a cheap shot at someone for being 'realistic' and preffering a family farm over factory farm, yet you're telling us it's unrealistic to think everyone would eat vegan. Riiiiiiight.

Yes, we DON'T think the whole world is going to turn vegan, and I think you'll find we are lobbying for humane ways to treat animals, take the ban on live export for example.

who said we were going to go and rub roast meat in front of a starving child? this is just absurd.

wait,vegans dont do that? damn i had my roast meat and my flight ticket to Africa all ready

No not all my family is vegan, but my uncle is the perfect example of a carnist is all. His daughter wants to go vegetarian (my influence) but he pretty much told her he would disown her if she did it in his household and he takes every opportunity to attack me and my mother about our veg(etari)anism. My mother went veg with me and since her partner lives with us he eats veg 90% of the time. My grandmother now eats half as much meat as she used to. I wish that I had known about the health benefits of a veg diet many years ago. Another of my uncles has bowel cancer, a cancer that is directly related to diet and in his case was preventable. A veg diet would probably have prevented it based on my research, there are noted cases that when the cancer was detected early enough switching to a healthy veg diet has slowed the cancer progression considerably (phytochemicals and flavanoids in some plants inhibit cancer growth) without radiation or chemotherapy. Perhaps he would live to see his daughter reach double digits, right now he's living on borrowed time. Turning vegetarian awakened a keen interest in nutrition in me and I spend a lot of my spare time learning about it, from books, medical journals in my uni library, organistations, etc. It is my conclusion that the healthiest diet is a plant-based one.

Do your cattle get sent to a slaughterhouse? If so, have you inspected the facility and watched your animals being slaughtered? There is a big difference between instant death by gunshot to the head and bolt-stunning(that is not always effective and may take multiple hits to knock out the cow/steer) then bleeding out from having their throat cut. I don't think that shooting is humane, but what goes on in slaughterhouses is disgraceful. Do any of your cattle go to halal slaughterhouses?

I grew up surrounded by dairy farms, I still live in a district where dairy is the main industry. This is not an "us v them" issue. Nobody is going vegan to spite "people on the land".

Cassie3, you sound like the crazy, meat eating kids at my school!

No, not everyone will go vego. But then not everyone will stop smoking, not everyone will stop drinking ect.

The whole point is, if you can survive ok without eating an animal, why would you go out, and kill that animal all because you want that certain 'taste'

Many people who can't eat anything else, obviously they have the 'excuse' (dare I say it) to kill an animal for SURVIVAL, not for money, or taste.

But we do spend a lot of money on food for cattle alone, which would feed MILLIONS of starving people. How sad is that?

While these MILLIONS of starving people are starving, there are MILLIONS of animals that have their lives sacrificed for them because people like the 'taste' of their flesh.

Many vego heads on this site used to like meat, dairy, eggs ect, but they gave all that up because they actually love animals more than their stomach. Now who's selfish?