McDonalds and other stuff

So it's been widely shown over the past couple of years that corporations like McDonalds are not what they have made themselves out to be. With films such as Supersize Me, the British McLibel case, and books like Fast Food Nation, recently made into a film, their credibility has been severely damaged.

In terms of what is relevant to this site, their animal cruely record is utterly horrifying.

My question is, do you feel comfortable patronising such organisations? Not just McDonalds, but all organisations that have some component of animal cruelty in their process. Whether it be cosmetics companies that test on animals, food outlets or so on.

I don't buy any products from McDonalds, for example. I am vegetarian but I don't buy their chips or non-meat products either. I don't want to help keep companies such as these in business. I am one person out of hundreds of millions that eat McDonalds, but I try to follow these principals not just with them, but with many companies.

In terms of cosmetics, The Body Shop, for example, do not test on animals, but their new owners, L'Oreal, do. So I don't buy products from either. And does testing on animals extend in your view to manufacturers, producers and distributors who test on animals, even if the actual brand itself doesn't?

How far do you go? What are your views? Where do you stand?

**snicker** Yeah, I bet you do. I feel your pain

I agree with you and I am vegetarian. I love meat - love it! But I'll never eat it again until some changes are made.

My decision to become vegetarian was solely based on an experience I had in January of this year. I'd been tossing the thought around for a while but hadn't yet found that convincing motivation. My friend's daughter had a petting zoo at her third birthday. I picked up a one-week old lamb and my immediate reaction was that it felt like a car seat cover. I was so shocked at myself because I realised I am so far away from how my food is produced that the first thing I thought when I touched a living creature was that it reminded me of something manufactured. I was vegetarian from that point on, and my interest in animal welfare became full-blown action and pro-active learning.

As humans, as the most evolved of all species, it is our responsibility to ensure that the creatures over which we have intellectual superiority, are benefited by that superiority, and that we do not allow ourselves to develop a sense of entitlement just because we happened to be lucky enough to evolve more. To eat meat is natural to the human species, to exploit animals for maximum profit is not. To kill our food is natural to the human species, to do so with extreme trauma and suffering to that food is not.

To me, it is perfectly acceptable to be human. It is not acceptable to be inhumane. And that is why I don't eat or use products that are available to me as a result of the suffering of animals.

Your life must be easy! It must be wonderfully stress-free to be so able to supercede your conscience.

But don't forget that wonderful old saying, `For evil to prevail, it is sufficient only that good men and women do nothing'. I truly believe in fighting for right, and good. It is the only way to make the world a better place, and if everyone does even something small for others then enormous changes can be made.

But, each to their own. It takes all kinds to make the world, and even though that's a really cheesy saying, it's true! I feel that we live in very exciting times, where people really are sitting up and taking notice, and refusing to stand any longer for inequality, injustice and inhumanity.

I agree that many of these companies do not direct the testing of animals themselves - that it is a facet of legislation that they feel to be unavoidable. But if that is the case, why is it that so many companies can circumvent animal testing altogether and still have their products on the market? Does this not make testing on animals (and I am talking cosmetics here) redundant despite the `legislation' argument?

Yes and no. Sustainability is not as cheap as mass production. Because there isn't as much of a demand for it at the moment. Until people consistently start to spend a little more, and more of these products sell, and more people want to buy them, they will remain more expensive.

It's also about longevity. Yes, you may be paying less in the immediate term, but for the long-term future of our planet and our environment, it is a lesser cost. Because the more things worsen environmentally, the more landfill there is, as climate change becomes increasingly obvious, the more dire our global warming situation becomes, the more the expense to us.

Eco-friendly products are not only less harmful to the environment, their packaging is usually more recyclable and more environmentally friendly too, and the companies are oftentimes involved in funding of new sustainable resources. It is a long term solution, one that will be forced upon us in the end anyway, and one that will become cheaper the more it is embraced.

The more we decide on the cheaper option, the longer we are prolonging the healing of our environment and the higher we are inadvertently driving prices. By spending a little more intially, you are investing in your future, that of your children, and that of all other life on earth.

My statement had nothing to do with eating meat. Other people can eat meat as much as they want, and I never try to preach vegetarianism to anyone. My statement was specifically about the comment `I just say whatever, and then go about doing what I want', which I found to be jawdroppingly selfish. I don't know any people with that attitude, so it shocked me. And that wasn't a meat-related comment, either. It was a comment about finding out about business practices.

If you think that the only people who achieve things are the people who speak out and make movies and write books, you are sadly mistaken, and somewhat naive. Every single person has the power to change things for the better. Climate change, global warming, for example. Do you think these things are just going to be solved by our politicians and activists? Not so. If each person changes their lifestyle enough, the products they buy and the companies they patronise, HUGE changes can be made. No, one person can't do a lot, but a million people all doing the same things - a BILLION people all doing the same things can achieve miracles.

And it's not always about what I'm accomplishing. No, me not eating McDonalds means nothing to them, but it means a great deal to me. Just about your whole post was about YOU and what YOU like and how things affect YOU. Which is fine, but I don't eat McDonalds because I don't want to be a person who buys products that are not essential to my life, that have been built on a great deal of suffering - not just of animals, but the environment, the labourers who work for McDonalds in those distant places we don't hear about and to line the pockets of greedy corporate giants. Again, my decision doesn't affect them at all, but it certainly makes me feel like a nicer, better person, and that's important too.

I'm am happy for you that you are morally flexible. It must be very easy for you to sleep at night. I wish I were more that way, because it would certainly be easier for me to sleep at night. I worry all the time about the way the world is going, politically, environmentally, in terms of animal welfare. It p!sses me off because it gets in the way of me being able to enjoy my life completely. And that's fine. You don't have to be that way, I never used to be that way, these days, the more I learn, I can't help being that way.

You assume that I don't do anything other than not patronise these companies. You tell me to get others involved. I do things on a daily basis - a daily basis. I do write to senators, I do try to educate others, I do change people's opinions through talking and listening and debating. I do it all the time. But MOST importantly, I change my own practices - you cannot preach what you do not practice. And trust me, if you think the voices of people like me aren't being heard, again, you are naive and misinformed.

People like Morgan Spurlock and Al Gore and Eric Schlosser started out as people like me! They believed in a cause and they took it all the way. If they didn't change their lives or their worlds or thought their voices weren't being heard, they wouldn't have bothered.

I'm not sure what you meant about being dead without animal testing. Is that because of medication you've been given? That is not because of animal testing - that is because of the hard work of incredibly dedicated people who have spent their whole lives trying to help others, mostly anonymously. Something that you seem to think is pointless, because individual efforts don't make a difference. Animal testing is a component of manufacture of medications. And whilst at this point it seems as though companies think it is needed, there are still better and more efficient methods of vivisection. In fact my last employer (a doctor) and I worked very closely together on establishing a new trend in the treatment of animals in labs, and he is doing very, very well with it.

It sounds to me like you think it's wonderful if other people want to make an effort to change their lives and change the world, and it's going to work fine for you because you won't have to do anything and you'll reap the benefits of others' hard work anyway. I'm not talking about vegetarianism, I'm talking about a better world altogether, where environmental and ethical considerations win out of corporate consumerism and greed for power. Because those days are ending just as life as we know it is ending, and I hope that when hardworking people who care more about the planet than lining their pockets or living convenient lives finally fix this beautiful world of ours, that people who feel the way you do, and don't think that the individual should bother trying to change things, appreciate all the hard work they've done.

I don't have anywhere near the extent of knowledge of animals in medicine as you do, and I agree with what you've said. I do have a problem in that you think it is not ethical to do this in humans, and yet it is perfectly acceptable to do the same things in animals without their permission or consent. As if they were put here just to serve our purposes. I do have a problem with that, I'll always have a problem with that.

Also, given that they are not the same species as we are, I don't see how there can be the general consensus that what works in animals is an accurate indicator of how things work in humans.

However, having worked in medicine myself for many years, I do understand the necessity of using animals to perfect medical techniques (ie cardiothoracic surgery in dogs, endoscopic techniques in pigs) and so forth - but many of these tests are carried out on dead animals.

The business my last employer (a gastroenterologist) started is in tissue sharing. He felt that there was a very great deal of waste in vivisection - you know, you use the liver of a rat, and then discard the rest of the rat because somehow it is no longer `pure' because the liver has already been used. He has started an ethical tissue sharing programme, where much more of the animal is utilised, and believes it has the potential to cut animal deaths in vivisection by up to 70%. To me, that is such a huge, positive step in the right direction, and I am all for that kind of advancement.

Humans are only superior to animals by way of our higher intellectual reasoning abilities. The same amount of incredible genetics, development, evolution and everything else is involved in the conception, gestation and birth of humans, monkeys, dogs, cats, mice - we are all evolutionary phenomena. It just makes me sick that because we were able to have the luck to evolve a little more, it makes us feel that we are entitled to use all other living creatures to our benefit, as if that's the reason life was created in the first place - solely to sustain human life. Many animals, in fact, have far superior physiological traits than humans - far superior. A dog's sense of smell, a whale's ability to communicate via sonar, the ability of deer and other wild animals to `predict' storms - intellectual superiority is one thing, but there are many, many other instances where humans fall far short of animals. And yet, in our capacity to be able to reason, we have an innate capacity for exploitation, cruelty and wastefulness.

Monkeys are more evolved than rats, too, but you don't see monkeys treating rats exploitatively, for the betterment of monkey life. I don't see how it is any different with humans. And until everyone starts thinking that way, or at least understanding the reasoning behind such thinking, things will not get better for the animals of this world (or, I must add, children, people in developing countries and other disadvantaged minorities).

Being smarter doesn't automatically afford us more rights. I am smarter than a lot of people, do I have more rights than them? A lot of people are smarter than me. Does that give them more rights than me? Of course not, and it's ridiculous to think so, but that is exactly how we do think when it comes to animals. What being smarter does, is afford us more opportunities to exercise power, and take advantage. And that is rarely a good thing, at least not the way we utilise it.

I don't disagree that we need models for medical testing, and we have a necessity at this stage, because we have no alternative, to use animals as those models. However, to use a beagle to test a moisturiser, because beagles are more `docile' than other types of dogs, to use rabbits to test eyeshadow, to use mice to test perfume - that is disgusting, pointless and should be abolished for all time.

Rather than using animals for our own ends, we should learn from them, learn to be more like them, learn to appreciate them for the wonders of evolution that they are. We're all animal species, all of us. We share the world - humans didn't create it, we developed here, we were put here, just like every other living being with whom we coexist. I just wish more people would just forget about themselves for five seconds, think of the bigger picture, and realise that the world does not belong to us, we all belong to the world.

Not at all! And I'm thrilled at the number of highly educated people like you who are choosing to share their knowledge in this thread....YAY! I'm learning so much! I LOVE discussing things like this with people - ALL people - it's such a fantastic way of educating oneself.