I read this article when it was published and have waited until now to post a comment to see which way the conversation went.

I have been vegetarian for 15 years – and it started because meat did not agree with my digestive system. And also I have a love of animals.

I raise chickens and eat the eggs – and I also have my own milking goats for dairy products.

This article maes me feel very proud to be vegetarian – I am so glad no being that is aware or has feelngs has been killed for my consumption in the last 15 years.

I hope others can see the trauma that killing these animals creates – not just for the animal being killed but for its friends and family.

Very sad.

Re eating young or old animals, I’ll throw one more spanner into the works for interest. This ’spanner’ has only been created in recent times due to our creation of chemicals and their now almost universal dispersion throughout our ecosystems, but it is another factor we must take into account. I’m talking specifically about bio-magnification, which is where an animal (including ourselves) accumulates chemicals in its body over its lifetime. This makes eating older animals more dangerous than eating younger ones, and this difference can be significant.

You can get a more full understanding on this via my Pesticides, and You post.

Eating meat in the past was considered a luxury and most of the people on the Balkans could afford it on big holidays exclusively. In the pre-fossil fuels era bulls (and not horses) were farm’s engines – they were pulling ploughs and carts, taking water out of wells, rotating wheels that pressed plant oil etc. Only well-off villagers could afford culling calves for meat. Fasts in Eastern-orthodox tradition require not eating anything of animal origin (meat, fish, eggs and milk) for their duration, effectively imposing vegan diet for approximately half the year. And many people abided them not out of religious reasons but of economical necessity.

However if you raise sheep you have to cull the lambs regularly, because when their numbers raise they can damage badly the landscape, especially in mountainous regions (like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sssr/2453562001/in/set-72157604806543036/ ). So if you wear a woolen pullover, someone have to eat the surplus stock or it’s not sustainable.

With regards to terminating the embryos that are 6-7 days old, it seems fine by me, I don’t see it an embryo as a living animal yet (please, let’s don’t get into a discussion about abortion).

If you reduce the number of unwanted male chicks by determining their sex prior to hatching I don’t see how it would affect the genetic pool. You can still have male chicks, however, in a smaller number. I agree that keeping male chicks on large-scale farms would not be cost-effective. You’d need a lot of space for it, and you’d need to find a breed with roosters that are less likely to fight each other. However, it seems to me, that on small farms, where your main source of income is e.g. growing vegetables and you keep only a small flock, than it could work out (the interesting thing I read is that the green-legged breed of Polish chickens can walk around a farm up to 1 kilometer and come back to the chickenhouse by itself). Would I pay more for “ethical eggs” from a farm like this? Yes, I’d be happy to.

http://permaculture.org.au/2010/03/08/how-cows-are-treated-in-india/

The problem with keeping all the male chicks alive is that they’ll fight with each other. I’m not sure how anyone could do that without basically locking them in cages – unless of course you butcher the males before they develop to that stage. But that’s not where you’re heading with this line of inquiry, obviously. I can’t see any commercial operation keeping unproductive males or past-prime females around – they’d be feeding 5-10 times as many birds as a commercial eggery for the same number of eggs.

There’s no real point in making sure your cows only bear females if you aren’t going to keep them all anyway. The excess still has to be dealt with, and butchering is the only sustainable way to do that. Again, I worry that big corporations will come up with some kind of ’solution’ where they can inject cows with drugs and hormones to induce a phantom pregnancy and kick-start lactation on-demand.

I’m not sure where your ethics will lead you, but would you regard it as wrong to exploit these animals in any way? I mean, we’re keeping chickens locked up (yes, even free ranges have boundaries) and stealing their eggs. With cows, we’re again fencing them in and keeping them lactating after their calves are weaned so we can steal their milk. Is that exploitation wrong?

Personally, my ethics lead me to believe that animals increase the productivity of a system and it’s fine to use all their products (including manure, wool, eggs, milk, meat, leather, blood and bones, etc), so long as they are allowed to live a happy life and express their natural habits, and are treated with respect and thankfulness. Joel Salatin likes to say that his chickens are able to express the essence of chickenness, and I think that’s a great way to think of it.

With regards to chickens, there is a research undertaken to determine the sex of chickens prior to hatch. As I am told, however, this method is not available commercially yet, but it would be great to introduce it in hatcheries to avoid killing of male chicks. As I’m also told you can design a system of raising chickens where you keep the male chicks, it all boils down to the price of an egg. You can also let the hens live after they no longer lay eggs, some small farmers in Poland do that (most of the hens end up in the soup, though).

Maureen, I called a bakery in my city and I was told that they use Polish wheat only. Around 85% of wheat consumed in Poland is grown locally, the other 15% is imported mainly from Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraina, Slovakia and Lithuania. Canada is not mentioned in the report.