caretaker

You don't send them to the abattoir when they're old, they should be in optimum condition. If you want to get depressed about packing plants read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, most depressing book I ever read.

Oink

I liked that book. I read it in a first year undergraduate course, "Liberalism in literature."

dave_j

So we've booked into a Beatles/VSO gig in Vancouver. It's a tossup, drive in/drive out or drive in/ stay the night in some hotel, what to do?

Now if I've got one cent, I like to spend it wisely but I'm open to lavish expenditure if I've been drinking and I've been drinking.

So I wonder what's available for a night's lounging around apres jaunt.

What I'm looking for is free parking and a free breakfast.

Now I know that I'm not a good businessman and I know that I've come first in the 'He's the one' in the 2015, 2016 and 2017 'who's the easiest mark in town' so I'm just a little careful.

Looked on the web and I know that hotels are hotels and that parking's for parking people so why can't they get together and offer free parking? Don't they realise that we just like to know how much it's going to cost.

We'll be spending the money we've saved on bottles of bubbly and driving home. Takes 40 minutes and Vancouver loses out to a couple of of sozzled oldies.

caretaker

That seems sensible; the 40 minute drive is probably only twice as long as it would take to get to a hotel and get settled. The advantage to staying could be shopping in town the following morning, but you could come in early and do that on the day and have a nice supper before the concert. One of my favourite places to visit: JN&Z Deli. Best pepperoni and smoked meat around.
A PBS special on sound recording the other day covered how Epstein introduced string quartets and octets into Beatles music so the symphony should be a good meld, and probably better than the Rain tribute show I won tickets to some years back.

Novocastrian

Only in Vancouver would there be a Rain tribute.

Siouxie

https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Hotels-g1...ia-Hotels.html

caretaker

Stilton cuts the cheese:
British town's cheese rolling festival cancelled because it's 'no longer seen as cool' - Home | As It Happens | CBC Radio

Oakvillian

That would be, IMO, utterly counterproductive and objectionable.

If you don't agree that pigs should be reared for food, then that's great - don't eat bacon. But keeping a livestock animal as a pet is a wholly false narrative. Pigs have been bred - for a couple of thousand years - for their meat. While there are some cutesy big breeds, such as the small Vietnamese pot-bellied variety, I suppose one could keep as a pet, that is not the norm.

I find that I feel really quite strongly about this, which surprises me a little to be honest. It is very important that children should know where food comes from, should have some connection to the husbandry and production of food sources of all kinds. The school in question is in Lymington, a small town with a significant rural population around it - so I imagine there are more than a handful of pupils to whom the rearing of poultry, pigs and other livestock is not unfamiliar. Even so, there will be far too great a number of children in the school who have no idea that the sausages they wolf down at teatime are in any way connected with the pigs in their school sty. That is a terrible thing.

Frankly, any sensible campaigner for informed choice (which may well lead to more people becoming vegetarian or vegan as they grow up) should be all in favour of this school's animal husbandry. It can only possibly be a good thing for all the children involved. The parent who complained - and reached out to the "vegan community" to mobilise a petition - is the worst kind of proselytizing do-gooder that gives every other vegan a bad name and makes them the butt of jokes everywhere. Shame on them.

Shard

It's certainly a shame that we perpetuate the notion that a pig's life is solely to end up as bacon or sausages! A more enlightened 21st century approach for the school would be to keep the pigs, and teach the kids to respect their rights to life. That's not something they will learn on the farm or in their rural area. I can't say I feel that strongly about it, but I do see the "do-gooder vegan's" point of view, and wouldn't disparage them about it.

dave_j

I eat meat because I'm sensitive to the angst suffered by vegetables as they're dragged from the ground and boiled alive...

Discuss..

Shard

They're usually anesthetized from the refrigeration process, so no need to worry. Of course the animals you feed on are in turn fed by veggies, so you're not really saving any suffering in the world. Maybe switch to fruit (but only those that have already dropped from the tree).

dave_j

Not so, fresh veggies, yum yum.

On a more philosophical level, we know that plants respond to outside stimuli, eg the well known response of sunflowers to sun position, so I make the argument that simply because we haven't recognised the plant equivalent to a central nervous system doesn't mean that one doesn't exist.

Thus, arguments put forward for not culling animals for food can also be used to argue against the harvesting and eating of living plants.

Statements like 'They're usually anesthetized from the refrigeration process' accept the possible existence of 'plant thought processes' and expose the hypocracy of the anti-meat argument.

Shard

Nope. It doesn't exist.

dave_j

Prove it....

Shard

No brain. (In plants, not you. Although...)