SC - Anti meat sympathies

[sjk3 at cornell.edu]

>     Hundreds of my ancestors DIDN'T die painfully so I could eat tofu and
> bran flakes. More than that, they essentially created the livestock species
> upon which we prey. Most of what we eat has been genetically altered &
> engineered for centuries; they just did it the slow and tedious way, by
> selective breeding. We've spent countless years and tremendous effort to
> create meat producing animals that are exactly what we specify
> 
>     Sieggy

     And the same was done for plants.  Admittedly, the development of
maize from teosinte (I used to work in the Plant Biology Dept. at Cornell,
and one of the professors was studying this) is of less interest to this
group than, say, varieties of wheat or barley (or other old world plants),
but they too were developed "the slow and tedious way, by selective
breeding."  I don't know enough about anthropology or paleobotany to say
for certain that plant breeding developed before animal breeding, but I
suspect it did. 

Sandra Kisner
sjk3 at cornell.edu