Monday, September 26, 2011

vegemerrian

I'm 90% vegan, and would be delighted to be 100%. The only reason i don't is because you cut yourself off from so much (Mom's holiday cookies, for example). Plus, it can be expensive and inconvenient - animal products are still so omnipresent.
I became a vegetarian at fifteen, mostly for teen identity crisis reasons. It took me six years to understand that, so at twenty-one i started eating meat again. For some bizarre reason, i chose McDonald's as my first meat after that layoff. Bad choice. Going anywhere near golden arches makes me a bit queasy to this day. I became a vegetarian again in my late twenties, but not as a conscious choice. I just woke up one day and realized i hadn't had meat in the better part of a year.
Of course, because a choice is organic doesn't mean there aren't reasons.
I recognize that all animals are thinking, feeling beings, just like myself. Am i smarter than a pig? Probably. Is a pig smarter than a sparrow? Probably. But if we used superior intelligence as justification for consumption, i'd be entitled to eat Ann Coulter...and i'm pretty sure no one wants that (except perhaps Ann?). The past century has witnessed an inexorable change in our scientific attitude toward other animals. 100 years ago, the list of qualities which separated "man from beast" was much longer (no doubt in part a by-product of our need to absolve ourselves of exploitation guilt). A century of honest science has whittled that list down to almost nothing, a trend that shows no sign of stopping. Tool-making, problem-solving, non-procreative sex, complex vocalizations, adaptive culture, affection and devotion...we may have Shakespeare and the Superconducting Super Collider, but our basic animal nature is no more unique to us than a whorelike attitude toward celebrity endorsement is unique to athletes. The notion that humans occupy some special place in the animal kingdom, thereby justifying a "superiority" that gives us license to treat other animals any way we please, is an idea that is fading away.
If we all had to kill the meat we ate, we would become an overwhelmingly vegetarian nation overnight. Yes, this says something about how little we do for ourselves in this too-comfy society...but it's also about growing awareness. Cattle are there for us to eat? Really? How long ago did white men think that black men were there to do the hard work, and black women were there be fucked? I'm not even concerned with invoking the living (and dying) conditions of our "livestock"...horrors so atrocious that they beggar comprehension. Upton Sinclair and Eric Schlosser have handled that well, but those points are superfluous to the ethical vegetarian argument.
16,000 children died of starvation yesterday. If it takes 2-6 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat, how can any meat-eater avoid some measure of responsibility for those deaths? Some say that we have enough food, it's just not being distributed. Even if so, it would take an awful lot of rationalization for me to go on eating meat while the problem remains unfixed.
I've heard that within twenty years, all our meat will be harvested in laboratories, through a cloning process. An interesting thought, and perhaps a perplexing one for an ethical vegetarian...is it wrong to eat flesh which never had consciousness? But again, that question ignores a larger one: is it natural or healthy for humans to eat meat and dairy? The argument that we don't have the digestive tract of a carnivore is compelling...as is the new research that says that for the bulk of humanity's history, the largest staple of our diet was bugs. I've been both omnivore and herbivore, and must honestly say i never noticed any particular difference in how i felt. Certainly nothing that couldn't be attributed to psychological reasons.
But that's neither here nor there.
Most of the humans in this world who eat other animals do so simply because it's what they've been taught. The smart ones eventually realize that maybe that's not a good enough reason.

1 comment:

Max said...

Sorry Rob, but your logic here is a sham. It may be true that most people eat meat because it's what they've been taught, but how does that distinguish them from most vegetarians? Society teaches vegetarianism just as it teaches meat-eating. I eat meat because it's delicious and because it is much simpler to satisfy nutritional requirements with such a rich nutrient source.

Societies today that kill the meat they eat, like Cajun culture, do so without irony or a lack of philosophical sophistication. Cajuns feel much more strongly about the ethicalness of their eating, because they, unlike a majority of Americans, know what it is they are eating and understand their role in the natural world. American vegetarianism is more a product of the distance Americans now have from livestock than eating meat is.

Your "slippery slope" from Ann Coulter to pigs to sparrows, while cute, overlooks the awesome gulf of intelligence between a human with an IQ of 85 and the next smartest animal. We ARE superior. Eating other animals is not something we invented out of cruelty or carelessness in the 10k years since humans shifted to agriculture. It is absolutely natural.

Humans, like all animals, subsist from the consumption of natural bounty. More than any other animal, we shape our environment to meet our needs, whether by farming plants or raising livestock. If your premise is that humans are animals, then that IS the natural order.

The ethics of not killing animals is a byproduct of the half-baked over-extension of principles of equality. Slaves and cows may look similar on paper, but the differences are enormous and of irrefutable significance. Cows cannot be members of our society the way that people can. Cows cannot survive without being eaten. Their ecological niche is as our vassals. They have a vested interest in being eaten by humans. Slaves had no vested interest in being slaves. They could do much better living as free members of society.