A Vegetarian Rant: Meat Is Murder
Disclaimer: The following constitutes a delicate combination of opinion and fact. I don’t write to convert you, or to make you feel guilty. I write only to make you think.
1. When I tell someone that I am a vegetarian, if they are not, they invariably begin to tell me about meat. I don’t care that you would like to be a vegetarian, but you like to eat "x" animal too much. I became a vegetarian because I don’t even like the idea of eating animals. So please, spare me the bacon chat.
2. I realized recently why I am so unfazed and entertained by zombie movies. Seeing undead people devour living people doesn’t seem so different from sitting next to the guy devouring ribs or chicken wings. Indeed, the famous truck explosion scene of Night of the Living Dead and the ensuing zombie barbeque seems just like every barbeque that I’ve attended.
3. I was not raised a vegetarian. My parents tell me that as a precocious three year old, I asked the Doctor if I could be a vegetarian, and he said no. Not till I was older. As I grew up in a cattle farming community, I gave up meats gradually. Beef, pork, chicken, and then fish. Please don’t tell me it must be hard- I chose to be a vegetarian.
4. Don’t tell me it is natural for humans to eat meat. Early Humans were opportunistic feeders, eating what was available in the diverse climates they inhabited. It thus makes sense that the Inuit traditionally eat meat, almost exclusively. The climate cannot support cultivation of crops. Peoples closer to the equator could hunt, gather, and cultivate vegetables, fruits and starches such as corn, wheat and rice. Since not all people domesticated cows, milk and dairy products are not a necessary part of our diets, but can be consumed if desired. It is interesting to note that lactose-intolerance is highest among individuals of Asian or African descent: their ancestors did not typically domesticate cattle, and thus did not develop the enzymes to metabolize dairy.
5. Now, since most people living in North America and Europe have the luxury to choose a vegetarian diet, why not choose it? Yes, vegetarianism is a luxury, but by choosing a vegetarian diet we allow others, who do not have this luxury, better socio-economic opportunities. It is selfish to eat meat because you like it—if you must justify eating meat to yourself, at least find some other way to do it .
6. Reducing (or eliminating) the consumption of meat and other animal products helps the planet in many ways:
-Beef (especially) is inefficient to produce. Arable land that could be used for crops is used to graze cattle, which are slaughtered and sold to people who already consume many times the daily “healthy” limit, if there is such a thing.
-These fields could be used for crops to feed the over one billion people suffering from malnutrition and starvation.
-Production and transportation of beef is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.
- The consumption of meat (especially red meat) is directly correlated with obesity in North America. Go read “Skinny Bitch.” Seriously. As North Americans, we consume so much that it kills us.
7. You are not an animal lover if you eat animals. You might be a cat or dog lover who does not eat cats or dogs. It seems to me a gross hypocrisy to love and domesticate one animal and to slaughter and eat the remains of another. A few years ago, I remember public outcry against the occasional Chinese practice of eating cats and dogs- why promote the consumption of some animals and condemn the consumption of others? Some people keep birds as pets and eat chicken, others have pot-bellied pigs and eat pork. These people are masters of self-deception. The flesh on your plate is just like the flesh living in your birdcage, swimming in your fish-tank, or sleeping on your lap.
8. Speaking of self-deception, remind yourself at every meal that the meat on your plate was part of an animal. It was not produced out of fairy dust and rainbows at the grocery store. It lived, and it was killed just for you. It may never have seen the sky.
9. Do not lie to children about where their food comes from. These lies help indoctrinate children, making them apathetic to the suffering of animals. The greatest thing we can teach them is to question everything.
10. As a personal side-note, I find the marketing of Jell-O to children particularly repulsive. Yes, it comes in fun colours and it’s easy to make. But it is made from the boiled bones and other remains of cows pigs, and horses. Vegetable-based gelatins do exist, but they are difficult to find and often expensive. Jell-O, marshmallows (like the ones in your Lucky Charms) and many chewy candies are receptacles for the most processed animal waste.
11. These animal products are everywhere. In addition to gelatin, I have recently become obsessed with finding vegetarian cheese. Cheese often contains casein or rennet: the lining of calves’ stomachs and an enzyme found in their stomachs, respectively. Aside from being cruel and repulsive, the consumption of both substances have been linked to certain cancers. Other animal products are used in moisturizers, shampoo and conditioners, and make-up. Don’t even get me started on animal testing. That’s a whole other rant.
12. Perhaps most importantly, we should not eat animals because of their capacity to suffer. Not because they take care of their young, possess language, intelligence, or lips and eyelashes.
It is wrong to cause needless[1] suffering.
Animals suffer needlessly when killed and eaten.
Therefore, it is wrong to kill and eat animals.
(I draw heavily on the work of Peter Singer, here.)
If nothing else in our lives, we should seek to promote happiness and well-being, and to minimize or even prevent suffering. Humans are animals, too- we are acutely aware of the suffering of our own species (although this is at times debatable), but we systematically inflict pain, suffering, and death on other species. We justify our actions with a set of arbitrary criteria, when we justify our actions at all. If another, sentient species visited earth, and justified consumption of our species based on the lack of some trait or other (telepathy? telekinesis? ESP?) we would feel this was wrong, to put it lightly. Yet we perpetrate these same crimes against other species here on our own planet.
So I ask of you:
Think about your food.
Reduce your meat consumption.
Go vegetarian.
Go vegan.
Promote happiness and prevent suffering.
Engage in a meaningful dialogue about food, the environment, and the economy. They are not as distinct as we would like to believe.
Meat IS Murder.
We just need to be reminded sometimes.
(Thanks Morrissey.)
