Monday, January 09, 2006
Turning veggie
I've turned vegetarian for the month of January. Mostly just to try to get myself to eat more fruit and vegetables, which is working, although I have lost about half a stone which I didn't really want to. Anyway it really amused me to see that there's been a big fuss made about a couple of TV chefs showing animals being killed on their shows. Really strange when you think how many people are shown getting killed on our TV screens every day. Do some people empathise more with turkeys than humans?
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I once worked for a hereditary peer who only ate meat he’d killed himself. I don't think that's a good idea, but it’s no bad thing for people to be aware of how food gets to their dinner table.
That some find slaughter shocking is telling. But if it is a shock and, having reflected, you come to view that lambs needn’t be killed and that the world would be a better place if they didn’t suffer in this way, simply stop eating them.
Those who react to stuff they find horrible by pretending it doesn’t exist, rather than recognising that choices they make contribute to the nastiness and changing their ways appropriately, really are dangerous.
"I once worked for a hereditary peer who only ate meat he’d killed himself. I don't think that's a good idea, but it’s no bad thing for people to be aware of how food gets to their dinner table."
Or not just the fact that animals are killed, but that factory farmed animals suffer greatly during their lives, and then are killed painfully, while many slaughterhouses have horrifying worker injury rates. Many people who wouldn't have a problem eating a free range cow that has a happy life and is killed humanely in old age still would draw the line at eating animals whose whole lives are confined to tiny pens.
There's also a really strong environmental reason to avoid meat - a meat meal uses far more land and resources than you need to produce a vegetarian meal.
"Really strange when you think how many people are shown getting killed on our TV screens every day. Do some people empathise more with turkeys than humans?"
A lot of television and movie violence is cartoonish. They rarely have you really empathize with someone who is killed, and see them as a human being and the effect that their death has on others. Many horror movies or bloody action movies are almost like a video game in their unreality - it's a lot harder to witness real life violence to an animal.
In 16 years of prosecuting felony crimes, our office has only had three istances of letter and petition campaigns from the public requesting harsh treatment for the criminals in particular cases. Each was an animal cruelty case.
Some people DEFINITELY get more worked up over animals than they do people.
Certain animals, of course.
Do some people empathise more with turkeys than humans?
Course they do. We live in a country where people give more money to animal charities than to charities that protect children.
This is definitely a bizarre trend. However, in defence of animal rights activists, I think at times the issue of animal abuse seems much more surmountable than human rights. While doing something about child poverty, especially from a Western country, seems depressingly impossible, going veggie is not. Either way, I don't feel it's really productive for activists to pit our causes against each other- the world is fucked up and we're all trying our best to fix it.
Cheers!
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