Vegan mini-rant.
frenchteeth:
Okay. I really wish that everybody would eat vegan. Obviously. BUT I try to be pretty cool and reserve judgment… however, when people say things to me like “I could just NEVER give up cheese [or burgers, bacon, chicken nuggets, etc.]!”, and they frequently do, it drives me nuts. I don’t think it’s funny or understandable or valid. I think it’s selfish and highly indicative of the kind of horrible, entitled creatures humans are. I hear “I value eating an omelet more than I value the welfare of another living thing” or, “My desire for steak is more important than the life of a cow”.
I usually try not to do little bitch fits like this, but I had to stomach this about 4 times this week.
You’re exactly right to think the way that you do.
In fact, every time I eat a piece of meat or think about eating a piece of meat, I immediately drop what I’m doing and go kick a puppy or a farm animal, because ultimately my desire for meat is perfectly synonymous with having a desire for a huge corporate farm somewhere to raise an animal in terrible conditions and put it to an agonizing death.
I also enjoy swerving into oncoming traffic instead of risking the possibility of hitting a rogue squirrel in the middle of the road.
(that was sort of asinine of me — I’ll own that)
On a more serious note, when I go hunting, I don’t think of it as “I want to kill this animal because I take pride in killing defenseless animals and putting them through agonizing deaths.” I think of it as, “I enjoy hunting because I get to spend more time in nature than I usually get to spend the other 357 days of the year, and while doing that I, get to contribute some effort towards managing the deer population; if the deer population gets out of control, they run out of food and starve to death, and the more deer there are are in the woods, the more deer there are running into traffic.”
So in case you were wondering, no, I don’t mind at all the ethics of deer hunting, because by putting some of the population to a sudden and relatively painless death, the greater portion of the population won’t starve to death and spend literally months suffering the agonizing death that is death by starvation.
Personally, if I got to choose my death, I’d much prefer a shot to the head than a shot to the gut, but you have no idea how far down the list of ways to die death by starvation would be. It’d be somewhere between being burned alive and falling through an ice-covered lake where I’m just capable enough of swimming back up to the surface, but unable to find an open hole in the ice to get out of the water through so I spend a minute or two in a panicked, helpless frenzy.
As for fewer deer running into traffic? You bet I value a human’s life more than an animal’s. I would love for collisions between motor vehicles and animals to never happen, but if the odds and probabilities of life say it has to happen because there are x number of deer living in a state with y miles of roads, I’d be perfectively satisfied if in every case the animal died and the person didn’t. Doesn’t mean I want the animal to die. I don’t. I’d just prefer the human didn’t.
Corporate farms are notorious for not being exactly humane, but two problems exist:
1) Farms go out of business if their business practices are not competitive enough with the industry. Practices that cost more push prices higher, and higher prices means the consumer will find someplace else to satisfy their shopping carts.
2) Whenever costs go up for goods that satisfy the lowest tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, people die. If that’s the cost of gas going up and making the transportation of goods cost more or the way that the good is produced costs more, the result is that someone somewhere loses the ability to afford to feed themselves and their families. Frequently, it’s Africa that suffers the most because nowhere in the world are more people living in poverty than in Africa. Still, there are places in first-world countries where people can just barely afford to put food on their tables, so they do that, but sometimes that takes priority over ever going to get medical treatment for a serious condition.
I certainly don’t have all of the answers, but I do know that if everyone in the world stopped eating food produced by animals tomorrow or even within the next few years, many people across the world would die if they were no longer able to afford a meal at the supermarket or if they could no longer go kill a wildebeest to feed their village.
There will always be the people who just continue to eat meat because they prefer it, but you make a pretty big jump going from “I want to enjoy a tasty meal that doesn’t cost very much” to “I enjoy surviving solely at the plight of others and would never have it any other way.” I’d pay an extra $1.50 for my burger in exchange for the animals being treated better as they’re raised, but I’ll understand if a business is certain they cannot sustain that business model and I’ll also understand that to lots of people in the world, the extra dollar and fifty cents can be the difference between being able to feed everyone in their family every night of the week and someone having to go a few nights each week on an empty stomach.
