World Week for the Abolition of Meat - from 23 to 29 January - is a week when we are asked to reflect on that suffering and try switching to vegetarian meals. Nothing could be more appropriate at a time of political, economic and environmental meltdown. Like it or not our values and priorities must be reappraised lest our planet becomes utterly enveloped by the market forces of greed and avarice under the guise of growth and progress.
Comment: While we agree that the suffering animals endure in factory farms is horrific, switching to a vegetarian diet is not a healthy nor sustainable answer to the problem. Not only has it been shown that vegetarian diets are harmful to humans, but that agriculture may have been the worst mistake in the history of the human race.
I stopped eating meat when I realised that meat production contributes to a society in which the value of a life is measured by profit margins alone and comfort is of no concern.
Cows, chickens, pigs and other animals raised for food are victims of our indifference. Because they are not as familiar to us as the dogs and cats with whom we share our homes, their capacity to suffer is largely but irrationally ignored. Yet there is no longer any question about it: they are emotional beings like us. All experience joy and love and pain and fear, and all are highly social beings who form strong bonds with their friends and families and mourn when they lose a loved one. Yet raised on intensive agriculture's factory farms, pigs, chickens and other animals are denied almost everything that is natural and important to them. Most never see sunlight or breathe fresh air. Crowded together in their own waste - filthy conditions that cause extreme discomfort and stress - many of them are driven insane.
When they are still very young, they are loaded onto lorries bound for the abattoir. They ride a conveyor belt to the person or machine with the knife and then are skinned and gutted. Pleading that we are entitled to snuff out a life in order to accommodate a fleeting taste is an argument that wouldn't stand a chance in court were the victim human.
As any lawyer can attest, legality is, of course, no guarantee of morality. The law changes as public opinion or political motivations change, but ethics are not as arbitrary. Albert Schweitzer, who accomplished so much for both humans and animals in his lifetime, put it this way: "A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist .... He does not ask how far this or that life deserves one's sympathy ... nor, beyond that, whether and to what degree it is capable of feeling".
It is our decision whether to pay for vegetables, nuts, fruits, grains and legumes or to pay someone miles away to string cows, chickens and turkeys up by their legs and cut their throats and cut off pigs' teeth, tails and testicles without giving them as much as an Aspro. George Bernard Shaw warned that no matter how far distant the abattoir is, we are complicit if we eat animals' flesh. The choice seems obvious: vegetarian or barbarian?
One day, it is likely that meat-eating will be relegated to the history books alongside other injustices. Until then, we can, as individuals, make the decision to go vegetarian, if for only a week.
All life feeds on death. This is the eternal cycle carried out by Shiva, the Crone, etc. Plants incubate and inculcate microorganisms in their root system by sending out chemicals friendly to life of those organisms. Then, those organisms engage in a war/genocide with billions upon billions of lives hanging in the balance. The plant then begins sucking water up from the ground and into its root system, bringing the bodies along with it. It does not receive much sustenance from the water. It eats the dead. Then, an animal comes along and she eats many many plants, but not billions. Those plants die and thus give their life to the animals. Then, along come a human hunter. She kills perhaps one animal every few days for food. maybe one each day. He may also decide to kill a few plants as well, but not as many as the animal. So, all life feeds on death, even microscopic ones. The right to life is earned by a life-form by carrying out life processes. When these processes cease, the animal or plant dies. To you, personally, is it moral to a) Kill and eat whatever seems to support your own life best, b) kill only animals, perhaps 1-2 a week c) kill perhaps 100 plants a week or d) take the life of nothing, and thereby take your own instead?
Ah, but I have missed one option. Some plants may be taken from without killing the plant, and also some animals occasionally die on their own, due to old age (hopefully not disease). In this pragmatic solution, your nutrition may not be optimal, but by all means, try it out and see, or do your own research, using a method of SYSTEMATIC critical thinking. I recommend the Trivium.
www.triviumeducation.com