Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Animals are made for the slaughter

It's a reality everyone should know by now. Unfortunately, it seems that we need to put up a honking big neon sign for those who are too blind to realize otherwise. Somebody handed Fidelis this flyer entitled Vegetarianism and Christianity. Needless to say we spent the rest of the afternoon having a good laugh over it. As if the psychotic fundamentalists and televangelist of the Catholic Church weren't enough... We now have to add a becrazed group to their number, a pack of vegetarians out to convert the heathen carnivores.

It's never going to happen, buckos.

Animals were put here on this plain to sustain us, it's the natural order of things. An animals first instinct is to survive and feed itself using all the means necessary. The most ridiculous statement I saw went something like "Animals have feelings to. They feel love, anger, pain..." Funny, for the longest time my old religion teachers have maintained that humans are the most complex life forms. They were right on this point. We humans are capable of thinking and feeling; we have the ability to rationalize things. Animals act on instinct - they do not think and feel as we do in the truest sense of those words.

"Every year over 8 billion chickens are in danger of ending up in fast food chains like McDonalds and KFC"
Oh big whoop. And tell me, if we don't end up eating the 8 billion chickens, what exactly are we to do with them, give them away as pets? In fact, if we didn't eat our livestock our population would be overrun with them by now. We kill and eat them to produce balance in our ecosystem, just like lions keep the antelope population in check. Too many antelopes = depletion of grass lands > It's a domino effect. I will be deeply impressed if one of these PETA vegetarian advocates can manage to convert a starving lion to vegetarianism.

And plants are made out of cells, which technically means they're alive. They also respond to stimuli - haven't we all heard that talking encouragingly to a plant can help it grow better. Wouldn't that make harvesting them for consumption tantamount to murder as well? Gasp.

"Vegetarianism as a solution to world hunger"
And I'm a grand matador. We can barely produce enough food for everyone as it is, removing poultry, meat, fish and whatnot would only make things worse. And has it ever occurred to them that not every corner of this earth can yield crops to sustain everyone?

Vegetarianism is healthy without a doubt. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, it's just that this particular group is making this such a crusade. The flyer is so blatantly one sided. What disgusts me is when people force their beliefs onto a person. It's like bullying a devout Buddhist to accept Catholicism - it's a slap in the face.

"If slaugherhouses had windows, we'd all be vegetarians by now"
Speak for yourself. I have to nourish myself somehow, and a display of blood spattering wont be enough to sway me or thousands of other people out there.


I think the most sensible argument they put up on the flyers was that certain butchering techniques are inhuman. Hot blades for ripping off chicken's beaks and scalding them while they're still alive and other such gruesome practices. Since that's one of their main concerns, they should rally for that instead of taking an offensive on something we know isn't going to change anytime soon.

This reminds me of one of Neil Gaiman's short stories called Babycakes. What creeps me out the most is that this isn't beyond our capacity to do.
Here's a snippet:
A few years back all the animals went away. We woke up one morning, and they just weren't there anymore. They didn't even leave us a note, or say good-bye. We never figured out quite where they'd gone.
We missed them.
Some of us thought that the world had ended, but it hadn't. There just weren't any more animals. No cats or rabbits, no dogs or whales or fish in the seas, no birds in the skies.
We were all alone. We didn't know what to do.
We wandered around lost, for a time, and then someone pointed out that just because we didn't have animals anymore, that was no reason to change our lives. No reason to change our diets or to cease testing products that might cause us harm.
After all, there were still babies.
Babies can't talk. They can hardly move. A baby is not a rational, thinking creature.
We made babies.
And we used them.
Thus spake Irish || 4:51 PM || 1 comments