Via Megan McArdle, I read this article about vegetarianism, in which the author describes his reasons for becoming a vegetarian:
Vegetarians give up meat for a variety of ethical, environmental, and health reasons that are secondary to this essay’s goal of increasing brotherly understanding, so I’ll mostly set them aside. Suffice it to say that one day, I suddenly realized that I could never look a cow in the eyes, press a knocking gun to her temple, and pull the trigger without feeling I’d done something cruel and unnecessary.
I’m a dedicated omnivore, but the only animals I’ve ever personally killed for food were fish. I’d be just a bit squeemish about killing a chicken, but I think could do it without much trouble. Likewise with cattle — in my limited interactions with farm cattle, they strike me as only marginally more intelligent than the grass they eat. I’d have a bit of difficulty with pigs and lambs, though, as tame pigs can be every bit as smart and affectionate as dogs, and lambs are frikkin’ adorable. But that doesn’t stop me from eating them when someone has done the dirty work for me.
How about y’all? What do you eat, and would you feel comfortable killing it?
{ 31 comments }
I eat almost everything and would have no problem killing it to eat it.
I’ve hunted a little, mostly birds. I enjoy the chase and taking the shot, but I’m uncomfortable with the actual death part. Nevertheless, there’s some satisfaction in knowing I can do it, and I can clean it and cook it, too.
Still, I’m glad that most of my meat is killed by other people who will do this for me for pay, or for fun. I have a full freezer from a whitetail my husband shot, and from part of one of my mom’s steers that my siblings and I paid to have fed out and slaughtered. The people at the store probably think I’m a vegetarian, since I hardly ever buy meat.
The author’s decision makes sense for him, and is fine as long as he doesn’t hold others to the same standard. I certainly don’t hold anyone to that standard.
BTW, lambs are usually up around 100 lbs. by the time they’re slaughtered, so they aren’t all that cute at the time they get turned into lamb chops.
I pay other people to do a lot of things for me, including killing my food (other than game and the occasional fish, of course, I take care of that myself, thankyouverymuch). I don’t think it would particularly bother me to do the killing for myself, just horribly inconvenient.
And then there are the vegans, who talk about the ethics of how we treat non-human animals, who are individuals just like us.
Ahem.
Boyd’s last blog post..Music and me
I believe I could kill, but fear I am too squeamish (barring emergency, such as being stuck in a wilderness for days) to do the rest. OTOH I also believe a day or two being actually involved in dressing carcasses for a day or so would alleviate, if not dispose of, that queasiness.Â
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Boyd,
you’re projecting. just as people become vegetarians for a variety of reasons, so, too, do people become vegan for a variety of reasons. Not all of which have to do with whatever save-the-whales bs you’re picturing in your head.
Hmm, if they won’t eat meat that someone else kills, why will they eat grains and vegitables that someone else grows?
Jan
JLBussey’s last blog post..Fountain on the Viewing Mound
JLBussey:Â A panel in Switzerland is working out the ethics of killing plants, and it seems to be that it’s just as unethical as killing people.
Elisha Feger’s last blog post..Fiery Computers of Doom.
I am a committed omnivore. I could probably live without meat but I don’t want to try that. On the other hand I give the cows, pigs and lambs credit for a good amount of intelligence. I just ignore that as I eat them! I could tell you some stories of cattle that seemed to be pretty smart, we all know the intelligent pig stories and I suspect lambs and goats are not all that dumb. Chickens don’t want to die, I’ve watched as my mother and grandfather killed chickens. About ten years ago my nephew had some leftover 4H chickens which my twin sister and I decided we were all-knowing enough to clean if he would only kill them. What a nasty job. But still I eat more chicken than beef or any other meat. I understand if others do not want to eat animals but I don’t want them to try to persuade me to join their religion. I won’t offer to share my meat if they won’t try to keep me away from it.
I was raised on a farm, which answers the question. I remember we had a bull named Jake. You always knew when you were eating a piece of Jake because you could chew all you wanted without making any progress.
Elisha Feger: "A panel in Switzerland is working out the ethics of killing plants, and it seems to be that it’s just as unethical as killing people."
Yeah, I saw that. They all had different reasons for the conclusion, but agreed on the conclusion. Like they’ve agreed on the con, and are just discussing the best way to sell it to the marks.
A panel in Switzerland …
Carrot juice is murder!
I don’t even understand the question. Merely juxtaposing two things — killing something and eating it — is not an <b>argument</b> for why they should go together. What is the logical premise of the suggestion that if you wouldn’t kill it, you shouldn’t eat it?
Ron Coleman’s last blog post..West view
Whether or not it makes sense depends on why you won’t kill it.
If you won’t kill something because it’d feel like you were doing something immoral, then it follows that hiring someone to do it for you (very indirectly, by buying the meat at the grocery)Â doesn’t remove the immorality.
If you won’t kill something because you’re no good at killing, or because the act of killing is yucky (but not immoral), then hiring someone to do it for you is completely legitimate, the same way it’s legitimate for me to hire someone to unclog my toilet.
I believe vegetarianism is both unnatural and unhealthy for humans, and verges on child abuse for those who subject their young children to it. There’s copious evidence for most of that.
However, I grew up in a hunting household, and something strikes me as not-quite-right about going your whole life eating meat without ever being exposed directly to what that entails.
Now, anyone who watches nature shows knows the truth–kill or be killed is the very basis of nature, and there’s a reason we refer to "savage beasts" because that’s what most animals are. Still, if you’re willing to be part in something you ought to be forced to confront all it entails at least once in your life.
Ever watch a preying mantis work? *shudder*
"Unnatural" I’ll buy — humans certainly seem adapted to an omniverous diet — but I was not aware that vegetarianism was particularly unhealthy provided you’re careful to get complete proteins (available from a mix of cereal grains and legumes, or from eggs and dairy if you’re not vegan) and enough vitamin B12(available from supplements, from eggs and dairy, and from soy milk).
We had a calf whose mother had died in the winter.
So, he would come to the door of our bunkhouse to get his formula. He would also follow us as we did chores around the house.
We put off branding him for much longer than we should have. He got so big that he would knock us down the minute we opened the door.
On the day of his branding, he followed us to the barn. Now, I know that I am projecting, but it seemed to me, that he looked at all those OTHER cows and said, "I’m with them", meaning me and my cousin.
As some point between cutting his nuts off and sticking a red hot branding iron into him, he became meat. My cousin, who grew up on the ranch, had a tear in his eye.
JLBussey: A panel in Switzerland is working out the ethics of killing plants, and it seems to be that it’s just as unethical as killing people.
I hope they do the right thing then and kill themselves. More veggies (& meat) for me and my family.
JLBussey: A panel in Switzerland is working out the ethics of killing plants, and it seems to be that it’s just as unethical as killing people.
Do weeds count? Cuz I just murdered about a hundred of them out in my garden. It felt good, and I am not in the least bit repentant. There’s probably a level of hell where I’ll be forced to labor in the fields and listen to every little weed scream as I pull them out of the ground over and over and over for eternity…
JLBussey’s last blog post..Gold Crowned Sparrow
My "test" of whether something’s "natural" is if humans in various states of nature could survive it. Vegetarianism wouldn’t work in a cold climate with long winters without modern trade and refrigeration technology; the most successful "cold-veggies" are Koreans, who came up with the pickling technology called kimchi.
Who knows? Maybe the best way to reduce one’s carbon footprint and be "seasonal" is to go bag a few deer in the winter?
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I’d have no problem killing and eating you if I was hungry enough.
Seriously, people only became vegetarians after food became much much more available than in the past. Meat is a first-choice food in pre-industrial societies because it’s more nutritionally complete, mostly because of the protein.
If civilization collapsed and you hadn’t eaten for a week, I think you’d be surprised just how unsqueamishly you killed something and devoured it.
Vegetarians talk a good game about balancing their proteins and making sure they get certain vitamins and minerals by eating those rare plants that are rich in what animal products have naturally, but I’ve rarely met one who’s sophisticated and anal enough to actually do that and do it consistently. And there are a ton of ex-vegetarians and semi-vegetarians out there who tried these perfectly "balanced" programs and found it exhausting or had health problems from it anyway and find that they cannot maintain good health without at least some animal flesh in their diet at least once a week or so.
Human beings are omnivores that lean toward carnivorous more than herbivorous. Human beings can eat nothing but animal products and remain quite healthy for extended periods of time, but rarely can that be said for the purist vegetarian.
Oh, and I should add, some define "vegetarian" so loosely that they allow themselves to eat eggs, dairy products, even fish in some cases, which if you ask me is not really vegetarianism at all.
Vegetarians, as the usual definition of the word, does include eating eggs and dairy products. Vegan is the term for excluding all animal products.Â
Dave Justus’s last blog post..Kindle
"However, I grew up in a hunting household, and something strikes me as not-quite-right about going your whole life eating meat without ever being exposed directly to what that entails."Â Â Â
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Whie I can understand that, the only times this suburb/city guy ever saw meat-in-the-raw was as roadkill.
May I assume you use plates? Have you ever thrown a pot good enough to be sold? Have you ever drilled for oil (you may have drilled for water, I dunno)? Mined for potassium nitrate and sulfur to make your own fireworks?
Does it feel not-quite-right now?
Dean, didn’t anyone ever tell you that fish are fast vegetables?
Me, I’ll eat just about anything that don’t eat me first. I haven’t killed anything higher up the food chain than fish, but I expect that will change.
Ken Hall’s last blog post..Hymn
Ron Coleman { 05.08.08 at 6:27 pm }
"What is the logical premise of the suggestion that if you wouldn’t kill it, you shouldn’t eat it?"
It’s the chickenhawk smear applied to food.
Dean— Evil Rob has a niece who is in the semi-vegetarian mode. For her it’s not a moral decision so much as it is a "squick" decision— for a long while she wanted to be a vet and was anthropomorphizing her food a lot.
I suspect she’s still in that mode. She does not in the least way complain about anyone else having meat in front of her, she just can’t bring herself to do it. (I inttroduced her to Indian food— they’ve got great vegetarian and semi-veg entrees.)
She probably wouldn’t make it into veterinarian school very long, since they wind up killing quite a few animals as part of the process of getting that degree (or so I understand).
I suspect that the "squick" factor long term will be what leads people to more and more move toward vat-grown meat. When you can use cloning and similar technology to just make meat without actually killing any animals to get it, people will (as generations go by) get less and less interested in actually killing any animals. Not to mention that it’ll probably eventually be cheaper.
I dislike dogs intensely. I never have had one around my house and I never will, and I’ve never lived in anybody’s house where I had to share space with a dog. I don’t like their peculiar odor and I don’t like them hanging around me. Would I eat one? No, because I think that meat from carnivorous animals tastes bad.
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On the other hand, I like cats. Always have. Always will. They don’t stink, and they hang around me only when they want to be fed, let out, or for some other specific reason. Would I eat a dead but cooked cat? No again, for the same reason I wouldn’t eat dog meat unless I were starving.
I don’t bond with any other kinds of animals. And I have no taboos about eating their meat except as described above.
As for companionship, I have a good-looking and intelligent wife. All things considered, she’s a far better companion that any animal I could think of offhand.
As for hunting them, I wouldn’t shoot any animal unless I intended to skin, cook and eat it. Which is a hell of a lot of trouble to go through for a mooseburger. (I had grilled mooseburger one time back in the ’50s, from a tavern owner friend who brought some back from a hunt in Canada.)Â So my guns are reserved for gunrange sports marksmanship contests. And self-protection if it ever comes to that.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold Harris says some of the damnedest things.
"On the other hand, I like cats. Always have. Always will. They don’t stink….”
I have couple of friends that say that my cats stink. But, then again, I think that those guys, my friends, stink.
By the way, Arnold, my dog suggests that I should boycott Dean’s World. All this interpretation of Animal Behavior is really bugging her.
RVR,
Well, I’m one of the damnedest guys you will encounter around here. So I say some of the damnedest things to earn and keep that exalted status.
I never spout off about animal behavior. Mostly because I don’t really give a damn about what a cat may be thinking. We keep and feed them mainly for amusement. The only behavior control we expect to exercize over our cat of moment to keep him from pissing on our leather-upholstered furniture. (Stefi buys these pump bottles of cat repellant and sprays it around like incense at a catholic church funeral service.)
That, and we don’t want the cat to try his fangs on the rabbit that we’ve also kept around here since our daughter in Milwaukee found out she is allergic to them. (Like so many parents, we get stuck with our kids’ pets. Luckily for them, they know better than to try bringing a dog around here. ) In any case, whenever we put the cat and rabbit together to romp around the kitchen, the rabbit tries humping the cat, who responds in turn with his canines.
By the way. Rabbit doesn’t taste bad, if it ever comes down to that.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
"Stefi buys these pump bottles of cat repellant and sprays it around like incense at a catholic church funeral service."
Like I said, Arnold Harris says some of the damnedest things.
"By the way. Rabbit doesn’t taste bad, if it ever comes down to that."
That’s what my dad says, Social Security just ain’t cutting it for him and my mom .
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