jones
Posted : 12/7/2006 1:26:51 PM
Even though I don't think the OP meant this as a serious question, it's still one worth asking ourselves.
I'm generally the type of vegetarian that you wouldn't know it if you didn't actually bring it up with me because I don't preach. My feeling is if you can actually do the raising and killing of food yourself and be okay with that, eat up. I have much less problem with hunting than I do with factory farming and buying meat all wrapped in plastic and totally divorced from where it came from.
I know that I just wouldn't be able to raise and kill an animal, and if I can't do that then I shouldn't ask someone to do it for me in such a way that I can just ignore it and not have to think about it.
That's about where I stand too. I ate meat up until six months ago so I can easily see both sides of the issue... I have to say that even when I was eating meat, though, I felt I did have to participate in a certain amount of rationalization for why it was okay to eat animals x & y but not z. When I asked myself that question, logic would take me down the path of "well, dogs and cats are intelligent and seem to have some consciousness, while cows don't...." but is that true, and how do we know? I think somewhere you're forced to draw a line and that line is kind of arbitrary when you get down to it. There is no hard and fast boundary between "intelligent" and "dumb" animals, especially the more these animals are studied for signs of consciousness, emotion, internal mental lives, etc. I also felt that I was choosing to eat meat basically because I wanted to and I could but ethically it felt a little... problematic. It was hard to read a book like
Fast Food Nation and come away thinking the meatpacking industry is fine and dandy from a moral point of view.
As corny as it sounds, as soon as we got a dog my boyfriend and I started thinking more about how animals intersected with our lives and that includes our diets. The kicker was when BF was studying to be a trucker and learned about what it entails to haul loads of cattle... needless to say they aren't exactly flying first class. He came home from school that day and said he was off meat, and I joined him.
Part of my feelings about meat-eating/vegetarianism are that if you, like me, have the resources to be a vegetarian, then it is really the right thing to do... I have the research tools to learn how to balance my diet and I have the financial ability and the cooking skills and the health food stores all around me to be a healthy vegetarian, so I am. I don't need meat. Then again, I don't need cable television either but I do choose to have that. So though I feel like I'm doing the "right" thing for my life, I never get on anyone else's case for not making that same choice... I wouldn't sit down with you at a restaurant and lecture you for ordering a steak.