Don’t Eat the Meat
I used to be a vegetarian.
It happened this way.
I was at the grocery store in the meat department looking at all the dead flesh, all the bloody bits and pieces of animals murdered for their meat and I got to thinking about my ferret. Farris, fairest of the ferrets, was a little albino ferret. My vet claimed she was the sweetest ferret in town. Indeed, I told him, “What had she not got to be sweet about. She is spoiled rotten, loved to death, and gets to do exactly what she wants to do whenever she wants to do it. She’s never penned up. She’s never punished. Of course, she’s sweet.” And she was.
Farris weighed just a pound and a half but she could play and be happy and suffer and be sad. She was a person. Not a very bright person, you understand, but a person, nonetheless, a person with her own personality, her own spark of being and knowing and feeling. I got to thinking, if my little ferret was a person, how much more must a four or five pound chicken be a person, much less a 200 pound pig or a thousand pound cow. Why, a cow’s brain was bigger than my ferret’s entire body. A cow or a pig must be person too even though it couldn’t do trig or read a book or shoot a gun. I found I couldn’t make myself buy any pieces of their plastic-wrapped pain and I left the grocery store in a state of incipient vegetarian grace. Thus began my 18 months as a vegetarian.
I wasn’t a very good vegetarian. I was more a junk food vegetarian. I figured there weren’t any dead animals in a Snickers and a Dr. Pepper. It’s difficult to be a vegetarian in the US. So many foods have hidden bits of dead animals in them. Take… Jello. Dead cow. Boiled bits of bones and hoofs seasoned with fruit flavors. And lots of things you would think would be free of dead animals have animal extracts for flavoring. Say you eschew the Big Mac but take the fries. Well, there’re meat extracts in the frying oil to give fries that meaty potato flavor. When you eat out you can’t even look at a list of ingredients to avoid animal products. No telling what foods have been made at the cost of an animal’s pain and suffering.
It’s not that easy to get complete proteins without eating meat. I was never good at it.
If you give up dairy and eggs, its really gonna be hard. And there is no need for it. If egg and milk producers could be persuaded to treat their animals kindly and let them live out their lives there would be no reason not to eat eggs and dairy. My grandmother had chickens and they didn’t have bad lives. Even the ones she killed and cooked. It was very quick when she killed them. No long drawn out trip to the slaughter house to be hung upside down on a conveyor and then be killed by a clumsy machine. I look at chickens now and often see bruises on their legs. They… well let’s not go into that. It’s even worse for fish. Fish are put through a machine that disembowels them while they are still alive. There are recent studies that show that fish feel pain, if you had any doubt. And let’s not talk about lobsters.
Anyway, after 18 months my protein and iron levels were so low, according to my doctor, that it was making me feel weak and sick. So I fell off the wagon and began to eat meat again. After a year or so I was in the meat department and couldn’t make myself buy any meat and went vegetarian for 6 months. Then I got sick again.
I eat meat now. But I have to be careful in the grocery store. If I linger around the carcasses I will not be able to buy any meat. I believe I am going to hell for not being a vegetarian. I know it’s wrong to eat meat and still I do it. I think if you do wrong things that you know are wrong that you are likely to go to hell for it. Let’s just hope there is no hell.
Even though I am not a vegetarian I still have rules about what meat I will eat. I won’t eat companion animals, baby animals, animals raised cruelly, killed cruelly, killed kosher (very cruel) or cooked alive. That means no veal, no lamb, no lobster, no shellfish, etc.
But I am thinking I need to put more restrictions on my meat eating.
Since suffering is by the individual rather than by the pound surely it would be more moral to eat beef than anything else.
Think about it. You can eat dozens of shrimp at a sitting. I’ve eaten 3 or 4 small fish at a meal as well. It’s not hard to eat half a chicken. But you have to eat a LOT of beef (or pork) before you are responsible for the death of one animal, particularly if you eat different cuts. Also there are laws mandating the humane slaughter of cows and pigs. Such laws do not apply to poultry or fish. So if you can’t be a vegetarian and want to minimize the suffering you cause you should probably stick to beef. And NOT kosher beef. Kosher slaughter is very brutal and causes terrible suffering.
We can’t eliminate all the suffering we cause in the world, but we should at least try to minimize it.
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© Alllie 2007
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