Over the last month or two I've been thinking about becoming a vegetarian and, as of yesterday, decided to enact those thoughts. By next week I will have stopped eating all of the meat that I think tastes so good.
I'd like to say here that I'm going to use this entry to explain at least some of my thought process behind the reason I'm becoming a vegetarian and that I don't want to sound judgmental or preachy or anything. I'm well aware of the deliciousness of meat and that many people enjoy consuming it. I wouldn't want anyone reading this to think I thought less of them because they aren't a vegetarian or whatever, I'm not even certain I'll be able to maintain it--but I aim to try, and I'd like to say why here.
There are some obvious benefits that come to mind when talking about not eating meat. Humans are capable of eating and digesting meat--indeed I believe we crave it (as we crave sugar and salt) because it provides a huge amount of protein and energy dense fuel that would power our hunter-gatherer ancestors as they roamed the plains or jungles or whatever. Humans that didn't want to eat meat no doubt died out pretty quickly, as did humans who didn't like to eat salt. Humans that didn't want sugar were probably okay, but no doubt lived sad, lonely lives.
All that being said, humans did not evolve--I believe--to consume to enormous amounts of meat that are available to us in the modern era. Throughout history meat has been a sign of wealth and power, while the lower classes subsisted on bread and vegetables the nobility would feast on meat and wine. In medieval times even hunting on lands was illegal, the ruling classes knew that meat was as much a status symbol as a delicious meal, and they couldn't have the unwashed masses just snatching all the animals and cooking them up for themselves.
As the modern era progressed people had more money, and they wanted what the haves had. Cars, makeup, education, and meat, of course. The insatiable demand for flesh has created an insane, bloated, and frankly inefficient mass production of meat to feed the bottomless gut of the so-called first world in its voracious desire for meat.
My sort of rambling point here is that the human body isn't really built to eat meat every day for every meal. Meat is supposed to be a boost, a treat every few weeks or so, not a staple.
So health is a legitimate reason, I think, to start eating less or no meat. But if I'm being honest it had little to no bearing on my choice to switch to vegetarianism. The two biggest factors on my choice were Superman and shit that lives on windows.
I might not have mentioned here before how much I dig Superman, despite the general idea that he's boring or dumb or whatever, I think he's pretty much the bee's knees when it comes to superheroes, and literary characters in general (there's probably a future blog post dedicated to Superman and how awesome he is, look out for it!) Anyway, there's a particularly good Superman comic called Birthright (I linked to Amazon there and not Wikipedia because I want you to purchase and read it, not just skim the synopsis on Wikipedia, and I know you can't do that if I don't give you the link) that's about the origin of Superman. In the comic he mentions being able to see an aura around living things and how it fades when they die. For some reason that touched me. I've always known that meat was the result of dead animals and never was too bothered by it, but seeing Superman marveling in the life of lions and zebras and every other living thing made me pause in a way that my logical knowledge never had. I can't explain why, but it really made me face up to what the hard reality of meat production was, the result of raising and slaughtering animals for something I wanted but did not need.
The other component, probably the bigger one, comes from cleaning windows.
I know, it's fucking weird. Just bear with me.
When I'm cleaning windows I see a lot of really nasty-looking insects that live on the windows or in the corners of them (I looked around the internet for some sort of site listing organisms that like to live on windows but all I could find were screensavers.) Mostly spiders and beetles. Lady bugs are strangely attracted to windows too for some reason, and of course there are plenty of grasshoppers and mosquitoes on there too, sometimes I even see a snail or a lizard or a slug, but those are rare.
Anyway, I realized that, as I clean windows, I always do my best to avoid killing these nasty things whenever I can. If the spider has a nest in the corner of the window, I'll try to judge if the nest can be seen from inside or easily seen from outside. If it can't, I'll just leave it where it is. If it can be seen easily and it's obvious that anyone looking at the window will know I didn't get rid of it, I'll smack it around with a squeegee until the spider and/or its babies flee the nest and I can destroy it. If a snail is sticking to the side of the window, I'll gently ease it off and try to find a nice place to deposit it on the ground, out of the footpath so no one crushes it. I'll even slide slugs off of the sills of the windows to the dirt or nearby leaves so I don't crush them with my strip-washer.
Sometimes I don't notice a mosquito on the window until I've crushed it with my tools. As I pick the crush corpse out of the bristles of my brush I'll feel actual real guilt. I can't explain why it bothers me so much. I hardly believe that a fucking mosquito can feel pain or experience fear or anything. I doubt the damn thing even has a brain, I probably have more neurons in my Enteric nervous system than that little bug has in its whole body--yet I still feel sad that I killed it. It wasn't hurting me, it was just chilling on a window, taking a break or whatever, and here I come with my big wet mass of fiber and crush it to death...for what? So that some people can look through a window without seeing dirt or whatever? That seems to me a pretty awful reason to kill something, even something as simple and insignificant as a mosquito or snail.
Once I really thought about all the trouble I went through to avoid killing vermin while cleaning windows, I started thinking about the animals I was consuming. I was killing them, much more indirectly than I killed the mosquito or spider, of course, but my demand for meat was contributing to the death of animals much, much more complex and sophisticated than the little ball of action and reaction that is a beetle.
I thought of my girlfriend's two cats, who obviously have different personalities and desires. I thought of an old friend who had a pet goat that would always rub against her and try to headbutt me. I've been around cows and pigs and all other sorts of livestock and I know they can be just as varied and aware as these pets.
And I realized my deep hypocrisy at struggling to spare the lives of window dwellers while going home to eat steaks. These are living creatures who very obviously can experience pain and fear, and I was taking their lives, erasing whatever experience they were able to have in this world forever and ever, so that I could consume them. I'd tell myself I had to do it, that if I didn't eat I would die--but I wouldn't die if I never ate meat.
I told myself that only eating plants was just as bad, a plant is alive, it can die--and that's true, but a plant doesn't have to die to feed a person. Indeed, some plants have evolved with the intention of having parts of themselves consumed in order to spread their offspring. There are no multi-cellular animals (that I know of) that have evolved to have a part of themselves consumed. With an animal it's all or nothing, you can't just slice off a chicken's leg and fry that up (or I suppose you could, but that would be even more horrific than just killing the damn thing.)
Now, if I stop eating meat, will the animals that die to supply the world with meat stop dying? Will they be set free to live their lives as best they can? Of course not. I doubt meat production will drop any amount at all, in fact I suspect it will continue to consume the surface of the earth (eight billion acres) in a desperate attempt to keep up with demand. Animals will continue to suffer and die and people will profit from that suffering.
But that doesn't matter. I will be at peace with myself. I will know that I have done some small thing to halt the pain of so many living things--things that are, as far as we know--totally unique in the whole universe. Pain and death inflicted on living things just so that I can enjoy something, not so that I can survive, not so that my loved ones don't die, pain for pleasure, pain for leisure...it's something that I can't stand by and accept anymore.
Now I'm not going to go join ELF (that is a link to their website which has nasty pictures and will probably make DHS start following you if you go there), or PETA or anything like that. I won't start saying that animals should be raised over humans in terms of what limited resources should be focused on or anything like that, but I will endeavor to limit the suffering and pain of everything and everyone in the whole world whenever and however I can.
It's certainly what Superman would do.
No comments:
Post a Comment