I knwo there's both carnivores and vegetarians on this board. My mother
eats meat and wrings her hands feeling guilty about it. I have animal
products in my fridge. I have long considered animal rights groups
excessively absolutist to the point of fanaticism about humans not using
animals for anything. However. www.washingtonpost.com and also msnbc.com
have a big expose online about the meat industry. The problem is the mass
production and speeding up of slaughter lines. THis leads to both E.coli
contamination (which killed a three year old child in the Midwest last
summer - heart rending story) and botched slaughtering which results in
animals not being properly stunned and sometimes even being awake when
they ar cut up.
OK, vegetarians go ahead and get smug (There's still cross contamination
to worry about getting into veggies...) Carnivores, my hands are not clean
so I cannot self righteously ask YOU to eat vegetarian! But think about
it: what if meat consumptioln in America dropped by half? What if every
meat eater ate only half as much meat (esp red meat) as they do now? It is
the huge demand (and things like fast food) that drives the huge push for
mass production (Not to mention greed and their evil politcal lobby.) Once
upon a time we killed our own food and we could respect it. There are too
many of us now. One more vegetarian *meal* is one little step toward
improving the situation (one more vegetarian diet is a bigger one, I do
confess.)
Those of you outside the US - I actually envy European meat, once they do
something about the mad cow problem. The standards are STRICTER than
here. It is American slaughterhouses that are much more horrible. Also the
potentila for mad cow is with us although they did ban feeding runinant
parts to other ruminants, they can feed pig parts to cows and pigs can get
it. Didn't the UK adopt a stricter rule than that?
I have much less of a problem with eating meat per se (as does the animal
rights movement) than with factory farming.
For the record my sympathies are more with groups like the Humane Farmikng
Assn than PETA (c'mon, throwing paint on fur won't bring the mink back.)
Very few animals, wild or domestic, are afforded the luxury of death with
dignity, pets excepted. Do you suppose a pack of wolves bringing down a
large deer politely waits for it to finish dying before they chow down on
it? Sentiment or feeling upset for cows is not the #1 reason fore
vegetarianism to me, it ranks far behind the *ecological* issue; the world
can't support six billion meat based diets. I can't imagine that everyone
will suddenly go total vegan though. Nature will force our hand and
probably many people will starve to death before McDonalds admits it ought
to offer veggie burgers! The moderate outlook in _Earth_ (which actually
treats hunting wild game as ethical) appeals to me. it imagines 2x as many
people in the future and 1/2 as many cows, which mean man hasnt stopped
eating meat but red meat consumption is down three quarters (ddi I get
that right?) anyway, vegetarianism had caught on with a generation - but
sometimes their kids start eating meat jujst to gross their parents out
(how do you know that won't happen to you....)
Kristin
mm, whats for lunch? slice of dead turkey on mayo. Piece of dead
increadibly stupid unnatural inbred thing that might go extinct from a
plague or something cause its gene pool is tiny...but that's another
issue...
Dripping blood and waiting for the fire...;
