Vegetarianism
If you were a Martian visiting the planet Earth, you could easily be forgiven for believing that vegetarians were a bloodthirsty, militant sect, positively armed to the teeth and prepared to make war against the helpless and peaceful denizens of civilisation. Judging purely by what the other ninety four percent of the population has to say about us that is.
Yes, yes, I can already hear the words coming out of your mouth:
“Oh no! He is one of those militant vegetarians about to jump on his soapbox!”
Well yes and no. I’ve never considered myself a “militant” veggie, in fact, I’ve always found the term somewhat mystifying, never having encountered one. Most of the vegetarians I know are reluctant to speak about their dietary choice, unless talking to another veggie, or pressed into conversation about it by an omnivore.
But I am about to jump up on my soapbox. Sorry folks, but this has been building for some time. It’s strange, but vegetarianism has been the only thing I have ever experienced any form of prejudice over, yet I’ve never tried to “convert” a non-vegetarian, and tend always to shy away from debate on the subject. Despite the fact that I would eat most omnivores alive in such a debate, and despite the fact that virtually every omnivore I have ever known has at least once tried to convince me of the merits of their diet, and furnished me with unrequested justifications for their murder of other species.
I get treated like a nuisance and a chore at meals and trips out, have been verbally abused by staff at restaurants, and am expected to endure any number of jokes at my expense with good humour. If any vegetarian should dare to answer back to the standard barrage of bigotry, they are instantly labelled a wild militant proselytising veggie.
I need to get this off my chest, so here it comes. My normally unspoken response to the stupidest things I hear said about my diet.
The Myth of the Militant Veggie
Every omnivore will talk about these people as though they cannot even get out the door without having to fight one off. Odd, since we don’t even constitute a tenth of the population in most western nations. They will roll their eyes and tut about how much they loathe them.
Here is some news for you:
There. Is. No. Such. Thing. The so-called extremist veggies, are usually just people you have cornered at a meal table. Every time my diet has been discovered by an omnivore, I have been expected to defend it, as though the very fact of my existence is a challenge. Every such discussion will mean having to endure the standard of effluent mush from self-appointed diet and ethics experts explaining their half-baked theories of why my diet is wrong. Most people that get pigeonholed as militant veggies are simply people that are sick of this shit. We just want to eat our meals, so please don’t take offence when you decide to pounce on us, and we reply in a manner that is less than obsequious.
What annoys me most, is that the smug critics of “militant veggies” are usually equally militant about their own moral qualms, it’s just that they aren’t forced to defend them every lunchtime.
Imagine if every time you tried to sleep with someone over 18, someone barged in and said “Oh my god, you don’t believe in fucking twelve year olds? Why?” And proceeded to explain why you should (twelve is the legal age of consent in more than one country you know…) and you might understand why some veggies start to feel a bit touchy on the subject of their diet.
So someone is a tad sensitive about having to defend their ethical stance against murder every meal time?
Well gee-fucking-willikers! What a surprise.
Humans Are Designed to Eat Meat…
Don’t you love it when people use superstitious anthropocentric teleological brain-farts in place of logical discourse?
Right.
Humans are not designed to do anything, you fucking imbecile. Keep your absurd religious beliefs to yourself, and then maybe I’ll keep my diet to myself. Humans evolved, from monkeys. Early human diets probably got their protein from small insects, not great lumps of cow flesh. Yes, human evolutionary history certainly includes the eating of meat, it also includes rape, living in trees and throwing shit at one another. This does not present us with a teleological imperative to eat meat, it is not a justification, it is simply a fact about the past. Trace our ancestry back far enough and you’ll find fish, should modern humans breathe underwater? The only “fact” about our diet in this regard is that we require protein and certain vitamins, all of which are attainable through a vegetarian diet without supplements. Meat is one way of getting those things, but it is not the only way.
You’re as bad as us! Cos you kill plants and plants might be able to feel pain!!!
This argument does genuinely does make me reconsider my stance on vegetarianism. Because I think “anyone stupid enough to try and field that as a rational argument, clearly needs to be removed from the human gene-pool for our good and theirs” and fuck it, if we’re killing them anyway, we may as well eat them for tidiness sake.
Now, I appreciate that you were probably never told this in primary school. This was because most primary school educators assumed it was self evident, that not even a lobotomy victim would fail to grasp the startling fact… Plants do not have brains. They do not experience life the same way that we do. Yes, there may well be some plant equivalent to displeasure, but to claim that their experience is analogous to ours, or even comprehensible to us, requires a special degree of mental ineptitude. Oh yes, you can invoke rhetoric and intellectual dishonesty, and point out that I don’t know what it is like to be a plant, and they might well feel pain and unhappiness at being eaten, but this argument could quite easily be applied to anything. It has the same degree of intellectual substance as claiming that eating shrimp may well upset Jehova.
Yes, Plants may well feel pain, and the invisible pink unicorn may well punish us for eating corn flakes. The simple fact is, we cannot possibly know, so as a statement it is entirely without meaning or content. However, we do know what physical pain is like, we do know what fear of death is like, we can clearly see that animals experience physical and emotional distress just like ours when confronted with pain and death.
We also know that an omnivorous diet is not a nutritional necessity, but simply a meaningless lifestyle choice.
Oh I know the “plants feel pain” defence was your favourite, I know, I know, it was a beautiful theory ruined by an ugly truth. Get over it. It wasn’t a valid argument when you spewed it up, it isn’t one now, and it won’t ever be. The only thing it provides evidence for is the possibility that you aren’t a thinking intelligent creature.
Well you aren’t saving any animal lives by not eating meat…
Well, aside from being an outright lie (the meat industry is a good 6-7% smaller than it would be if we ate meat, simple logic, give it a try sometime) this statement is based on an extremely shaky ethical assumption.
The point isn’t that we are saving all the cows, the point is that we aren’t killing them. Would you apply the same logic to abortions or the holocaust? No? Of course not, because it’s fucking ridiculous.
If a woman is going to be raped anyway, would you join in?
Vegetarianism is a luxury, what if you were starving to death and had nothing but a cow/sheep/duck/kitten/etc?
If there was a famine, and people were starving to death, why the fuck would they waste the bulk of their edible resources raising an animal, that will provide them with barely a quarter of the same amount of food in return?
When you produce meat, you are throwing away food because meat is a secondary food source. The idea that hard times would force people to adopt meat-eating diets is patently absurd. Why don’t you take a trip to the third world, and ask them how many times a week they have steak?
Meat is a luxury product, ecologically unsound and wildly inefficient to produce. If you were starving in a desert, you wouldn’t eat a cow, you would tuck into your grain like everyone else, imbecile. Sorry to break the illusion for you.
And if for some reason I were forced to kill an animal to survive, well what of it? It’s a completely different ethical situation to our current one. We don’t have to kill animals to survive. We have a choice. And one of those choices leaves you less prone to cancer, is better for the enviroment, less expensive, causes less heart disease…
But we stun the animals, so they feel no pain…
And I drugged your sister with Rohypnol, so she won’t even remember…
But it isn’t wrong to kill weaker beings for food…
Good, I’ll eat you
But…but… but
Shut up already. I’m done (exhales). So next time you’re at a meal, and about to abuse the veggie with the usual line-up of flaccid inanities, please, just think back over this, see if it has already been covered. You might just spare yourself an encounter with a militant veggie.
Our diet is better than yours, morally, ecologically, medically and economically. But if you don’t bother us, we might just keep it to ourselves.
