I grew up on a remote cattle ranch. Nobody thought much about deliberately inflicting pain (branding cattle) or rendering them sexless through castration. I have killed plenty of animals with my own hands.
When I grew older and left the ranch, at some point I eschewed all that and became a vegetarian. Couldn’t bear the thought of killing an animal.
But then one day I read somewhere that “the problem is that human food consists entirely of souls” … and I realized it was true. Whether it was plant beings or fish beings or yeast beings or mammal beings or fungus beings or cephalopod beings, we kill and eat other living things. That’s what our food is. Other forms of living things. That’s the problem.
Accordingly, I realized my personal problem was my lack of respect for the beings that I was constantly killing and eating. There was no way I could abstain from killing other beings, vegetarianism was just kidding myself. (Yeah, I know, I could go ovolactovarian or something and stayed alive, become a Jain and worn a cloth over my mouth to keep from killing invisible bugs in the air and never take antibiotics, that’s anti-life … not an option.)
Since then, when I kill something, I thank it for giving up its life to sustain me. I assure it that I will go the same way when my time comes, changed into food for some other life form. I was working as a sport salmon guide a couple years ago. The clients thought I was nuts, standing in the little boat with the four guys from Idaho or New York City or somewhere, thanking some awesome salmon I’d just killed for giving up its life to make food for humans. I caught some strange looks, but it was Alaska and Alaska guides are supposed to be strange …
To return to the OP, of course I dislike the lack of respect for the animal. All beings deserve respect on my planet. Part of the professed outrage is from something else, though. To explain what it is, a story.
Through a series of misunderstandings and coincidences, I ended up as a crewman on a purse seiner fishing for herring in the Bering Sea. Of course we listened to the radio. We got the news it was the time of the annual baby seal outrage festival. Newscrews and cameras and Brigitte Bardot and the whole jamboree.
I got to thinking of the hundred tons of herring we’d caught in a single set of the net. Maybe 15 herring per kg, 15,000 herring per tonne, in a few hours we had killed one and a half million living beings for human food.
And I remember thinking there on the boat, “Man, it’s a good thing that herring don’t have big, soft eyes like baby seals and puppies and such. Otherwise, the ship would be covered with protesters and news cameras calling us mass murderers.”
That’s the “big, soft eyes” effect, and it applies to puppies, baby seals, and in some measure most baby animals. Most people don’t care that I killed a million slimy, smelly fish. They’re not cute. They don’t have big soft eyes. They don’t look adorable as a backdrop for Ms. Bardot.
That bothers me. I don’t like that it’s OK to kill some and not others based on whether they have cute eyes that look sooo adorable … and the herring must find it cruel and unusual punishment.
A final story. For a while I fished commercially for salmon off the Northwest Coast of the US. To me, salmon are separate from all other fish, partly because they rule both the land and the sea, and a host of other reasons. Anyway, I read about what one tribe of native americans did, and we adopted the same practice.
Salmon were a huge and crucial foodstuff for the Northwest Coast people. This was especially true of the inland villages on the rivers. If the salmon didn’t show up in their river, they couldn’t go to sea to find them … they went hungry.
Accordingly, they respected and venerated the salmon. The custom was that when the first fish was caught and brought ashore, it was formally invited to be the guest of honor at a big party in the village. It was placed on a plank and carried into the village with noise and shouting, where the people commented on its beauty and spoke of its noble qualities.
Then, of course, they cooked it and ate it … yum yum. They danced, because the salmon miraculously had returned once again to feed them. And they carefully saved all of the salmon bones, from nose to tail.
Then they assembled the bones. They put them back together in order on the plank that had brought the salmon from the river to the village. They carried it back down to the river. They thanked the salmon for coming to the party. They asked the salmon to tell all its cousin brothers and sisters about the wonderful village on the river, and how they danced into the night, and what great parties they throw.
Then they placed the board in the river, with the nose of the salmon pointing downstream. They wished it well on its journey. They pushed the board under the water so the current could make the bones dance and spin away, and the salmon could swim downstream and greet its incoming relatives …
Anyhow, I do understand that there are castes of animals in most societies. I do understand the big soft eyes effect, I’m not immune to it.
But at the end of the day, in my world, I know that I am of no more essential worth than a salmon, or a carrot. A trout doesn’t trump a housefly. I apologize to carrots and thank them, just like salmon. We’re all just living beings that are born to die, and while waiting for that, some of us eat the others, because living souls are our food …
