I’d say I run the gamut between being pretty chill about most things and then falling down hard on certain things. I get caught up in my anger sometimes toward people I think are making Earth a worse place to live. But this is something I’ve been working on, because while anger is a natural response to injustice, it’s not really a solution to anything. I’m working on taking that pause before I lash out or say anything divisive.
I do have mild judgements but I try not to invest myself too much in them. I think you are right that they are kind of endemic to being a human being. That’s a good point and I’ve never thought of it that way.
As a teenager, I read The Case for Animal Rights and Animal Liberation, as well as a slew of other books about the issue. The other books ranged from outdated to fallacious; but these two laid out two competing but mostly complementary cases for treating many nonhuman animals as moral subjects (that is, their concerns should be considered in moral judgments, independent of any human concerns), and were hardly sentimental.
I have some quibbles with them. I’m not sure whether my quibbles are intellectually honest, or are rationalizing my continued willingness to eat meat. Nevertheless, I think it’s clear that veganism (or at least refraining from eating mammals and birds) is the more ethical choice, setting aside sentimentality and environmental concerns.
I eat less meat than I want, and eat plenty of vegan meals. But if a vegan judges me, I absolutely get it. They’re right.
I feel good about the decision to stop eating beef. That’s markedly different than when I tried to stop eating meat in the past. It felt like a thing I should do rather than something I really wanted to do. It was a deprivation mindset.
I was thinking earlier today about this thread and I started thinking about the animals waiting to be slaughtered and while they’re standing in this line, they are seeing other animals get slaughtered and you know they know what’s coming. How scared they must be. I don’t believe animals are like humans but I do believe they at least have the faculties to know when they are gonna die.
That’s another point. People who hear that I’m a vegetarian sometimes instantly ask: “For what reason?” But there hasn’t to be only one reason, in my case the decision to go vegetarian was mainly ethical, but I also already had the ecological aspect in mind. The health advantages are a welcome side effect, though I hadn’t that aspect in mind very much (I’ve never been very health conscious, I still smoke, drink alcohol and move my body to little).
And yes, some people just don’t like the taste of meat.
Agree with your summary. I am not very health conscious. I still eat potato chips (gave up candy) and smoke a bit. Have an occasional beer.
I do what I can and what is feasible to limit my footprint within my comfort zone.
Just don’t like the taste of meat. I will occasionally eat a very charred grilled hamburger a couple times a year. But it has to be really charred lol.
I was not seriously recommending someone gives themselves a red meat allergy just to avoid beef, but I have to ask - have there been deaths? Last I checked, sometime last year, there hadn’t been any confirmed MMA deaths.
I should have said “symptoms of any IgE-mediated allergy also include death”. Though I too am not aware of any cases of death from the alpha-gal allergic reaction. But when one such does occur, I won’t be surprised. Thankfully it does seem to be quite rare so far.
Yeah, same. Sometimes about the “fawn” response, imagine them snuggling their killers with their snout - it breaks my heart. It’s horrifying beyond words.
And about what I’ll do when the AMOC collapses. Birdflu, the dying oceans and insects, pesticides & fertilisers killing the soil, tipping points, diseases… Lots of stuff. (Sometimes I wonder if other people’s heads are a lot more quiet?)
I’ve also been thinking about this:
I wish they did…
And then @JackieLikesVariety responding with that acknowledgement and how it affected them. It’s… not nice, acknowledging reality, the enormity and the horror. I almost don’t wish it on people.
During the pandemic there were constant press conferences updating everyone on how things were developing and I’ve seen arguments we should do this for climate change. It’s an interesting idea; I do think it’s so much for people to hold in their minds so they just set it aside and carry on with their day, but simultaneously, the threat it poses to humanity is greater than the pandemic.
Or would constant updates paralyse people or normalise the threat? Would worsening the conspiracy madness negate any positive effects?
And further stuff I’ve continued thinking about:
I listened to an interview with a Dutch rapper. It didn’t make me like rap music but I do think it’s quite a good form for critique of social/political issues. Thanks, @Mijin
I’ve added “The Light Eaters” to my reading list. I’ve read a few books about trees, plants, fungi. I see that “The Light Eaters” even raises the question of plants seeing! Seeing!! I would like to say this: if it’s plants you care about, stop eating animal products and buy organic. (The flowchart has one outcome.)
Bit of a roulette with tick bites though. Alpha-gal syndrome is one possible outcome. Lyme disease, encephalitis various haemorrhagic fevers and other nasties are among the others outcomes.
I think everyone has their issues that keep them up at night. Mine is, by and large, sexual assault. Fortunately I have a job actively working to help survivors and prevent future sexual assaults. The kind of thing I think about is, oh, I live near one of the largest human trafficking corridors in the country. When people ask what I do it doesn’t always make for pleasant conversation. The other day I was talking quite excitedly about a grant I’m writing to address the rise in pediatric sexual assaults we’ve seen at my agency in the last couple of years. I’m trying to describe what we do, and then I have this moment, like, oh, people probably don’t want to think about little kids getting sexual assault medical forensic examinations. But it happens every day where I work. And you think this would depress me, but it doesn’t, because I’m actively doing something about one of the issues most close to my heart.
The problem is that there are too many issues to care about and not enough people to care about them. And I’m not saying I don’t care about animal welfare, and I’m not saying I can’t expand my scope of caring just a little more to include animals. It’s more a reminder of, sometimes we don’t think about one category of suffering, not because we lack compassion, but because we’re focused on something else.
This is so accurate! I used to work with kids, years ago. And some kids who had been trafficked in the sex industry. The worst thing is when they first come in and they start their rote sexual behaviour towards you, because it’s just what they do, all they know. But strangely, I think I could deal with it much better at the time. Now when I think back, it makes me cry. I mean, I cried then, too, but you get to address it and it’s so much easier. Now it makes me feel more helpless. Feeling enraged but powerless at the same time is… AARGH!!
This is such a big part of my choice not to eat (most) animal products. The rage at the injustice and my refusal to be powerless.
When I was a teenager, a writing instructor gave us a story to read. It was like three paragraphs, but 30 or 40 years later it’s still stuck in my head.
The story described some children on a farm playing a game, when they noticed a stink, and followed it to under the house where they found a dead raccoon (I may be flubbing some of the details here). They contemplated it somberly, and then someone mentioned having seen a dead bird nearby, so they went and looked at it–and suddenly they started finding death all over the farm, so many dead animals everywhere. Not like more than normal, it wasn’t some creepy apocalypse; it’s just that they realized how common death was. What could they do?
They put clothespins on their noses and went back to playing.
Some days, I don’t know what to do except grab that clothespin.
