Rabid Hippies Attack!

Ok... I've been avoiding this one for a long time, mostly, to be honest, out of laziness.


"Foreword"


1. This post is about morals and ethics and stuff, particularly about vegetarianism. I give you this warning such that if you are not in the mood or not prepared to give proper thought to such things you can leave now and have not wasted too much of your time.

2. Veganism may or may not have some merits, but let's not go there. One step at a time.

3. I will try my darndest to be as brief as it is possible to be with such unresolvable topics.

4. If I quote anything that appears as fact, including statistics, I am not going to include a reference (I'm pretty sure we both can't be bothered). I promise I am not making it up or lying to you (i.e. not misquoting anything) and the idea is that if I kindle any spark of interest you will research things and see for yourself.

5. I have a theory (untested, but particularly fascinating in the context of a coffee shop or Douglas Adams bistro, as the theories of all laypeople are wont to be) about why people hate hippies. The "hippie type" is smelly, hopelessly left-wing, irrational and preachy, or so their popular image seems to declare. The norms (as I have decided I shall call them) hate the hippies for it. While they are getting on with their jobs, being clean, driving cars and eating whatever and not being at all radical, the hippies, according to the norms, try to undermine their entire lifestyle by being irresponsible, jobless, bridge-dwelling arseholes who have the temerity to preach to the norms why everything they do in their lives is wrong. And some of them are arseholes. Some of them decide to nag people into the ground in the most fruitless ways. They thrust vivisection leaflets at your face as you try to enjoy a pleasant day in town. They vandalise company buildings and sometimes even threaten or kill scientists if they have reason to believe that company was involved in animal testing. Whatever, the list goes on. And these people are the nutters. They are crazed people who besmirch whatever banner they choose to stand beneath, so don't judge the majority by what they do.

Putting that select group aside, I think people who are very ethically driven ("hippies") are hated, or at least regarded with disdain by most, more apathetically minded people("norms") because: a) They whine, try to convince too hard or try to take the moral high ground not because it is right, but because they get to be holier-than-thou. b) They're actually right, and the norms are busy stewing in repressed guilt, unwilling to hear the argument fairly, unwilling to think for themselves, because to do so just a little would be to realise they have built their houses on shifting sands. They are not evil people, but they are lazy, and they would rather ignore the truth than have to suffer a revelation at the hands of a "hippie".

The reason this last point ignores my pledge of brevity (and I haven't even gotten to the thing yet) is because I'm scared. What I'm about to say makes me feel like I am a whiny hippie with little grip on reality because I think that is what you will think of me. If you read past the first point that means at least some small part of you is not already decided. I will make a deal with you: I will try my very, very hardest not to be one of the nutters or hippies who fall into category a, if you try not to be one of the norms who falls into category b. You can hear me out, and if you agree, I invite you to change, to learn more or simply to think. If you do not agree with me, you can say, fairly, "what garbage!" and then get on with something else.


"The Thing, a.k.a, Go Veg!"


My problem with vegetarianism is that I believe it is in the natural order of things to destroy other living things for substenance. Vegetarians who have chosen their diet on the moral grounds of "oh, you are killing the poor animals" are naive. Life feeds on death. If they do not feast on animals they feast on plants, most of which have to die in the process, or at least suffer. There is evidence that plants respond to "painful" stimuli such as breaking or burning: galvanometers (sensitive voltmeters, "lie detector machnes") show wild fluctuations when a plant is injured. There is even evidence that plants are psychic, and galvanometers respond in the same way when somebody in the vicinity of a plant merely thinks about injuring it (see Lyall Watson's books, for example, and if you know of contrary evidence I'd appreciate being enlightened). Short of becoming a windfall fruitarian (one who eats only plant food which falls naturally from the plant in question, thus not inflicting any harm) or invoking the extremest form of Jainism (which I belive on a practical level involves vowing to cause no suffering through pledges to eat less food every day, take fewer steps and breaths each day, etc, until death), which I think are unhealthy, unproductive and stagnant ways of life, you just have to accept that your life depends on the death and suffering of other lives. I'll respect the plants and animals of which I eat, but eat nonetheless. If a situation called for it, as long as the animal in question was not "unhappy" (I'll clarify what I mean later) and I needed to kill it to eat it I would do so without complaint.

HOWEVER

Life is not a wonderful place where everyone is healthy and thoughtful about the Earth and about animals and about the animals they eat. If this was the case, I would have no problems at all. If suffering is caused to an animal at the moment of slaughter, but up until that point it was living a healthy, comfortable life, that must be accepted. If deliberate, prolonged suffering or neglect prior to slaughter is caused to an animal I believe that is never acceptable. (This is what I mean by "unhappy".) In an industrialised, Western world, sadly, most animals fall into the second category. For example, "broiler" chickens are kept in dark, crowded conditions where they often have their beaks sliced off, with no anaesthetic, to prevent them attacking other chickens out of frustration. They also scratch and cause injury and infection to each other, which is left untreated. Even if you care not a jot about their welfare, do these diseased animals sound like something you'd want to put inside yourself? The slaughter method for nearly all chickens is to shackle them upside down by their legs, often done incorrectly, which crushes bones. Next, an electric shock is intended to incapacitate them, but is often incorrectly administered, hurting the bird and leaving it concious anyway. This means they are conscious for the scalding tanks, intended to remove feathers, which instead boil the chickens alive. This probably doesn't always happen, but be wary of "free-range" claims, as that tends to mean dark, unhealthy, crammed barns with just a few "peepholes" to the outside, often guarded by the more aggressive chickens so that most never get to go outside anyway. And that's just the chickens! I could give examples of similar instances of cruelty (frustrated, crowded pigs have their tails sliced off, again without anaesthetic, because otherwise other frustrated pigs would bite them) or disease (foot and mouth in England caused by bad agricultrual practice, millions of animals culled and burned, just in case), but I shall move on (I am growing ever more concerned about my brevity, but at least, the main point has now been stated).

So, if animals were magically ethically treated from now on, would I eat them? Certainly, but probably not very often:

> Wealth
It's cheaper! It is!
> Health
If animals are diseased, unhappy and badly fed (an extreme case, but plausible) meat is poor quality. Full of antibiotics, chemicals to keep it fresh in the supermarket, beef packaging in particular is often lined with carcinogens for preservatives. Old supermarket meat is probably also just not as tasty as fresh and from as happy an animal as local butcher meat. Fruit and veg eaten instead of meat provide much more nutrients, and it's actually pretty easy to find protein in a non-meat diet. Even broccoli has protein in it. Fact: on average, vegetarian people are taller, leaner, less diseased and more energetic than meat-eaters.
> Environment
Global warming is a reality and needs to be addressed. Much beef comes from South America, where cows not only fart their way to a warmer world, but rainforest is cut down (preventing carbon dioxide reduction) and then burned (increasing carbon dioxide emission). Slurry causes eutrophication, a process in which water systems over-fertilised by run-offs of slurry from farms grow algae, which smothers all other life. Things become stagnant and die and rot. Slurry also contributes to acid rain. Meat also uses up much more (precious) water to produce than an equivalent amount of
plant produce, (50,000-100,000 litres of water for 1kg beef, about 900 for 1kg wheat, just 70 for 1kg soya).
> Poverty
Consider the water point above and also that meat takes similarly larger areas of land to cultivate compared to plants, meat just uses up too many resources (you have to grow all that wheat to raise the chickens when you could just eat it straight away). In total, 70% of the world's plant produce goes to livestock. It's been calculated that if everyone ate as vegetarians there would comfortably be enough food in the world to feed EVERYBODY.