May 28th, 2009
I saw this somwhere recently and I love it:
“When vegetarians grow up they become vegans.”
It’s so true. All the arguments for vegetarianism apply to dairy and eggs also, particularly from the factory system. I don’t think ovo-lacto vegetarianism is philosophically coherent. It beats meat eating but it’s not quite finished, you know? And most vegans started at vegetarians who eventually came to realize they were still supporting cruelty and even meat eating (veal calfs are a byproduct of the dairy industry).
Speaking of incoherent philosophy, everyone needs to lay off the governor general. Yes she ate some seal heart. So what? You probably ate some cow/pig/chicken recently. Guess what? Those animals live way shittier lives than seals, even baby seals clubbed and skinned alive. You should see what happens to animals in the factory farming system. Eating some seal is no worse than eating a cow or wearing fur or any of those things that most folks do without batting an eye. The hypocrisy of this just kills me.
Anyway, I like that line.
I’m interested to know – when did you start to *feel* that veganism is right? As you may know, I’ve been dabbling in vegetarianism in the past few months. I’m not very strict about it at this point, I’m still testing the waters. I accept the moral argument about animal rights and cruelty and whatnot. I predict that the zeitgeist is moving in that direction and in a hundred years eating meat (well, mammals at least) will be seen as barbaric. But I don’t *feel* in my heart that eating meat is wrong the same way I *feel* that, say, stealing a bike is wrong. I thought the feeling would come when I had separated myself from the “meat as food” mentality, but it hasn’t. What was your experience?
I think the GG is an idiot, not for eating the heart, but for being a stupid politician. I watched the video – she said nothing but empty platitudes the whole time. I doubt she would have gone into the same room as a butchered seal without a camera on her. And after the fact, her “I was just participating in their noble culture” defence is the same old bullshit cultural relativism.
About the GG – agreed.
The feeling issue was settled when we became vegetarians. We honestly just didn’t know what happened to egg/dairy animals and, bizarrely now that I think back on it, assumed they had it okay. When we found out they didn’t, we quit that stuff too. But by that time we were already pretty persuaded that there are significant health benefits from veganism so we were basically ready to switch for that reason too.
One thing we both noticed was that the longer we were strict vegetarians, the less appealing meat became. At about the one year mark I started to see meat in the grocery store as severed chunks of muscle (not as steaks / breasts / fillets) and it became disgusting to me. Cooked meat still smells great but thinking of eating it is really not appealing. Rob had the same experience – as time passed, it felt like we were coming out of a fog. Slowly, it got weirder and weirder to think that we used to eat flesh, and weirder and weirder that we used to think it was normal. So I guess it’s just a time thing in part.
And actually watching videos of animals being horribly mistreated during food production was intensely reinforcing of vegetarianism. That shit makes me sad and angry and really, really made me not want to be a part of it. Say what you will about the bad sides of peta, they have the insider goods on what companies do to animals.
But anyway I think you’ve nailed it on the head – it’s a matter of separating the idea of flesh from the idea of food. For us it was gradual.