thoughts on anti-carnivory

[Guest guest]

@@@@@ Katja:

my big thing about religious vegetarianism, though, and maybe it's

just

cause i'm all tree-huggy, is why is it any less bad to kill a plant

for

food than an animal?

@@@@@@@@

That very thought was really pulsing in my mind just the other day.

When I woke up in the morning and looked out the window, I saw very

distinct deer footprints perfectly preserved in the snow right up to

my window and my thoughts turned to the pleasant views of wild

animals I occasionally enjoy from the comfort of my home and my

frequent opportunities to admire various breeds of healthy and

contented cows when I'm visiting my local farms for milk. As I gazed

out the window I realized my feelings about the mysterious complexity

and beauty of nature embodied in these animals is precisely the same

as my feelings about the plants whose sheer variety of finely

differentiated modes of ecological adaptation is for me the most

illuminating concretization of nature's combinatorial elegance.

As this matter of the splendor and deep state of life-ing plainly

witnessed by plants becomes the object of my ruminations with ever-

increasing frequency, it struck me I could not possibly place greater

ethical value on the life of an animal over a plant if I even were to

assign ethical value outside of the human realm in which the

cognitive phenomenon of " ethical value " originated and evolved as a

cultural adaptation. Of course, such an assignment of ethical value

is precisely the thing that I do not do, and I've long identified it

as the grave error at the very core of anti-carnivory.

Nevertheless, I copiously assign aesthetic value to these plants and

animals, and it was a bit of an epiphany for me to experience this

deep unity of aesthetic value completely indistinguished across plant

and animal life forms. Since it is my firmly entrenched belief that

the ill-conceived extrapolation of ethical value to non-human life

forms is but a thinly veiled misinterpretation of aesthetic

experience, this was a powerful confirmation of my pro-carnivorous

worldview.

To trace the logic of this experience one step further, it would

never occur to me that there is any conflict between the vibrant

aesthetic value I assign to plants and my frequent acts of

sacrificing their lives for my benefit. A basis for treating the

animal case any differently is completely absent in my mind, and I

can easily imagine that many traditional cultures of hunter-gatherers

felt precisely the same way about animals and would find the thought

of internal conflict either incomprehensible or laughable, just as

most people today would regard the plant case. The recent cultural

phenomenon of regarding the animal case differently may be linked to

the novel man-animal relationships that emerged in the pastoral

cultures that came into dominance after the last Ice Age. This

thought springs to my mind immediately as a result of reading the

first few chapters of Ron Schmid's " The Untold Story of Milk " last

night.

On this matter of revelling in the wonders of plant life, it would be

unacceptably selfish of me not to pass along a microtext (roughly

equivalent to the concept of " poem " in this case) I conceived a few

months ago:

---------------

SOIL. SEED.

SCULPTURE.

---------------

@@@@@@@@

Why is it right to kill the mouse and not the cow?

This is a very interesting concept that I bet few Vegans ever

consider.

<http://eesc.orst.edu/agcomwebfile/news/food/vegan.html>

Judith Alta

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Just for the record, I hope everyone notes that this anti-vegan

argument unfairly assumes ideal farming practices (pasturing) for

cows, but doesn't consider the comparison to a system of ideally

farmed grains, small-scale biodynamic farming without heavy machinery

ala Fukuoka, etc. If the premise is to minimize animal casualties,

veganism still comes out ahead if both animal husbandry and plant

agriculture was natural. Of course, this is only of theoretical

interest to those of use who assuredly don't accept that premise! I

only point this out so people take this article for what it's worth,

which is a lot less than it might appear at first, and remind

everyone that instead of moving it a little ahead, weak arguments can

set a cause a little behind instead.

Mike

SE Pennsylvania