Interestingly, given my previous post here regarding vegetarianism, a book called The Vegetarian Myth has been assigned for LFS 450, and as a former vegetarian (who isn’t?), I was intrigued from the start. My experience was this: around grade eight I started to become aware of the inhumanities of our food system, although the idea of becoming a vegetarian never occurred to me. In grades eleven and twelve I had a classmate, naturally one of the brightest and best students, and who I admired greatly, who was a vegetarian. When I asked her the standard question I’d heard, “What effect can one person possibly have?”, she answered that if she saved one cow it would be worth it. When I graduated high school I went straight into university where I immediately picked up that university attitude of “I must be smart because I’m here, and I’m learning things that other people don’t know, so clearly I know more than anyone else around me” etc. etc. etc. and within a year I declared myself a vegetarian. My motivation was, as I flippantly declared at the time, primarily selfish: I didn’t want to consume what I believed they were putting into meat. (I have since come to fuller understanding of what they put into and onto plants, but of course many vegetarians simply deal with that by becoming organicoivores. I also failed to check which animals “they” actually put chemicals into; in Canada, chickens and milk are not sold with any content of hormones or antibiotics.) But my other reason was that the conditions in which animals are raised for food are cruel.
Becoming a vegetarian was easy because I also moved to another province to attend a different school, and a) I didn’t know how to cook or even buy meat, b) I couldn’t afford meat, especially not at restaurants, and c) being vegetarian in a new crowd made me edgy and interesting. I didn’t have trouble sticking to my guns because my vegetarianism made me (feel) superior every where I went.
Lierre Keith got this. Now that I’m out of vegetarianism (farmer’s sausage combined with pregnancy converted me without so much as a fight), and now that I am married to an ardent omnivore, while living with a pair of what I’d call weak militant vegetarians, my perspective has shifted rather dramatically, to the point where I actually reveled in how much Keith agreed with what I’d already, albeit relatively recently, come to see. I’ll outline the most significant of these here. (Apologies for redundancies from my previous post.)
1. To sustain one life inescapably requires the end of others; life is death. Every living thing from a dandelion to a pig eats to live, and its nutrients come from something that was previously alive (except minerals from rocks but even these, such as iron, are for many living things most accessible via the flesh of animals). The cycle of life and death (yes, think The Lion King) is the very one that promotes and maintains balance and biodiversity in this crazy, entropic world.
That all life requires death is not obvious to everyone: The last time I talked to him about it (which was a few years ago, to be fair), one of the vegetarians I live with (the motivator of the two, who are a couple) actually made the same incredible claim that Keith encountered: That it is evil for any animal to kill another one, and that it would be ideal if all animals would stop killing each other and all become vegetarians. This is insane. Not having been what Keith calls a moral vegetarian myself, this thought had never crossed my mind. I’d always figured: cougars eat other animals. They developed (or were made, if you prefer) that way. In fact, their biology is directed toward that function above all else, to the point where if you take one of their distant relatives, a house cat, and whisk a flashlight’s beam across the floor like some small glowing prey, it will do its darndest to kill it.
Trying to remove humans from this cycle is a strange thing to do. Keith’s extremist example seems to have been simply from a radical vegan, but my own specimen had a particular motivation: a divine decree. The phenomenon of religion-based belief in a division between humans and the rest of the “natural” world is now centuries, if not millennia, old, and it is as crazy and dangerous as the suggestion that eagles shouldn’t eat mice. To deny human participation in the cycles and patterns of nature is to make us into aliens with no business on this earth — our effect is clearly currently detrimental — and to cut us off from any hope of reintegration. It is to see us as a cancer, or a virus. This is not what we are. We may be a strange animal, but animal we are. Our life comes from the same soil as everything else that is alive, and like them we return to it. Our desires and our fears are predominantly identical to those of all other life on this planet, even as our hope for a better world rests in our governance of those drives.
[To be continued…]
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