In Defense of Meat Eaters

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Here are some reasons I can think of why that Meat eaters find Vegans baffling. Firstly, the idea of suffering of another person or living thing is a very abstract notion. We can only believe that the animals are suffering because they only seem to be suffering. Suffering is only real to us when we actually had a first-hand experience. This is similar to watching wrestling matches. Two giant hulks spitting insults at one another and performing Indian Deadlocks and Double Underhook back breakers.

One will not usually know how much it stinks to smell another greasy man’s unshaven underarms while having his spine pulled back at an unnaturally painful angle. Nor the challenges both parties face: the pile-driver having his face so darn close to another man’s sweaty crotch or the pile-drivee, who is about to get his head pulverized by the pile-driver’s family jewels.

piledriver4

The stuffy atmosphere during Jerry Lawler’s execution of his pile-driver move

This is pretty close to the experience of an animal being hung upside, fully conscious, awaiting its death sentence. Perhaps even more dreadful as they have to watch their peers go first, screeching and jolting in agony.

Unlike farm animals and grapplers, most consumers do not get to experience first hand for themselves what is it like to be pile-drived or electro-slit (electrocuted and slitted), hence fail to fully comprehend the extend of suffering the animals must endure.

This leads on to the second reason: Most consumers are removed from the vicinity of farming and slaughter. Sadly, many farms do not boost the tranquility of its processors- yesteryear farms which provide large, lush green fields for livestock to roam; milk was freshly squeezed with tender care by milkmaids with buckets, piggies get to be with their mommies and duckies waddling in ponds.

Well, the reality is just too Matrixy for me to describe. I mean the movie is literally what the living conditions of today’s battery farms are- dark, dang and specter/rodent filled. Heck, they didn’t even bother to plug them into a virtual stimulated environment. Most consumers are also ignorant of the properties of antibiotics and hormonal growth stimulants injected to the animals and the side effects of consuming such substances.

Living far away from the battery farms, consumers are thus led to fantasize about a simulacra of a ‘happy farm life’.

“What’s this slime?! Get those nipple-clips off me!! Urrggggggggghh”- Neo’s realization that he was a battery baby

Lastly, poultry products sold in supermarkets are sanitized, ‘prettified’ and labeled alternative names to hide their bloody traces of massacre eg. beef (cow), mutton (lamb), pork (pig) and chicken (hen) to make them more palatable.

The attempt to disassociate killing and consuming is like Jack growing magical beans. Mom throws it out, we turn the page and BOOM! we have a giant veggie ladder. It is like erasing the growth period from a magic bean to a magic stalk. Like, the chicken lays an egg and the next thing you’ve got is a headless corpse wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam.

“Saw faster you dimwit! This house is uninsured”- Jack’s mom to Jack

Kingston, Rosemary. Fifty Famous Fairy Tales. Ella Dolbear Lee, illustrator. Racine, WI: Whitman Publishing Co., 1917.

The consumer and the consumed in modern society today thrives on this dissection of information and that is precisely why some meat-eaters find Veganism such a hard concept to grasp.

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