#2 What are human?

Another thing that happens to me quite often when a person finds out I am a vegan is that the person goes into defensive mode. It is uncanny, almost like a switch gets turned on. At the top of most people's list is the love of meat. They just can't give it up because they enjoy it too much.

People somehow get the impression that just because I don't eat meat I never enjoyed it in the first place. Certainly I don't enjoy the smell now, but when I decided to stop eating animals I still had a taste for them. At one time I ate meat at least six days a week and usually two or three times a day...and enjoyed it very much, thank you.

So I can identify with people liking the taste of meat. Sort of. What concerns me are two things. The first banal but worth mentioning, the other not banal and also worth mentioning. First the banal.

Very few people in industrialized nations like meat for the taste. That's right. Think about it this way, how many people do you know cut off a hunk of meat from a dead or dying animal and eat it right then and there? How many people do you know simply boil a chunk of prime rib or other choice piece of flesh in plain water and eat it? Getting the picture yet? Everyone I know eat their meat spiced, marinaded, salted, pickled or otherwise treated then BBQ'd, broiled, seared, deep fried or roasted. So what are they tasting anyway?

Now I know that some research suggests we can taste fat outside our usual sweet, sour, bitter, salty or umami. My point is most people doctor their meat to such a degree it is hard for me to buy "I love the taste of meat" as a valid excuse.

Now onto the not so banal. Some people do not know or refuse to see the suffering that is their meat. But to see the suffering, the deprivation, the horrors these animals go through and still defend yourself with, "But I love the taste of meat" falls on the side of demented for me. If this same excuse were offered by a cannibal who loved the delicacy of young flesh or a WWII Nazi claiming to love the feel of vellum over cotton, the world (I hope) would be outraged.

"But they are not humans!" Although this is usually a separate excuse, if the argument isn't going well the person I am talking with will tack this one onto the end of the previous one. So in order for a sentient being to be afforded any amount of mercy on this planet they have to walk on two legs, wear name-brand clothes, carry a smart phone, work a real job, earn real money, pay taxes and...what? What is our definition of human anyway? If I thought for a moment the person arguing was making a species differentiation I could understand. But he or she is not. He is making an arbitrary judgement call based on a culturally engendered bias and nothing more. He, or she, is simply being a bigot.

Don't get me wrong here. Putting animals and humans into different categorical slots is going to happen. We all have to do it. If we do not things get really messy really fast. We wind up finding ourselves in the untenable position of choosing between saving the child or the dog or refusing to eat lest we accidentally kill a field mouse in the process of harvesting our food. I'm just not convinced this is the sort of categorizing the people I speak with are doing. It is much less thought through and far more shallow.

On the other hand, we make these same sorts of sacrifices based upon contrived categories with humans all the time so why should our animals be exempt? How many babies and mothers are killed in wars every year? How many are left to die on the streets of our cities? How many mentally retarded people, shut-ins and residents of nursing homes have any of us visited lately?

They are what we would categorically call humans but considering the push for euthanasia, infanticide, abortion along with the pervasive warmongering today I would guess our insensitivity towards the suffering of others doesn't necessarily have to cross the species barrier. Perhaps C.S. Lewis struck far closer to the prophetic than the profound when he wrote, "If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons."

What I am saying is this: Just because a creature is less "human" than our ideal (which is usually determined by the perception we have of ourselves) that does not give us the right to abuse and destroy it. And certainly not for a reason as trite as taste. When we do that we are not just condemning the animals, we are in a very real sense condemning ourselves.

#1: Ask a child

...and a little child will lead them Isaiah 11:6b

This post begins my list of reasons for giving up eating animal products. As I mentioned in my previous post, it is not the first reason, only the one I decided to discuss first.

There probably isn't a hunter alive that does not at least get a little miffed at the movie Bambi. I remember going with a friend to see a re-release of the movie in the theater (the last one before its move over to home video). When it came to the famous scene of hunter vs. Bambi's mother my ears were suddenly accosted by shrill, hellish wails. A mother suddenly jumped up and dragged her hysterical boys from the theater. I heard, "They're going to kill the mother, don't let them kill the mother!" (or something along those lines).

Me? I was secretly cheering for the hunter and (not so secretly) angry at parents that would let their children watch such a movie in the first place without teaching them the facts of life.

What has to happen in a child's heart to change it from one such as was possessed by those two children, to one like mine? Strangely enough we automatically assume the problem is with the child.

A friend accounted to me a time she was eating with some coworkers when the topic of animal cruelty and factory farms came up. It wasn't long into the conversation when someone stated they didn't want to talk about it anymore. They would rather not know where their meat came from and they were more comfortable pretending it didn't come from animals. Really.

I recall, as a child, almost vomiting when I realized the thing I found in my food was a vein. Up to the point I really had never made the connection that at one time what I was eating use to be alive. I, like most children. I would have to struggle through the nausea many times before adulthood finally cleansed me of that weakness.

It was a long time before I once again started thinking about the source of my food. At forty years of age I had finally outgrown the need for pretending. The food, the chicken, steak, pork chop, came from something that was once alive. Something sentient and feeling. Something innocent. Only this innocence wasn't anesthetized by social mores, it was simply destroyed for my entertainment. The hunter had won and any screaming children dragged out of the theater.

This post has turned into more of a ramble and for that I apologize. My point is this: I saw a dark irony in the disparity between the child screaming for the deer who was about to die and and the pretense of my adulthood. I realized that if normal had to be defined by how well I could pretend, then something was seriously wrong with me.

Perhaps the screaming child scares us. We want to slap him or drag him out of sight (and hopefully out of mind), anything to shut his blathering mouth. We don't want to be reminded of the fact that our lunch used to be something other than what we are pretending it to be.

In short, I woke up and, like those two boys, started screaming.