Meat: Our Friends the Animals

I want to talk with you briefly about a first world problem: Having too many choices of what to eat. They don't have this problem in the third world. There, you eat whatever you can get your hands on, or starve. And don't get me started on North Korea!

This is exacerbated by another first world problem: I keep hearing this ad on my satellite radio about veganism. It starts out blandly enough :

Not all vegans are 'tree huggers'...okay.

Here's a guy who's a Christian and a conservative and he's a vegan...okay...sounds like a reasonable person.

And this guy is a vegan because he knows that animals...are not his enemies.

Wait! What?? He doesn't eat meat because he knows that animals are not his enemies?? What is he? A cannibal??? Do you know anyone who eats his enemies? I mean, I oppose mine, debate them, try to defeat them politically, in the case of terrorists, I may try to kill them, but eat them? Never entered my mind! What are these guys smoking along with their veggieburgers?

Now, I wouldn't necessarily classify these guys as world class whackadoos, because, after all, what constitutes "world class" these days? But, here's a sample of their 'thinking':

When Nazis rounded up Jews, babies were ripped out of their mothers' arms. In the dairy industry, calves are stolen from their mothers after birth. Other animal mothers, such as sows, rabbits and ewes, have their babies taken within days, weeks or months after birth. Separating families is a psychologically devastating tactic used to weaken one's pride and inhibit their desire to retaliate and fight back. Nazis swiped this technique from the meat, dairy and egg industries. Jews were tattooed to mark them. All animals in the meat and dairy industries are branded with hot irons, or ear-notched with a numerical tag. Jews were sent to the concentration camps in the same extermination trucks that still send animals to slaughterhouses. The Nazis constructed human slaughterhouses to massacre millions, while these torture-buildings have been strategically built all over the planet to massacre billions of animals. Jews have been, while animals still are, treated like nothing, as if their lives don't matter.

Because, when Nazis treat people like animals it's bad, but if you treat animals like animals... well...it's like... look! Over there! Shiny!!

But, their profound thinking about "species-ism" got me to thinking...if all life is sacred and equal, what gives them the right to commit genocide on our brother and sister species of bacteria and viruses? Who are they to make a distinction? I believe that in order to be consistent, that when they go in for surgery, they find a doctor who does not believe in hygiene. Think of the millions of bacteria mindlessly slaughtered when they scrub in? No antibiotics. No sterilized instruments. No boiling water... just sharing the planet with the tiniest of our brother and sisters! (Kumbayah!)

I'm not going to bother to give you the link to these guys, because if you're dedicated to wholesale bacterial genocide, I'm sure you can find them! I'll give you a hint: they call themselves "adaptt", with two "T"s, (because they spell as well as they reason).

For the sake of full disclosure, I want you to know that the neither the steer who provided my steak tonight or the pig whose bacon I enjoyed this morning or even the hen from whom my eggs were gathered were enemies of mine. Because, in addition to opposing my enemies, debating them, defeating them politically, and trying to kill them...sometimes I merely mock them.


Mmm, bacon!