I have an opinion about vegetarianism. Part 1

I have an opinion about vegetarianism.

There are three basic factors that I can see for people to become vegetarians, or to not become vegetarians: Mind (Morality), Body (Biological Health), and Spirit (Religion and Morality).

Part 1:  Mind
Most of us would like to believe we are moral people.  In the case of vegetarianism, morality tends to lead to two discussions - the validity of a human's right to kill and eat another animal, and the animal cruelty inherent in the current system of raising and processing that meat.

Let's start with the basics of the food chain.  Big fish eats little fish eats tiny fish eats plants that live off the waste of big fish.  Simple, cyclic logic.  However, many people feel that because the human is the animal at their perceived 'top' of the chain, humans should take pity on the poor animals beneath them.  Especially the cute ones (but maybe that is a topic for another day).  I would like to first point out that humans are not at the top of the food chain.  Virus' have that accreditation, which explains why we are all more frightened of touching the doorknob in a public bathroom than we are about the long-term repercussions of spilled crude oil killing the plankton that fuels our little food chain.

We are being murdered en mas by the tiny critters that rule our food chain - Influenza, AIDS, West Nile ... you hear about outbreaks and plagues and death-by-mosquito and yet here we are talking about how mean it is to feed ourselves on the flesh of the weak.  Yes, I say weak because, even though many of the critters we eat are stronger than us, they are not as advanced in mass-killing technology as are we humans. Of course we know that when we compare ourselves to, say, a virus, we are the weak.

Now, if we assume the food chain is not just some habit we picked up in the stone-age (we will debate our biological need for meat later), than we must focus this morality discussion of how we get our meat.  I am going to take a cow as my example.  First of all, cows are cute.  Wittle baby cows with their soft wittle noses and their cute little moooo.  It is my opinion that we should not use chemicals to make them bigger or produce more milk, or any other nonsense (another topic for another day), but we do breed them, grow them, and harvest them.  This should be done humanely.  Free-range, fed on the stuff they are designed to eat, allowed to live as normally as possible until they are taken away and quickly killed with minimal pain.  It's not like we're running them down and slowly gnawing at their hindquarters until they get tired, then eating their soft parts while they wiggle like some carnivores do.  Either way, the cow doesn't have a chance.  In our case, the cow wouldn't have been born in the first place, or would have had to search for food every day, fend off predator and disease and environment in a high-stress battle for existence until it eventually succumbed to the devastation. 

So morality ... how about instead of being a vegetarian, you put a little effort (like maybe a phone call to your government) into making the process more humane.  Instead of paying huge prices for tofu, or for mineral supplements, you buy meat from a local farmer.  You want to make a statement?  How about I will pay extra for meat that was raised in the sunshine?  The reason the process is as bad as it is ... people think life is cheap.  A decent life for a cow costs money.  That means that raising cattle in a moral manner costs money. 

By the way - one last bit on morality before we move on to issues of biology and spiritualism.  Do you wear leather shoes? Belt? Ever use rodent traps? How about this one: Have you ever been on antibiotics?  After all, virus' are animals too, aren't they?

To be continued...