[Homestead] Meat
Gene GeRue
genegerue at ruralize.com
Sun Aug 3 00:01:14 EDT 2008
On Aug 2, 2008, at 11:14 AM, Robert Walton wrote:
>> And lastly, people should realize that while eating meat involves
>> killing, so does eating plants. We > must kill to eat.
>
> I'm on an organic gardening list where someone brought up that perhaps
> on some level, plants do feel. On some level they may feel pain when
> we kill them. The moderator stopped the discussion short because he
> saw a big war coming discussing that one!
I'm just home and decompressing from ten hours of road grind, so if
this is incoherent, please blame that.
I have no issue with anyone's eating habits, unless they are
unnecessarily cannibals. My eating evolution is of interest to me
mostly as insight into personal understanding.
It seems to me that we experience angst over killing when the victim
is most like us: killing a raccoon is more traumatic than killing a
snake or a carrot. Also, we have negative reactions based on size:
killing a steer is more off-putting than killing a chicken, even
though the steer makes less of a fuss--the steer drops like a rock
while the chicken goes flapping all over the yard. We are furry
animals and we relate to fur: killing a rabbit or a deer is more
repulsive than killing a turkey or a quail. And, too, the extent of
noise, blood, muscle and nerve reaction from the victim affects our
killing sensations.
Mostly, I suspect it is the volume of violence we exert. Guns, axes,
and knives are tools of violence and abuse our humanity; their use on
other animals coarsens us. We feel diminished if we resort to what we
feel is violence, even though it is for sustenance, wondering why we
haven't figured out something better.
All of this, of course, helps the present mainstream system works so
well. Someone else does the dirty work.
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