Homestead mailing list

[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

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.