Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - Re: [Homestead] Meat

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Meat
  • Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2008 23:01:14 -0500


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.




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page