[Jerry K]

Joey,

Thanks for your reasoned response to my post. I TOTALLY agree that the conditions most animals are kept in is quite abominable, and that's what I was talking about when I said people have to find their own moral pathway, and that's it all about intention. For some people, they aren't at a point in their own emotional development where the source of their meat matters to them and they'll eat any meat that's offered. For others (such as myself) I am quite a bit more discriminating about what meat I eat, where it's come from, how it's raised, and offering my own version of gratitude for the nourishment. For others, all meat consumption is against their moral standards so they abstain.

Racism still exists, as does homophobia, misogyny, nationalism, and speciesism (might not be spelling that last one right, sorry!) I think we agree that no one's mind was ever changed through legislation or berating them. People are unbelievably set in their ways. My issue with the vegan approach of equating meat-eaters with torturers is that it goes from square one to square 100 without giving your audience an opportunity to catch up with what it means. In other words, because a vegan has already gone through your own transformation from meat-eater to conscious-eater (let's call it that for a moment, instead of vegan) they are un-intentionally or perhaps intentionally trying to shock Joe Meat Eater into thinking of himself as a torturer, one shade away from Adolf Hitler, rocket-shooting him from meat-eater to vegan in one fell swoop. All that this kind of resistance does is further entrench the vegan and him in different camps, rather than simply saying, "Listen, I learned a lot of things about where our meat comes from and how it's treated and what it's doing to the environment that are pretty shocking. Can I tell you about some of them?"

Meat eating isn't just about survival. There's a pleasure to eating meat that many people don't plan to give up. And before we get into a converstaion about the ethics of murder for pleasure, we should make a complete inventory of every single piece of clothing, furniture, paper, electronics, transportation methods, medicines, cosmetics, packagaing, water sources, etc that we use, to see if any of the comforts and luxuries that we enjoy that have nothing to do with meat might also come from a supply chain that also includes murder, environmental degradation, torture, and agony - and perhaps the murder, torture, and agony might even be of the human variety rather than animal. I was shocked recently to discover how much of the precious gem trade is based on obscene treatment of human slaves, for instance. I had no idea.

But I also wonder why we choose to use the treatment of factory raised farm animals as a euphism for the Holocaust when there are very real Holocausts happening all over the globe right now. There's no need for the moral substitution. It just seems to me to be a convenient way to elevate veganism to a position of moral superiority encompassing a much grander view of what not eating meat means, especially for vegans (and here I say carefully I don't know how involved anyone reading this is in world issues, that's my caveat) - especially vegans who aren't actively involved in stopping the human murder, agony, and torture that we all know is going on right now. It's like sitting in a room watching a human being tortured and saying "I'm not going to eat that hamburger because I don't agree with this torture, and so by not eating a murdered animal I am making my statement." Unless that person very very rapidly progresses to being involved in an active way in stopping the torture of the person, the not eating of the meat is really an empty gesture and borders on hypocrisy.

The middle ground as I see it is a part of the big conversation that is emerging about the environment - and I'm using environment in the big sense to include physical & spiritual. It's time for people to take more responsibility for the moral and physical harm that is done by this mis-guided notion that we should have tons of meat available at all times (and fresh vegetables in NYC in December, and cheap tee shirts, and cheap computers, etc etc). All of this abundance at such a cheap price has a cost. I believe the day is coming sooner than we think that more people than we can imagine will wake up and realize that maybe they should be more concerned about where their meat (and clothes, and vegetables, and computers, and furniture, etc etc) comes from, that the source and transporation of these things has an effect on our moral/spiritual/physical environment. If 50% of the people in the USA alone started insisting that the meat they eat be raised humanely and slaughtered humanely, that would be a huge reduction in the amount of unnecessary suffering in the world.

I also think (and this is a seperate conversation) that there is a direct link between the way we treat the animals we raise for the bulk of the meat eaten in the US and the way we deal with issues of poverty/racism/women's rights.

Let's keep talking, this is great.