Who Made You the Boss of Ewe?

Imagine a legal system that recognizes animal rights as inalienable, slaughterhouses closed because they deny life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Impossible.

Imagine a planet made uninhabitable by a singularly rapacious species.

A near certainty.

Can the impossible and the near-certain be reconciled?

 

once.you.eliminate

Why do we never refer to “farmed” animals as cadavers or corpses?

Carcasses get hung by hooks that slide along ceiling rails and transport them into a sequence of production stations. We don’t do such things to human beings because we value life. Where did you go to school anyway, Bill?

By the sixth day, the Bible identifies certain animals as livestock (alive, caged, enslaved, dispatched). Sentient beings with a central nervous system — one that transmits data from brain to spleen — are complex emotional bemichael-maslin-which-came-first-mom-the-chicken-mcnugget-or-the-egg-mcmuffin-new-yorker-cartoon_a-l-9179842-8419447ings. Pet “owners” know this, but they also “know” that a meal without meat is an oxymoron.

Apples and oranges, Bill. Pets are lovable family members. Meat is matter that doesn’t matter. Just don’t think about it and we’ll all be better for it. You’re obsessed with animal so-called rights. You need help. I hope you get the help you need. Pets are simply lovable. They are not dead meat. But why do they eat pets in Korea? That’s just wrong.

Apples and oranges are both fruits. Piglets and human children are both mammals.

No animal wishes to suffer lifelong torture, brutal death, family separation, mechanized dissection, mechanical separation, supermarket aisles with nutrition labels. A dead food-animal isn’t even graced with the nicer post-life identity of cadaver or corpse.

What you shun enduring yourself, attempt not to impose on others. You shun slavery—beware of enslaving others! If you can endure to do that, one would think you had been once upon a time a slave yourself. For Vice has nothing in common with virtue, nor Freedom with slavery. (41).

— Epictetus “Golden Saying of Epictetus” (as translated by Hastings Crossley)

us our they

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over

  1. the fish in the sea and
  2. the birds in the sky,
  3. over livestock and
  4. all the wild animals, and
  5. over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

so that“???

Did a God create mankind in his own image or was it the other way around?

  1. in the image of God he created them; 
  2. male and female he created them.”

Again, who made us the boss of them? Why is an animal killed by homo sapiens called a meat carcass, not a cadaver or a corpse?

Bill, did you know that Mannwich® is a meal? It’s not annimal fodder.

culture.mother.child

Control the narrative and own the outcome. The cadaver/corpse you ate yesterday, the corpse/cadaver you’ll eat today, the cadaver/corpse you plan to eat tomorrow. Eat all your fodder, son.

Animals don’t feel pain the way that WE do. Hunters know this. You should try hunting and you’ll know too, Bill

Certain faiths grant animals mortal souls. They grant themselves immortal souls.

Bill, do you recognize the difference between cannibals and meat-eaters?

Use them, consume them, tan their hides, chew their jerky. Search for even more markets that promise additional markets for each cadaver part, create a demand for a wide range of corpse parts.

Bill, you should read Rhys Southan’s blog “Let Them Eat Meat,”  a restful place for former vegans:

“As a meat-eater-to-be, however, this was more of an issue, because I would presumably need to stop caring about animals. How does one stop caring?

The answer to that question in my case was severe depression. I had always been prone to depression, and still am, but as a vegan I finally became so utterly indifferent to my own life that it led to this epiphany of sorts: “If my life doesn’t matter,” I thought, “a cow’s life definitely doesn’t matter.” Eating meat no longer seemed impossible to justify. If it had to be me or the cow… it might as well be the cow.”

Animals do not wish to be husbanded.  They do not enjoy a caged or crated existence. Freedom for me, but not for thee? Gaze into an animal’s eyes and see what those eyes scream back at you. Or don’t.

Why don’t “meat processing facilities” provide tours? Advertisers proclaim their thorough quality control, cleanliness and wholesome products. A family business for family folks.

From lip to anus He/we created them; male and female we/He created them.

A male calf cannot produce breast milk. Cow milk is calf nourishment.  A mother cow is a fellow mammal. She produces breast milk for her young in the same way that all mammal mothers do. She wouldn’t seek to divert her breast milk to supermarkets. Veal is a tender flesh that draws ever fewer consumers, and not because it’s illegal. A proxy agent crates them, force-feeds them, kills them, sells them. A product code triggers a beep.

A male chick does not lay eggs. This severely limits his value in a poultry processing facility. It yields marginal protein content and cannot be inventoried. If management doesn’t do something about animals who cannot produce eggs they get stuck with useless inventory. Fortunately, there is customer demand for pet food and school cafeteria fare. Male chicks serve this market. Once you have separated the egg-layers from the useless-as-bull-teat chicks you need to send them down a chute, pump the protein-rich slurry into tankers and truck them to rendering facilities.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

Solidarity for Sustainability

My thanks to all and each who inspire this blog 🙂

I appreciate my readers and am ever grateful for each of you — including those who disagree with some (or all) content here, or those who have tripped into my blog by entering a type O graphical error in a Google search bar. Say you’re interested in discovering something germane and find German instead. Many (most) might feel that nothing I write is germane to many (most) surfers’ interests.

sustain.pakistan

Today’s comment of the day is from Robert, creator of Words for Breakfast, a worthwhile blog I recommend to your attention on the basis of its inherent interest and merit:

“…Vegans, Vegetarians and proponents of sustainable living should work together more, be more receptive to each other instead of trying to convince each other of the rightness of their opinion…”

Please allow me to quote from my reply:

“… You are absolutely right about the need to work together with as many fellow travelers as possible. I believe in joining with others in solidarity, even if you disagree with them on many other issues. Creating enemies by edict solves nothing and poisons the soil… — crap drains no sewer…”

Vegans are not the only planetary inhabitants who recognize that a sustainable environment is not a luxury or a fantasy. Solidarity for sustainability unites many with whom you may disagree: mildly or vehemently. We have no Plan B Planet.

meatrix

I believe that sustainability is a rock-solid rule of Mother Nature, a rule enforced by her forces of evolution and devolution. You break the rules by stacking the deck in your favor, resulting in expulsion.

Before going any further, let me recommend a recent review and summation of a recent symposium in Sheffield UK by Mira Lieberman, a scholar who combines voice and verve at a sustained level of competence. Thorough and well written? Yes, indeed.

Sometimes the rules are blatantly not caused by planetary inhabitants. Sizable meteors are also a force of nature, as is a dying sun. The dinosaurs had been around far longer than mammals, for example. Extinction Event Number 5 was not of their doing. Sometimes being in the wrong place at the wrong time just happens. Sorry ’bout that.

Venus became enshrouded by clouds, setting hypothetical Venusians up for the heartbreak of The Greenhouse Effect. Your assignment: write an essay (50,000 words or less) on the topic: what I think happened to Venus.

greenhouse.smithsonian

Extinction Event Number 6 may be well on the way to completion, I’ve heard that nothing is completed until it is finished, or something. Unfortunately most other innocent fellow species are thus endangered. Many species have already disappeared through a process known as ‘extinction’ — something as natural as getting hit by a largish meteor or squeezed into a cul-de-sac by a human crave for lebensraum or some other geopolitical impulse.

Extinction events usually take millions or billions of years to complete. Leave it to the self-appointed kings of the hill, self-named topper of the food chain to deserve an “anthropocentric” geological era.

Perhaps robots invented by homo sapiens will begin a “cene” of their own after their creators leave the scene.

Vegan Venn Diagram o’ the Day

Venn diagrams are useful heuristics. Here is one from VeganStreet.com that departs from the conventional Meatist perspective. I’m calling it the Venn diagram o’ the day.

vegann.diagram.veganstreet

Hoping that you like the idea of complimenting a comment with a complementing commentary. 🙂

Thanks for reading.

 

“In Praise of Idleness” and Veganism

40 years ago I read Bertrand Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness,” an essay he published in 1932. The piece was already 40 years old when I got around to reading it — 40 years later I reread this essay, perhaps under visitation of some Jungian synchronicity. Reading it this morning allowed my imagination to stagger — where have I read a better statement on redressing an injustice: the theft of productivity gains? My tentative answer — “nowhere more succinctly.”

First of all : what is work? Work is of two kinds : 
first, altering the position of matter at or near the 
earth’s surface relative to other such matter ; 
second, telling other people to do so. The first kind 
is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant 
and highly paid. The second kind is capable of 
indefinite extension: there are not only those who 
give orders, but those who give advice as to what 
orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds 
of advice are given simultaneously by two organized 
bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill 
required for this kind of work is not knowledge of 
the subjects as to which advice is given, but know- 
ledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, 
i.e. of advertising.

Source

I’ve alluded to Russell’s essay “Nice People” several times now. Actually it’s becoming a commonplace theme here.

I checked out the marvelously titled “Why I am not a Christian” from a West German library in 1971 Giessen — the librarian was not, not, not in the least amused. Not.

Das ist Blödsinn. Totaler Blödsinn.

how.to.love.and.eat.animals

I took up my practice of living iconoclastically shortly (about ten minutes) after graduating from high school — I’d completed 12 years of mandatory Catholic education and needed to discover why free thinkers were so despised by non-freethinkers.

By my estimation vegans are free thinkers who believe that all sentient beings are fellow free thinkers, Genesis 1:26 notwithstanding. Being a vegan just may qualify you as iconoclast. Hold that thought a moment. I’ll be right back…

Hey, it does qualify you as iconoclast.

26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

I am convinced that veganism is the gentlest means for solving the ever unaddressed need for addressing global warming. It might even nip a certain extinction event in the bud: The Anthropocene. Is it possible that 7 billion homo sapiens consuming 70 billion animals (from fur to marrow) annually — a practice sanctioned by most religious institutions — might warrant more than a shrug?

Look here, Bill. Humans are created in the image of their maker. Read Genesis 1:26. ’nuff said.

Today’s bumper sticker suggestion:

Meatism kills. Veganism nourishes.

Was Venus once a lush planet? Are we preparing to become a one such once-lush planet?

Thanks for reading.

 

 

Veganism, Meatism and Freneticism

It’s a good day to weigh value systems and lifestyles.

Sounds judgmental, Bill. A waste of time and a waste of electrons. You know very well that we’re too busy and far too important to read your screed, yet you insist on inviting us to your frugal table. Why do that?

I don’t know.

ConsumeristVeganism

Freneticism. An active lifestyle, branded on gross national consumption — consumers playing a complacent role toward a dismal goal.

Michael Ende’s classic novel Momo explains it well. Ende knows his Zeitdieben (time thieves) — those functionaries  who siphon the productivity of persons more innocent, more gentle. Quite a fine book, if you have the time.

Do con artists ever have a hidden agenda? Just an idle question.

momo.zeitdiebe
from: Vegan Warrior Princesses Attack

May we remind you, Bill, there is more money in beef than in beets. Jobs from sea to befouled sea, that’s what we’re talking about. Filling waste-management positions, artery pharmaceutical rep salaries, butcheries and slaughterers, belly futurists, hide sellers, Boeuf Taco artisans.

Meatism: a lifestyle based on flesh and blood, unfertilized eggs, calf milk, buttered bacon, Snausages®  all nicely appointed on a dinner plate. Marketers know their play-books, how to drone a message into your psyche, how to grant you the illusion of independent thought —  you are the one doing the thinking. Something to manufacture a lasting crave, powerful enough to drive you from refrigerator and pantry to the supermarket and back. Where are the car keys? The 12-hour Energy Boosters®?

Consume, c o n s u m e, C O N S U M E, c o n s u m e, consume. 

The lab gals and guys have skills honed to fashion biochemical ions that stimulate taste receptors and simulate well-being. Palm oil fuels a munch crave. Be they chips or be they crisps — an open bag is an empty bag. Palm oil substitutes for hydrogenated oil, but threatens rainforests.

You’re a do-gooder and a poison-ivy hugger, Bill. Let us buy you an ivy salad. Our treat.

Buy another bag. And aren’t you clever now  — buy a bigger bag or two, or five. Buy ten bags and save ten dollars. The more you buy, the more you save.

Wow. Where are the car keys? The 12-hour Energy®?

A dinner plate is a wasteland, absent a meat entree to grace it, my friend. We did not evolve to nibble bunny salads and sip miso soup. Let us tell you about tired emaciated vegans. God made animals for us to domesticate and to eat. F-ing cows were not created in God’s image. We are not Bottom-headed — and we’re not bottom feeders. 

Of course.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

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