To address the pictures of cute cats and dogs on vegan websites that pose the question - if it's OK to eat farmed animals, why not them?
When I started to think the idea through - OK, lets say we outlaw meat or collectively magically decided to all be vegan- but then what? What happens to all the farm animals? Release into the wild? Well we all know that will just make the population of every predator go up. Wolves, coyotes, bears will flourish on easy meals.
So humans are sentient beings, cows are sentient and so are wolves. If we see wolves hunt down that cow, do we interfere? Humanely slaughter it for the wolves? Because from watching Animal Planet, very few predators were concerned with pain of their prey. How do we, as humans, participate in the natural world, when a lot of it is quite violent? We make a choice to go to Whole Foods, while a wolf or a bear ... doesn't really have the same options.
I guess it made me wonder if basing my diet and a way of life on just "well it's wrong to eat them because they feel pain" is a good idea. Because everything tried to eat something else living.
But then again, I can't compare going to a grocery store to hunting prey in the wilderness. After all, I have free will and intelligence to decide what I will have for dinner. I live in a place where options are essentially limitless. I live in a metropolitan area, there is everything from farmer's markets to gourmet butchers to ethnic food of every kind. A real farm is about 2 hours away if I choose to go that route.
So I am as removed from wilderness and hunting my food as one gets, though I am sure I could pay someone to take me hunting. So what am I suppose to do?
I guess I have decided to use my place in the food chain and my ability to think critically as to how do I fit in to this world puzzle.
I am trying to compare the fate of fowl and prey animals in the wild to the slaughter of animals on small family farms. And while in the wild the predators will start eating their prey as soon as they sink their teeth in it, we humans tend to bring the suffering of an animal we are about to eat to an end as soon as possible.
If deciding between living in the wild and being eaten almost alive vs. being fattened up and slaughtered painlessly later.... I guess I would pick the latter...
Many vegans will say, well neither. But that means living in the wild where natural death is not as neat and tidy - who is comfortable in releases massive amounts of animals who have had their survival instincts bred out of them into the wild to a certain death?
Or taking it upon yourself euthanasia of animals that can't fend for themselves to "ease suffering" of natural living- mainly anything domesticated like chickens, cows or pigs. I don't think I am comfortable with that idea... Maybe that's the mutual relationship that early farm societies developed and factory farms bastardized.
Well, would I eat my cat then? No. My cat is not a product of thousands of years of domestication and selective breeding. He's kind of bony. And what a Western world thing to ask! There are countries they eat dogs, snakes, lizards and insects and some that don't eat cows or pigs. We all make choices based on our own reasoning and our environment. Cute puppy or curious piglet.
I decided to be vegan (at least for a while) not because I swayed by the argument that there was something similar between chicken and my cat. I am trying to make a rational, reasoned decision in a vast sea of valid and ridiculous opinions. It's gonna be interesting one way or another!
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