| ...I'll eat veal with a smile on my face even if you show me a picture of the veal calf I'm chewing. Am I really that cold and callous? Probably. But I look at a hamburger this way: the cow's already dead. My eating it isn't adding a bit of cruelty to the situation. And if the hamburger doesn't get eaten by me, someone else will. If nobody else does, the cow died in vain. Why would I do this? Veal tastes good. Hamburgers taste good. Sausage tastes good. Healthwise, like Kickstart, I can tell a definite difference when I don't eat meat. I've gone a few weeks without it before, either because I just wasn't in the mood for it or because I was too broke to buy any. ;) I lapse into a state not far, symptom-wise, from anemia. I don't know why this is, only that I've been eating meat my whole life and my body's used to it. For religious reasons, sod that. I think religion has too much power over a person's life already, and I personally think it has no business extending into their diet. That's my opinion, your mileage may vary. Seen a documentary? Yeah, I've seen a few. It's not pretty, granted. It's hardly enough to divert me from eating meat, though. My family has a chicken farm, and the chickens we raise go on to take up coveted space in meat departments all across the northern bit of this fine continent. I wouldn't think it so out of the ordinary that some of you folk reading this have eaten a chicken I've met. Let me just say that for their entire lives (except for the last few hours, anyway), a chicken has it good. Spacious living quarters are only the beginning. Each house is 16,000 square feet. Free room and board are also included in the deal, with food and water being readily available at all times. The food they eat is of a higher quality than the pet food many people give their pets. Social hour never ends, for with roughly 22,000 chickens to a house, you've always got a friend nearby. Extreme measures are taken to keep them healthy, with each one getting more vaccine in their six-week lifespan than most people in the world get in their own lifetimes. Add in the climate-controlled facilities and it's not so bad being a chicken, until the catchers come and catch them all and stuff them into cages which are loaded onto a flatbed truck, taking them off to a state-of-the-art facility for processing (a procedure I'd rather not go into here). Bottom line: meat puts food on my table. Those 500,000 or so chickens we go through each year feeds us, pays our bills, puts clothes on our backs, and stinks up the neighborhood. I'm all for meat. Most meat. I don't eat lamb or seafood, just because I don't like the taste. I don't eat emu (my grandfather raises them, for that precious emu oil so popular in skin care these days), because it's dry and doesn't taste all that good. I don't eat SPAM because I'm not even sure what it is. And I don't eat people, because that's just weird. But anyone who doesn't eat it has done so (hopefully) for their own, carefully considered reasons. I do eat it, and for my own. |
