Letters to the Editor
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A little linguistic precision would have been nice
Carnivores are chic? Well, that was cute, but imprecise. Novella, if you weren't an omnivore, you would have eaten Harold with side dishes of sausage, liver, and other meat dishes, not veggies and cranberries.
I suspect that your glibness was an attempt to make your story slick enough for Salon, but the end result was to trivialize Harold's death. Too bad. The article could have been much better if you'd put a bit more feeling into it and played less with words.
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Detaching from nature
I used to think that militant vegetarians were just harmless fools. I'm not talking about people who don't eat meat as a personal choice and keep it to themselves. I have no problem with that. Seems reasonable enough to me. I'm talking about capital V vegetarians, the fundamentalists, the religious zealots. You know, the type that views their dietary choices as some sort of political statement, that has that air of moral superiority and disdains meat-eaters as unenlightened carnivorous heathens.
No, I no longer view the Vegetarian/Vegan movement as benign. I now understand it to be dangerous for both human health and environmental health, and what I mistook as ignorance or mild disdain for nature and ecology I now recognize as outright rejection and contempt.
Let me insert a little story here. I was at a beach in Northern California, watching a fascinating spectacle: a mother Gray whale and her calf were swimming back forth very close to shore in the surfline, while a pod of 5 or 6+ orca whales penned them in at either end and at the perimeter. Obviously, the Orcas were patiently waiting to separate the mother from her calf and then eat the calf. I found it fascinating that I could watch with my own modern eyes a scene that has been repeated for hundreds of centuries in this same place. While a crowd watched the spectacle, I heard murmurs of concern grown into cries of anguish, "Can't somebody stop them!" and "Call the Coast Guard, get a boat, let's the save the baby whale." And I'm thinking, why? Why save the baby Gray whale? So the baby Orca whales can starve to death? Gray whales are food for Orca whales. This is not only natural, it's beautiful. From death comes life.
From death comes life. I believe that only hunters and farmers and naturalists in our society understand this. We have become so detached from nature that we no longer understand the beauty of the system. These are the same people who can't watch the Discovery channel for fear of a seeing a lioness eat an antelope. As if it's an act of cruelty and evil. Every being is food for another being. Even us. After our deaths, unless we are cremated, we are consumed by tiny animals. And that's a good thing.
When Novella killed and ate her pig, she was participating in an act of beauty, participating in nature and in her own life. That some would consider it immoral or repellent only betrays their own alienation from their own natural world and ultimately, themselves.
Why is the militant brand of vegetarianism dangerous? Because it offers a world view where humans must be kept separated from nature and live apart from nature, rather than within it as we always have. It offers specious solutions to our environmental problems. It distracts and detracts from actual constructive efforts to preserve and protect the natural environment. I believe strongly that only by understanding and participating in nature, rather than putting it in a museum or zoo, will we be able to save it.
I eat meat because it's what human are supposed eat, what we have evolved to eat, not solely "because I like the taste." Meat is a natural diet for humans. Like it or not, animals are food. For each other. And for us. You can wish away reality all you want, but the natural world is all we have and I choose to embrace it rather than push it away and live in a pretend world where "Turkeys are Friends Not Food!"
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Sad
This article strikes me as sad. I am vegan, and I realize that the tenderness and introspection that Ms. Carpenter shows throughout this article is a good thing. Sweet, admirable, even. But I'm sad to see Harold be killed.
I have spent a good portion of my life, through college, law school, and now working after having recently passed the bar, trying to understand people's relationships with the animals they eat. And trying to understand myself along the way. Just this morning, Compassion Over Killing released an investigation on how the turkeys commercially raised for America's Thanksgiving dinner tables began their lives. (http://www.cok.net/camp/inv/turkeys06/). It is sick, objectifying, disheartening, violent, and terribly depressing. These baby animals are treated like the widgets of any factory, some are suffocated in plastic bags, mangled on machinery, and countless numbers of them are thrown out like trash. The numbers involved are staggering. It's something the human brain can't even comprehend. As many hours as I've spent confronting animal abuse in the commercial farming industry, most recently with this turkey hatchery footage, and as these depressing images and thoughts stick with me, I wonder why people allow this to happen. Why people who are compassionate, happy, warm, and devoted to their families and friends and even to their pets can be so blind to this, even when they have at least a vague awareness of the suffering and destruction of factory farming.
And yesterday I thought to myself that it was because people do not have to put it in their own hands; they do not have to look these animals in the eye, remove the objectification. People often tell me they just don't want to know the details. If they knew the details, would they return the status of these animals to individuals, to living, feeling beings with the capacity to have relationships and personalities like Harold? Apparently not.
Instead, Ms. Carpenter and many of the authors who wrote letters in response to this article find ways to detach themselves from the situation. She argues that this way is the lesser of two evils, assuming, of course, that you want to continue eating meat. One letter talks about it being an emotional experience at first, but then the emotion goes away. Since when is numbing ourselves a solution?
The desire to kill to eat is so strong that we find ways to justify it to ourselves. The comments on this article have used "nature," "necessity," and basic concepts of utility ('if we eat it, it's not a waste') as routes to this justification. But the bottom line to me is that we just don't need to do this. We can live happy, healthy (very healthy) lives without killing (or at least reducing killing as much as possible). I am grateful for this privilege. But it does mean that when we kill, we are killing for fun. For preference, enjoyment, just to have another option on the menu.
That's why Harold's death was so sad. Intellectually, I understand that there are pragmatic ways to reduce the consumption of meat and increase the welfare of animals - having people raise their own animals, the humane meat movement, etc. Emotionally, I am more hurt to see hundreds of thousands of animals go through a painful and heartless process so their parts can end up in cheap shrink-wrapped packages than I am by Harold's story. And I know that the way Harold lived and died is nicer, more humane than the 252 million turkeys killed in this country every year. But I was taken into the world of Harold, and the thoughts and feelings of Ms. Carpenter, and I was sad to see him go. I felt like she was too. We live in a wonderful society that allows us the choice not to kill animals to eat them. Then why do we put ourselves through this sort of avoidance and pain?