Letters to the Editor
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Kelly's letter describes everything that is wrong...
...with all the meat eaters I know. I've been a vegetarian for 19 years. I started when I was 15. I'm 34 now. The reason that I'm a vegetarian is not because I think that raising animals and then killing them for food is wrong, but because I know that the way in which this culture does it is immoral. It is immoral because the animals live miserable lives, and then they are painfully and cruelly slaughtered. The disconnect in logic and personal integrity that people like Kelly display sickens me. Kelly knows that if she raised an animal for six months that she would then be emotionally connected to it and would not be able to slaughter it for food. Kelly realizes that the animals that she does eat suffer before she buys them- yet to her and millions like her, they will continue to feel affection for the animals they can see and turn a blind eye and a blind conscience to the ones hidden from their view by the factory farm and the slaughter house. I have far more respect for the author of the article and how she raised and killed Harold than I do for those who feel and act the way that Kelly does.
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awesome!
I can't wait to hear the shrill frothing and lathering of the vegans.
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I don't really like the idea of killing an animal with which I have a social bond
Assuming somewhat equal levels of suffering, I'd rather assasinate a deer, or especialy a feral pig or a million.
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I have never heard anyone object to animals eating each other
Only to HUMANS eating animals. ALL animals kill members of their own species, does that make it right for people to do it.
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Its not about the bird
I'm with farm boy on this one.
Except for vegetarians, what seems to get most posters here, is that the writer bonded with and raised the turkey like it was the family dog, and then slaughtered it. Anthropomorphising (is that a word?) an animal can do this to people. (which reminds me of a great joke that ends with the punchline "A pig like that you don't eat all at once." But I digress).
It's easy to eat meat that we buy in sterile saran wrapped packages in mega grocery stores. We just see a slab of white or red flesh whithout ever considering it was once a living animal. To the average consumer it is no more living than a bag of Fritos. Worse, buy purchasing a cheap mass slaughtered piece of "ease on our conscience" we perpetuate an industry that raises animals in the worst of conditions; cramped together in filth ridden stalls, fed often the meat byproducts of fellow cattle and pumped with chemicals. They are killed in a horrible way, with a large ram to the head often leaving them still alive while their flesh is ripped from their bones. They are stored in the worst of conditions and, unlike spinach, if there is an E Coli outbreak, warnings are sent out, but nary a morsel of tenderloin is pulled from the shelves.
To those who eat meat, the best thing you can do is raise your own. Failing that, buy locally from a small family farm. It is the best chance that you will get meat from poultry, pigs, sheep or cows that is humanely raised and cared for, fed non hormone or chemical laced meal, let alone their fellow cows entrails, humanely slaughtered and rich in nutrients and low in fat. Even better, the more people buy local and from small farms, the less profit these huge mega producers make and the less cattle, pigs and poultry are made to suffer under the far more awful conditons than anything this writer ever did to poor Harold.
BTW if you don't have room for turkeys, and they are mean creatures, try raising rabbits. They only take a back yard, your kids will love them and they taste just like chicken. The pelts also make great hats.
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There is value in not exposing ourselves to some psychological traumas
No one ever talks about the countless people in modern society who have been spared the psychological trauma of having to kill or be around the killing of the animals they eat. Avoiding psychological trauma isn't usually a bad thing. It is not necessarily a bad thing or even particularly immoral that most of us are insulated from the beheading of farm turkeys, let along turkeys with names that we have treated like pets. I'm reasonably comfortable knowing intellectually that something died to provide the meat I eat and I don't feel much impulse to experience, and fetishize, a particular type of "authenticity." To me there is value in not imprinting myself with the indelible images and sensations of chopping off my turkey's head and holding its writhing body as it bleeds out.
I respect the impulses and viewpoints that lead people to veganism, but I feel no moral obligation to arrange my life's priorities as vegans arrange theirs. Honestly, I like to think that if I saw the moral equivalent of genocide going on around me, I would feel compelled to do more than punctuate my comfortable life with shopping around for the right kind of sugar and ensuring that my meat substitutes were vegan instead of merely vegetarian. Vegans feel moral imperatives, but they are hardly the moral imperatives I would expect to animate courageous moral actors confronting genocide in their midst.
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Thoughts from a guilty sometimes carnivore...
I don't think I could ever eat something I had named. I am therefore glad I have not named this brownie sitting next to me. Oh, the pure (tasty) joys of ignorance.
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Food by any other word
My Alphabits just spelled out "Help Meeee."
I fell so ashamed. Munch munch.
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A lucky bird
This is, quite simply, the most wonderful piece of writing about food that I have read in a very long time - and as a writer about food for the past twenty years, I read a lot. Thank you Novella Carpenter, for taking Hugh Fearnley-Whittinstall's marvellous essay, Meat & Rights, and - gosh I wanted to say huamanising it - but I should say animalising it - and I mean that in the sense that we are all animals....hallejulah! God bless you Harold - you did not die in vain. We should be able to say that about all the animals we eat.