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Thanks for publishing this article. I can no more give up meat than I can give up sex, and I strongly suspect the majority of human beings is in my camp. I'll drive a smaller car, I'll pay more on my electric bill for wind power, and I'll vote for any party that taxes me more to invest in the future of our planet. I'll happily sacrifice.
But I just can't give up meat. I would willingly eat less of it, and would happily see prices on meat go up, way up, especially if higher prices ensured meat was humanely and sustainably produced. Westerners do have too much meat in their diets, after all.
But I refuse to feel bad about the fact that evolution designed me to require a lot of protein to support my large brain. And that evolution made me only able to get complete proteins from just meat, and one lonely plant, the soy bean. That I am evolved this way because my ancestors got good enough at fishing, hunting, and trapping, that humans' ability to manufacture complete proteins from a variety of plants, as other animals do, fell away from us, superfluous to our survival.
And I do tire of PETA and their ilk trying to pretend that my lust for meat is not innate. That's like trying to ignore the fact that I like salt and sugar. Or sex. Or that I'm straight. I'm already starting to imagine myself in some dystopian future buying meat on the black market!
PETA would be so much more successful if they campaigned for particular kinds of meat, in particular amounts. But, like so many other organizations these days, PETA is not about facts; PETA is about its agenda, and cherry-picking the facts to support its foregone conclusions.
It's too bad our political landscape is divided by left and right. It would be so much more useful if the political spectrum ran from truthful to deceitful. PETA, sad for them, would be on the Terry Schiavo end of the scale.
