But Eating Meat Is “Natural”
Eating animals ISN’T natural. Here’s why…
1. The way animals are raised and killed for food today isn’t natural. Factory farming isn’t natural.
Keeping animals in close quarters requires antibiotics and pesticides. The vast majority of meat comes from over-crowded, inhumane intensive animal agriculture facilities, aka factory farms. The animals are treated like products in a FACTORY. There’s nothing normal or natural about that.
2. Paying someone to slaughter an animal because you can’t stomach to do it yourself isn’t natural. If you can’t personally kill animals, you shouldn’t be eating them. There’s nothing natural about pretending the cruelty doesn’t exist and eating the meat anyway.
There’s nothing natural about a coercive economy that compels otherwise compassionate people to ignore their NATURAL compassion for animals in order to perform their job and bring home a paycheck to feed their children. There’s nothing natural about the most dangerous job in America: working at a slaughterhouse. There is nothing natural about paying people to risk their lives by killing animals just so you can eat a tasty meal.
3. Compassion and concern for animals IS natural. Children tend to LOVE animals and are horrified when they learn where meat comes from. There is nothing natural about ignoring our instinctive compassion for animals.
If we were naturally supposed to eat animals, we’d react to animals the way other omnivores and carnivores react - we’d chase and hunt them. Instead, only a small minority of people hunt at all, and those people aren’t usually salivating when they do it. Many do it out of bloodlust, not to satisfy hunger. Humans don’t get hungry when they see insects or squirrels or cows or pigs.
In fact, if we gave a human - any human - an apple and a rabbit and the person ate the rabbit and played with the apple, we’d consider that abnormal, unnatural behavior. Eating animals ISN’T natural.
Great list. Very true and kind of funny, in a ironic way.
~ Recent blog post: Sleeping while I’m awake. ~
There is another side to this “natural” argument. In days past it was considered natural for some men to have many wives, and certainly natural to have many children. Our world has evolved to the point where neither of these actions is necessary for the survival of the species or even for the survival of one family (except for starving families in some third-world countries, which do often have many children so that some might survive and help the parents).
Way back in prehistoric times, it was an evolutionary advantage for humans to be able to eat other animals as well as plants. It is the rare culture that needs this ability now, and in fact the unnatural eating of too much animal protein has been proven to cause serious harm to humans. There isn’t anything at all natural about the amount of animal protein western societies eat.
My parents raised chickens when I was a little kid. We loved them all; my little brother even named them. We used to help them find worms when they ran free in the yard. Naturally I assumed that is how all chickens were treated. I was sorely shocked when I went to work @ 2 slaughter houses as a teenager. The way it looked, sounded, and smelled was disgusting. As an adult, I don’t eat meat that comes from those places. More veggies than meat is way better anyway.