Of vegetarianism and word play

The current saga of Michael Vick, an American Football star who has been caught up in a huge controversy over “brutal” dog fighting is frankly amusing to me.

Let’s back up a bit. I am a vegetarian. That is more for reasons of my upbringing, religion, health and preference in taste than any concerns of cruelty towards animals. I gladly wear and use leather and do eat many things that might have animal products (including dairy) like cheese (did you know that some cheese include stuff from inside the stomach of calves called rennet?), jelly (made from bone gelatin in most cases) and Indian sweets with the silver film on them (those films are made by beating silver sheets in between cow hides and guts which ends up transferring blood and other particles to the silver). I eat it not because I like that stuff, but sometimes there’s just no way to make sure that I am not eating non-dairy animal products.

I therefore have no ethical stances on vegetarianism. People need to eat and they happen to eat animals.

What cracks me up however is that in Western countries, people indulge in a lot of sophistry to define cruelty towards animals. While there are huge meat processing plants that butcher millions of animals every day, these are supposed to be done in a “humane” way. Excuse me, but I think if you can stomach (pardon the pun) killing an animal for eating it, you shouldn’t feel outraged if an animal is killed for sport. Or any other reason. Just because your steak comes from a cow that you didn’t see being killed doesn’t mean your conscience can be clear if at all it is a conscionable act.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this “humane” business is more about people feeling better about themselves than animals not suffering.

Western culture has also sought to make eating meat ethically acceptable in other ways. Notice that animals killed for food are not “killed” but “butchered”. And who does it? A “butcher”, who happens to be a human being! You take the guilt out of the act by humanizing it, in this case by naming the fellow the same way. How’s that for sophistry? Or the mass killing of deer for example (to control populations) is really “culling” and not killing.

I therefore like the terms that are used in Kannada. There are no allusions to moral correctness (or wrongdoing for that matter) in my language. When people want to eat mutton, they “chop” the goat or sheep and eat it (kaDidu tinnu). Simple!