Note: This is a post of an essay that first appeared on my website Janary 14th, 2004. The original essay can be found here. This is part of an ongoing effort to put all of my soapbox entries onto this blog, to give a space for user feedback. A "new" retroactive post will be made every Monday.
14 January 2004
I don't mind killing animals to eat, but I don't like to see animals killed for no reason. I'm pretty sure that's the consensus in the Western world, since most people aren't vegetarians, but still don't like the idea of killing animals themselves. What gets me is that even though people don't want to see animals die needlessly, those same people are unwilling to eat foods such as pigs feet, scrapple, or sausage in a natural casing just because they're "disgusting." They're all just body parts of the animal, just like muscle is a body part. And the more parts of an animal you eat, the further that single animal goes, and the less animals have to die to feed you. Pork chops are my favorite part of the pig, but I'm also willing to eat hot dogs, scrapple, bacon, and a lot of the other scraps. That way, a single pig will feed me for probably about a month. If all I ate were the pork chops, I'd have to kill four pigs to feed me in that same time span. Not only is that being cruel by killing more animals, it's also being irresponsible environmentally, since it takes the same resources to raise each pig.
Although it's not nearly the same magnitude, I see those people as akin to poachers killing a rhino for a single horn, or fishermen killing a shark just for its fins. It's wasteful. It's only taking the favorite parts, and then just leaving the rest of the animal.
The way I see it, even if you don't kill the animal personally, if you pay for the meat, you're responsible for its death. The rancher wouldn't have killed it if he hadn't have known that you were going to buy it. So if you're going to take an animal's life to eat it, you better use the whole animal.
Related Link: Terrapin Tables thread
