Home
Intro
Ourlinks
Contents
Galleries
Yeslands
Virtual Jon
Virtual Adam
Links

Eilands
Makes other
sites look
useful

Moments
to Keep

This is not aimed at all of you very nice people out there who choose not to eat meat and are happy to let the rest of us make our own choices. I have lots of very good friends and relatives who don't eat meat and they're wonderful people and don't deserve to be challenged. Such people shouldn't be reading this. This article is aimed at all those people who use public platforms from time to time to try to tell me that I shouldn't eat meat, and especially those who try to claim there is some moral or environmental advantage in not eating meat. To name one, Tony Banks MP, who was going on about the moral superiority of vegetarians recently on radio, but he gave no explanation of why avoiding meat is a better moral choice. I don't think it is.

I was listening to a feature on Radio 4 this morning about squirrels. The point being made was that the good old red squirrel, native to the UK, has been squeezed out by the grey squirrel which has been brought by humans from overseas. This is held to be a Bad Thing, and I agree. Human intervention has done a lot to wipe out a native species.

Now I'm no biologist, zoologist or whatever, but I have a feeling that no grey squirrel ever fought it out in combat with a red one. I suspect that the grey squirrel is more effective in finding food, breeding, defending it's living space and what not. So although grey squirrels don't kill red ones, and certainly they don't eat them, they have simply created a situation where it is impossible for the red species to survive. Red squirrels aren't being killed, but fewer red squirrels are being born because they can't compete in the environment. If fewer are being born, then as the older ones die away the numbers drop. So no individual red squirrel suffers very much, but fewer are born, so the species is killed off as surely as if we took to them with guns.

I think vegetable growing is more akin to the grey squirrel menace than is rearing animals to feed humans. Picture two fields, adjacent in some idyllic setting. One is neatly ploughed and has cabbages growing nicely, while next door a number of sheep are chewing the grass and trying not to think of mint sauce. From time to time a farmer comes along, takes a few sheep away and kills them, unpleasantly, so that they can find their ways onto dinner plates. The same farmer comes next door and takes up some cabbages. They don't suffer at all on their way to the kitchens of the world. Now if you stop thinking right there then vegetarianism looks like a kinder option.

But lets not stop thinking there. Lets look at the whole picture. The sheep share their field with all sorts of other animals; rabbits, mice, spiders, insects. It's a thriving ecological setting. All those animals and insects carry on. They breed, eat and generally thrive alongside the sheep. The rabbits though look wistfully across to the cabbage field and comment "Uncle Bobkins used to live there. It was a nice place until they ploughed it up. Now none of us can live there.". The insects, not cuddly creatures like the sheep, but nonetheless deserving of their space in the world, look across at all that food, but those that venture across get a slow and painful death inflicted by some horrendous (but organic, because our farmer is kind to the environment) concoction which gets sprayed on from time to time. Those who opt to stay in the sheep field don't suffer, but they know they are part of species threatened by the growing number of fields like that one across the way. "Where are our children going to live?" they trouble themselves. Vegetable fields are bad news for many species.

Pesticides aside, humans probably don't kill many animals to grow vegetables. Not directly. Just like nobody kills the red squirrels. Killing isn't the issue. It's deprivation of the habitat of the species that does the ecological damage.

So even if you don't like the idea of ingesting animal tissue, I think you owe it to the environment to, from time to time, forego the cabbages and think if the wider ecological picture as you take in a little meat.

Meat is murder. Yes. So is vegetarianism.

"Ah but", you say, "aside from the moral position, vegetarians are healthier than meat eaters". This is true, but there is nothing intrinsically more healthy about the vegetarian option. Most vegetarians have made a choice about diet, and as such will be more diet conscious, so they will opt for a healthy vegetarian diet. Vegetarians could go for a total chocolate option and die early. Meat eaters can opt for a healthy meat eating option. Besides, vegetarians are over represented in the middle classes, and so benefit from the other advantages of the middle class lifestyle. So it is no surprise that health and vegetarianism correlate, it is just a mistake to deduce much from the correlation.

There is much said about what is "natural". Human beings, some say, are evolved to eat meat, or not, depending who you read. But this is spurious. We can make choices; it is without doubt that we could survive as a species without meat. We could choose to do so, as a moral position if it were morally better. We can make choices because we have the intellect, and a moral outlook. But it's not only the intellect that allows us to make choices. We also have the power to make choices. We are the powerful species on the planet. We might like to make noises about "sharing" the earth, but the bottom line is we are in competition with other animals for food, and we win that competition hands down. We can choose to let more species survive; the meat eating option, or to make more sterile and chemically laden land for crop production; the vegetarian option. Either way animals die, species are threatened, and the only alternative is to not produce food for ourselves, of any kind. Thin ourselves out a bit. Animal lovers with a conscience form a queue over there by the guillotine, but, whatever you do, please stop telling the rest of us that vegetarianism offers some ecological, moral or health advantage. It doesn't.

Andy Sutton

Agree? Disagree?