Vegetarians are weird

I’m all for limiting the amount of suffering on our planet. I’d even say I’m probably one of the top 100 people who stand against torture. But despite professing these beliefs I am not a vegetarian, and have not considered being one since late 2007, when I briefly flirted with pacifism.

This isn’t because I don’t care about fluffy animals leading short, meaningless lives in slaughterhouses or anything so mundane as ‘liking the taste of meat’. If those are your only reasons for not being a veggie, then shame on you, you heartless cad.

My choice to eat meat is made not because I think less than veggies, but because I think more about them – or at the very least more broadly. You see, I am part of that slim portion of the population that believes plants can feel pain, or at the very least its emotional equivalent.

All life has intention, the most base of which is to continue living. Potatoes have neurotoxins to poison animals that try to eat them. Pineapples have enough barbs to ensure their place as the most deadly m*****f*****s in all creation. Thorns, tree bark, bitter sap – these are all used to defend a plant from death, which suggests the plant’s will is to survive. If cruelty entails going against another entity’s will for pleasure (satisfaction, survival, gluttony… any old excuse), then to a point, one must admit that killing plants is as cruel as killing animals.

Some veggies would argue that the prime difference between killing one and killing the other is that animals suffer before they die. They don’t consider that plants can feel pain too. For example, when pruned a plant not only produces sap to clot the wound, but will also vary in its growth cycle to prevent being damaged again. Some plants release allelochemicals only after being grazed upon; chemicals which draw carnivores towards the plant to kill any herbivore nearby.

What does one call active distress to stimuli but pain?

I don’t blame vegetarians. Ignorance is a wonderful thing that can at least give Earth the illusion of being a happy albeit boring place. I would love to believe I could eat something without causing pain to another living entity, but I cannot. Consider the most basic ramification feeding has on the food web:

 Joe-bob the Vegetarian decides to be nice to the animals and eats fruit instead of a cow.

Smiggle the earthworm has no new soil to till (no fruit has fallen to the ground), and after enduring the agony of starvation for several days, it dies.

Angusine the bluebird is perplexed by the recent earthworm shortage. After struggling to feed her family for a week or so, watching her children die one by one, Angustine commits suicide by flying into a window.

Joe-bob and Jane the Bald are blissfully unaware that their vegetarianism is killing the world. On the bright side, all the animal corpses everywhere make wonderful fertiliser for more trees, which in turn can boost the maximum supportable number of human beings on the planet.

As illustrated, eating an increased amount of fruit from the bottom of the food chain throws off the balance of nature, ending biodiversity in favour of bland stability. IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT, VEGGIES?

Sane people – or at the very least ‘I’, have realised that all life is dependent on resources. As we are living on a globe with limited resources surrounded by a gaping chasm of empty space, we need to take those resources before they are taken by others in order to survive. Cruel and evil as it may be, it is necessary, and one of the prime reasons I choose not to worship any ‘Creator’. I do not revel in the thought of taking another life, but I understand that it is the only way to continue mine, and console myself in the fact that I too will die, and my corpse will be eaten by thousands of bacteria, worms and plants that in turn will be eaten by larger life forms – cows and pigs and chickens whose ancestors died to feed me long ago. If there is any fairness or justice in the world, it is that we all die, eventually.