7.07.2006
Be Like Me
Guess who said this: "We understand things from our point of view. Animals are noteworthy and miraculous, not just because they share traits with us, but because they are special and impressive in their own right." Nope, it wasn't Mr. or Ms. Fancypants Humanities Theorist who you might expect, but Jonathan Balcombe, a research scientist at Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, DC. Woot! Keep it going B-dog: "The sensory rewards and punishments that accompany strong emotions, in many cases, create the drive for animals to stay alive and reproduce. Countless studies suggest that creatures from birds to bats to baboons feel joy, pain, sadness and other emotions."
I've been waiting for just the right kind of wedge to drive open the vegetarianism topic, and I think this is it. This Discovery.com article discusses animal intelligence. It does not subscribe to the ususal barrage of anthropomorphizing, bleeding heart nonsense, which is largely why I stay out of vegetarianism discussions. Instead, it details studies showing that "Chickens practice deception, pigeons can categorize images in photographs as quickly as we can, a gorilla plays a joke on a human teacher, and a tiny fish leaps from one tide pool to another using a mental map formed during high tide." It makes the case that, because our cognitive talents are so centralized we often fail to recognize that, taken as individual characteristics, many other animals share the same cognitive capacities and even outstrip us.
Now I'm not trying to make an eat crow (or dead retarded baby) argument. I think that one of the problems with many cases made for vegetarianism is that it gets posited as a competitive strategy, when it is anything but. This approach doesn't work for so many reasons, not the least of which is that it assumes a predatory form. In doing so, it just begs others for the kind of unquestioning one-upmanship meatbath that usually results in two carnivores talking about clubbing seals vs. bowhunting, and one utterly bored and unpersuaded vegetarian. In conjunction with my experience of such meatbaths, what these fairly intuitive studies indicate to me is only that people who eat meat to some extent enjoy the fact that they are asserting their dominance over similarly intelligent creatures. What it comes down to is an ethical decision: given that animals are intelligent, how do I chose to react to that fact?
"Gawd! I'm trying to raise awareness, you know? Make people think for a change?" -- hideously annoying character from subUrbia, Suze
"want to my cat" = Freudian slip
The "monster" thing is clearly a copout designed to spark a sense of horror in my fragile vegetarian sensibilities. Once again...
ryan = bored and unpersuaded
What's interesting to me is the idea that "The smarter the animal, the better it tastes." I think that what you're up to with this "monstrous" meatbath thing is just stalking more prey -- this time, prey of the academic variety. The question is, now that I've spotted your ruse, who's the smarter animal?
I have a very hard time eating anything cephalopod. This started after I read some articles suggesting that, in terms of reasoning ability, some species of squid are about as smart of cats. I looked down on that chunk of tentacle served in that Korean restaurant that night and felt sad: "My brother."
This, mind, is with a food I began to eat at a very late date. I still eat more conventional meats, for now at least.
That's interesting about your aversion to cephalopods, Randy, though I think you might drive Jason to eating them on those very grounds. I once watched a show where they were filming squids mating, and they were flashing these insane colors while keeping the other half of their bodies white to ward off others. They are remarkable -- there's no question about that.
I'm not so sure I buy my own argument about what motivates meat eaters anymore. I think that meat eaters eat meat mostly because it's yummy, and vegetarians usually try to dissuade them on intellectual grounds. It's apples and oranges (or cows and carrots as the case may be.) I just don't know if trying to intellectually evoke a gag response will ever work. It reminds me of trying to will my lazy ass out of bed when I don't really have to get up.
With that in mind, I've decided to start genetically engineering animals that taste like dog poo, and then releasing them into existing populations. I figure that if I can sneak just one dog-poo bull into the cattle populous, the rest will take care of itself. They tried the mad cow thing a few years ago, but so far that's been a bust. Wait a sec, they tried the dog-poo thing at McDonald's already...dammit.
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