Meat Kills
Description
Meat Kills Vegans and Animal Rights Activists
Meat kills — just as butchers slaughter pigs, and animal rights activists slaughter butchers, and vice versa. At first they only wanted to intimidate each other, but at some point they crossed the point of no return, and the mission to save the pigs turned into a bloodbath.
Did you know that plenty of animals that are essentially herbivores can turn cannibal when the chance arises — hippos, for example, and, apparently, even elephants? And in this film we’re told that pigs, too, go mad from the smell of blood and devour their own kind.
“Meat kills,” any newly minted vegetarian will tell you. But not me — I’m a former vegetarian. Science has shown that moderate meat consumption does no harm to your health and has the same effect as if you were a strict vegan or vegetarian. That is, if you set aside the ethical side of the question.
After eight years of vegetarianism — at times even veganism — and rejecting meat in any form, I reconsidered my attitude toward eating meat.
I became more tolerant of those who eat meat, and then my own disgust faded away.
I should explain that I originally became a vegetarian for environmental reasons and out of concern for my health. I love animals, but that wasn’t the original motive. At some point, though, I began to regard meat as carrion, as a corpse — which, in essence, it is. But after seven years, the disgust started to fade.
If you live outside a big city, it’s very hard to maintain a vegetarian lifestyle, let alone veganism.
At the moment I became a vegetarian, I was a fervent eco-activist — though I still am one — but times have changed dramatically. Back then it seemed to me that the world was on the verge of global change for the better. But no, humanity once again turned the wrong way.
It’s funny that of all my friends I was the last, or second to last, to give up vegetarianism. But in truth I’d like to return to it — only more consciously. Because vegetarianism, and especially veganism, demands careful attention to what and how much you eat, otherwise you can harm your body. At first I tried to follow the rules and keep my protein up, but then I started blowing it off, and that’s wrong.
These days I sometimes eat meat, but without much enthusiasm. The thought that it’s dead flesh still hasn’t left me. Meat begins to rot the very moment the animal is slaughtered. No matter how quickly it’s frozen and all the proper preservation measures are taken, it’s a natural process that’s invisible from the outside.
Unlike the characters in the film, I am a moderate activist in the sphere of ecology and civic initiatives. I understand that self-sacrifice, just like harming others to prove a point, brings no benefit. I have accepted the fact that nothing will change until society changes, until the conditions it lives in change, until the world as a whole changes. And until then, it’s an endless knocking on a closed door.
We can either torment ourselves daily with the fact that the world is unjust, that there is hunger, poverty and war in it, or we can accept the world as it is and try to create for ourselves a space free of all this horror. Yes, it’s hard, and from time to time the horrors catch up with me: no matter where I am or how much I isolate myself from the horrors of the real world, they find me and won’t let me live in peace.
My mom says I’m too politicized, says I’m obsessed with politics. And yet we live in the same city — a city where I wake up at night to the sound of missile-alert sirens.
To my mind, it’s a perfect example of running from reality: when everything around you is a total shitshow and you pretend nothing is happening.
I don’t believe one can be “obsessed” with politics. On the contrary, we’ve all seen plenty of examples of what happens when people take no interest in it. Sooner or later, politics comes knocking.
Meat Kills? No — people kill people. Just as animals kill their own kind. But they can be understood — it’s their way of survival. Humanity, on the other hand, lives in an age of abundance.
Decent activists, empaths and other caring people are not the freaks an apolitical society tries to portray them as. They are people. Real people. Love and empathy are the mark of humanity — they are what make me a human being, what make us human.
I try to live by the principle, ‘Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible’ (Dalai Lama), but it doesn’t always work out. But I want to believe that I’m trying.
P.S.
At some point I even caught the thought: do I still have the right to call myself a Vegan Vampire? Maybe it’s time to rename the site? haha
By the way, I still drink vegan milk. I adore chocolate vegan milk. The other day I spotted protein-enriched cow’s milk on a store shelf — let me try it, I thought, what does it taste like. I didn’t like it. Important detail: I hadn’t drunk cow’s milk in about ten years. So I’d basically forgotten what it tastes like.
So I remain an ambassador for oat milk, and for chocolate oat milk — my stand-in for cocoa. My breakfast starts with the chocolate one, and buckwheat is perfect with oat milk. A protein shake with chocolate oat milk tastes amazing, too.
