They Are Not Meat

Saw a post this morning that pictured three deer in a field and the news that bow season is about to start. Most of the comments were variations on “Yum!”

I accept it as a fact that some can think about killing animals and feel no qualms, no empathetic cringe, no sadness. I can respect this as their legal right. But I don’t respect the interior life that process this response. I want to say to every hunter, “If hunting doesn’t make you sick, you shouldn’t be hunting.”

Killings animals for food is a choice we have to make sometimes. Controlling wild animal populations apparently requires us to allow hunting, at least until we come up with a better way. But nothing requires us to enjoy hunting, or to allow people who do enjoy it to be the ones doing it. If we can find a way to limit hunting to people who hate doing it, that would be a big step forward.

As a start in that direction, I would like to see a ban on hunting trophies. Making it a crime to mount a deer head, same as we do for poesseing elephant ivory.

I believe a case can be made that how we think of animals raises or lowers how we think of life in general, including human life. And that the higher our respect for life, the more fit we are to do our part in advancing civilization. 

I eat beef. But I never look at a cow and feel hungry, or even think about the cow as meat. I look at a cow and think how much they enjoy being petted, or playing with a ball, or getting out of a barn in the morning. I know there’s a moral contradiction, a compromise with my conscience. And that troubles me, too. I should be working harder to change my diet, to end my eating of animals. I admit that. Meanwhile, I never make a joke about how yummy a cow looks. I probably made that idiot joke when I was younger, but I haven’t for decades and never will again. I want to be less callous,  not more so.

If I had to kill and butcher my own sources of meat, I’d turn vegetarian overnight. At least in these modern conditions. The killing would break my heart each time, and the butchering would be a nightmare. Were I living in older times and meat really was imperative, I’d find a way to do both. But I don’t think enjoyment would ever be a part of it. Hunting would be a solemn and tragic act. I would accompany each kill with a ceremony of respect and apology, and each meal not with a prayer of thanks, but a prayer for forgiveness. In a small way I do that now, not each time I eat animal flesh, though I should, but each time I see a cow, chicken or pig. I look at these creatures and see something very close to a dog, as a dog is very close to a human. The affection I feel when seeing livestock and thinking of them not as livestock is in part my apology to them and all their kind. I think my love of these creatures in their living form is moving me gradually towards a change in what I let myself to forget when I’m looking at the thing we call meat.