Running over "The Chicken Crossing the Road"

Imagine you're driving on your normal route to work and you see a certain chicken crossing the road (why it's crossing I'll leave up to you). It's a one way street with two lanes and you happen to be in the right one, while the chicken is still in the left. It's not in your way, and there's no need to run it over, so you let it cross, letting it go unscathed.

Now again imagine you're driving to work, but this time the chicken is already in the right lane while you're driving in the right lane as well. Any cars that would be behind you are halted at a stoplight, so you are more than free to change lanes and avoid her- but you don't. You decide it would be too inconvenient for you to change lanes, even though it really wouldn't take any effort, even at the expense of the chicken. You get to work safely and don't think about the chicken ever again.

Was it necessary to kill the chicken in the second case?

This is akin to the issue of eating animals for food, because many people cite that it would be too inconvenient to stop eating meat, or simply just don't want to, even though they can meet all of their nutritional requirements with a diet that doesn't require them to kill conscious creatures. I draw the analogy because I think it really illustrates the point that in cases where it is not required to kill an animal but do anyway, it is regarded as cruel, perhaps even monstrous, but for some reason when it comes to food, there is an exemption made. We should all think about what it means to kill another being that is conscious, and whether that is the type of thing we want to continue doing, even when (at least in developed nations) there really isn't any necessity behind it. Essentially what we're doing as a society is putting animals on the road specifically to run over, even though under normal circumstances the route to work doesn't have any animals on it, and we should ask ourselves if we can live with that if we continue to do so.

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Offended and I Didn't Even Bring It Up

Last weekend I went over to my girlfriend's parents' house to celebrate her dad's birthday with a barbecue, and being vegetarians we had to bring over our own meatless patties, which wasn't a problem whatsoever. After getting settled in, some of my girlfriend's aunts and uncles started asking questions, some that had us give legitimate responses (Are you guys vegans?) and some that were just to give us shit (Oh you guys are just eating grass, now?).

There was one thing, however, that I didn't really expect in them asking questions, considering we were both just answering the questions they asked us, without attitude or even a hint of the stereotypical "How could you eat meat?" attitude. One of her uncles, who is a nice guy, who I already knew was a hunter, but even if you had never met him you could probably tell (big beard, camouflage, etc.), said "So you'll kill a potato but you won't kill an animal." There was a little chuckle in his voice but you could tell the reason he brought it up was because just the presence of vegetarians, even if we weren't criticizing him, implicitly makes him think that someone believes something he does (hunting) and gets a lot of meaning from, is morally wrong, and that makes him feel bad. When he said that I could tell he was trying to "get" me, as if I hadn't thought about it very hard, so I just said "Yep, potatoes aren't conscious," with a chuckle and then walked away. Later on when we were wrangling one of their dogs that ran down the block he walked passed me and said that he would have just shot the dang thing. I'm sure he was being honest and would have told that to anyone, but he had to tell it to me. Awesome.

I'm sure you can imagine the weird tension that this provided, even if this was only one person in a family, but it is almost a guarantee to happen in families where people live in more rural areas and are more old-fashioned/religious, which reinforces and adds another problem to the issue in my last post, just replace vegetarianism with atheism.

Hope you're having as nice of weather wherever you are as I am in North Dakota (peculiar, I know). Talk to you soon!

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I May Have Found an Argument for Eating Meat

As stated in a previous post, I am a vegetarian, primarily for the purpose of reducing unnecessary suffering in the world. I don't think we can really justify killing a being that has an interest in remaining alive, especially when its existence poses no threat to our own survival (we don't need meat to nourish ourselves). I think at the very least we definitely can't justify the modern way we treat animals harvested for their meat, but that's not really the point I want to bring up today.

As we have learned through evolutionary biology and medical science, the appendix is far-removed from its original function. So far removed it's to the point where its pretty much useless, and a threat to our health. Due to this threat, about 1 in 100,000 people are now being born without appendixes, and we know that all of this change in the form and function of the organ is due to the change in our diet from what it used to be. So as the functionality of the appendix no longer affected our survival rate, it was no longer necessary for people to be born with appendixes that functioned correctly; as long as they didn't kill you, they could sit in your torso and do nothing and it wouldn't matter, though, obviously, some of them do kill people.

Why do I bring all of this up? Let's say we have pretty much a thorough dietary revolution, and nearly everyone on the planet stops eating meat (except in extremely rare circumstances). At this point, we have to ask, do we run the risk of developing more vestigial baggage like what's become of the appendix? I'm not a dietary expert and I don't have an advanced knowledge of how the digestive system works, but I can't help but wonder if this could potentially be the case.

I don't think this could be used to support the amount of meat currently eaten world wide (particularly in America), but I think if it is indeed true that we seriously risk acquiring harmful evolutionary baggage we would then have a reason to permit some amount of meat in the diet of the general population, but still significantly less than what we do now.

I'm interested in any thoughts or information on the issue so any comments are more than encouraged.

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Just Because It's Alive?

There is an older fellow (between age 50 and 60) in my 18th Century Philosophy class with whom there doesn't seem to be anything I can agree with him on. I have had arguments in the past with him about the Existence of God a few times before. Not only that, but he is very conservative and seems to not even understand the dribble that comes out of people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck's respective mouths, because he takes what they say and tries to make it more moderate and less crazy.

To add to the list of things we have polarized views on, yesterday he said something like, "I don't understand why those hardcore vegetarians who hate people who eat meat can tear open a piece of lettuce and see water come out of it and not be upset, because it's alive and the water that comes out is practically its blood."

This is a really inane and idiotic thing to say, and I gave him a simplified explanation of why I (as a transitioning vegetarian) can do just that. Put bluntly, animals suffer and lettuce does not. I may not be able to know it as absolutely as I know my own existence, but it's about as certain as I can be about anything. Animals can display behavior and emotions, and from that we can attain a satisfactory understanding of the types of things that cause suffering and happiness in them. I think this should be practically obvious, but maybe I'm wrong. On the other hand, lettuce leaves and other vegetation, while they do perform biological functions, they don't display any kind of behavior whatsoever, and behavior is the primary way we can tell how an organism is feeling emotionally (e.g. body language). Some plants have mild internal responses to stimuli, but they aren't any more significant than how water reacts when you throw a rock in to it, and I think you would be hard-pressed to find someone who thinks water can suffer (except maybe homeopaths).

In a nutshell, I have no reason to believe that lettuce or, really, any other plant can suffer. It's irrelevant to me whether or not something is technically "alive" in whether or not I think it is immoral to kill it. My skin cells are alive, but I don't think that I'm inflicting suffering upon another mind when I scratch my arm because there is no evidence to support that, but there is a vast amount of evidence to support the fact that animals can suffer (just ask anyone who has a dog or a cat). To think that vegetarians/vegans don't eat animals simply because they're alive, in the vast majority of case, is, frankly, hugely mistaken.

Of course, he said after that he doesn't go out of his way to avoid suffering, especially to animals that caused him to suffer, which I doubt there are more than a few, if any, which I think is also without reason. It doesn't surprise me that his actions are without cause because he is an old, conservative fart. The discussion ended after that. I like discussing things with people I disagree with but that man sure is frustrating.

Have a pleasant day.

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