One of my all time favorite quotes is “Travel is fatal to bigotry and narrow mindedness.” by Mark Twain. Recently I’ve been reading articles and having discussions with co-workers about how people are indoctrinated from birth into accepting and eating animals all over the world. The difference being in what they eat.
It has been a giant paradigm shift for me over the past twelve months. I regularly run by the local BBQ place, and it smells delicious. Yet I’ve not eaten anything like that for over a year now, and I’ve grown to not even crave it all that much anymore.
We talk of having compassion for dogs and cats, and we are eating pigs, and then wearing cows skin. But I believe that is an American reality. The dogs and cats are overwhelming our shelters her, they need to be adopted. But if you go to Thailand you don’t see all that many stray dogs and cats roaming around. Why? Because they eat them. In fact I heard a story about a local who had a giant mosquito land on her arm. She quickly killed it, and then popped it in her mouth and ate it.
So some places in the world the cows are sacred, in others nothing is, or maybe just the monkeys or elephants. I think as a society we need to become more comfortable with our core belief system. Why we draw a line between dogs and cows is absurd. One we will spend thousands of dollars on medical care for, and the other we don’t care how it was treated when it was alive, and are hoping it is on sale when it makes it to the butchers counter.
Having not eaten any animals for quite some time now, I do feel less discord between those two worlds. I still take my dogs to the vet and spend money on them, and I feel much better about the fact that I have not personally caused a cow to groan in agony as it is dying for quite some time.
We need to open our eyes to all the ways different cultures consume meat, and make it a global phenomena and not just an American one. Pluck the best vegetarian dishes from them all and change the world.
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