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“Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.”
Fran Lebowitz
There are many reasons why vegetarianism is wrong including the proven fact that it is impossible to get everything your body needs for health from vegetables alone. Still, the most important reason of all as Ms. Lebowitz says is that without meat, it is impossible to have a satisfying meal.
Humans are omnivores.
Let’s face it, human beings are omnivores. It is one of the big reasons that we dominate the animal kingdom. We would and could eat anything that we could find. It is why you find humans all over the world in every climate and habitat. Our ancestors ate anything they could get; a little meat here, a little fruit there and vegetables to fill in the holes. Pre-civilization, men were hunters and we have the cave paintings to prove it. As civilization progressed, men became farmers, keeping herds of animals for meat and milk while they grew crops both to feed their animals and to bolster their diets.
What are vegetarians afraid of?
So why is it that today we have so many people who insist on avoiding meat? What are they thinking to put thousands of years of history and success with meat eating on hold and to cause them to risk their health with such foolishness? You have to give a pass to folks who for religious reasons won’t eat meat because they fear they might eat their reincarnated Aunt Josephine. Coots are not going to criticize serious religion here (although we might be caught smirking from time to time). What can possibly cause normal people to shun meat? I am no shrink but my opinion is that these folks have got themselves totally detached from reality.
Nobody farms anymore.
Almost nobody today grows up in a rural, agricultural environment unlike the golden days of my youth. The only animals people know today are their dogs and cats. They would certainly never think of eating their pets and companions and therefore make an unrealistic comparison between farm animals and pets. This is very different from the more realistic view of animals back when we were an agrarian society. Even forty years ago, people were closer to farming. If you didn’t grow up on a farm, you knew somebody who did or you had grandparents who farmed. Farmers have a more healthy understanding about animals and what they are for – food! This was how the world worked. It was the pattern of life. Men raise animals and then eat them. Period, end of story.
All they know is cute little animals.
Today because nobody ever sees a farm animal or experiences the process of making food, they get neurotic about cute little creatures. I remember raising chickens as a kid, first in our suburban house and then on our farm. One of my earliest memories is watching my father kill a chicken for dinner by chopping off its head. My brothers and I enjoyed watching the headless chicken flop all around the yard. We knew first hand the reality of a chicken with its head cut off. We knew that the chicken was not tortured. Its demise was quick and merciful. And we knew that this is what chickens are for – eating.
People today live in a fantasy where nothing is messy.
People today know nothing about the realities of feeding yourself from your own labors and they have access to anything that takes their fancy just by visiting the local supermarket without any pain or effort. Because they love their pets, they confuse pets with animals whose only reason for existing is to feed humans. This makes them suckers for organizations like PETA with its confused morality that equates farm animals to humans. If you do anything to a farm animal that you wouldn’t do to a human then you are bad. Sloppy logic leads to wrong conclusions and unhealthy eating driven by confused morality. The emotional pablum that eating animals is cruel drives them to become vegetarians to sooth their confused consciences.
Survival of the fittest – as always.
In the end, I suspect that Darwin will have the last laugh. In the long run, those foolish individuals that damage their health with deluded morality and the pablum of vegetarianism will fail to procreate and raise healthy offspring leaving the world to meat eaters.
