Lately I watched a film. Not a long one, it lasted only 12 minutes. But it was one of the kind that takes you back to childhood, one that makes you stop for a while and think why the decisions you’ve taken are the way they are.
As the saying has it, we are what we eat. And even if our venerable Mother Nature had put human beings at the end of almost every food chain, some of us sooner or later started contemplating this facet. I did too. What would have made a carefree nine-year old toddler transfer to a ‘rabbit-food’ diet? I can’t recall the detailed course of this turnabout, I must have watched one of the National Geographic documentary films concerning the lot of a meat-loaf from McDonald’s burger. But eventually, what at first might seem to be the first youthful act of rebellion, turned out to be the first life-lasting decision.
Those memories got back after watching the film ‘Meet Your Meat’. I have been recalled why I was actually mentally set to change my eating habits which -to some extent- established my priorities.
You can live a perfectly happy oblivious life dining in steak houses, treating yourself to my country’s cuisine’s hallmark: fatty, meaty fares; helping yourself with marshmallows and jelly beans for a dessert. At least for as long as it is not brutally brought home to you by - for instance - a film like ‘Meet Your Meat’. The images of what happened to human carnivores’ favorite snacks when they were still alive, are definitely formidable enough to give it an X-rating. Ever since, horror movies have never given me more shivers than I get from seeing sausages on someone’s plate. One may say ‘You can’t change the world by refusing ham on your bread slice!’. But by putting someone’s dead body in the tank I feel personally responsible for the suffering of this animal. I couldn’t put up with this kind of remorse. And after my beloved Johnny Durham, digesting animals into your own body ‘is not a very sexy thing to do’.
I share the view that if people had to hunt and slaughter their meat themselves, there would be a lot more vegetarians in the world, for people would open their eyes to the fact that their nice meat department in supermarkets must be have been supplied from somewhere. And regardless of whether one loves animals or not, everybody must acknowledge that they do have a sense of feeling. The situation where we, human beings, theoretically higher on the evolution ladder, have no qualms about keeping these animals in inhuman conditions in slaughter houses, some of them born and spending their whole life there, just to provide us with a nice dinner, makes me feel a little uncomfortable about my human origins.
But no matter how deep the ideologism is and how strong the faith keeps you doing things you believe in, it still hurts. It hurts because I don’t meet with much tolerance nor understanding, while I feel that what I do is right. And I don’t know if my vegetarianism should be only my personal moral comfort or a mission where I am the crusader-pedlar pestering people to take stands against cruelty to animals.
I am not trying to be aggresive. I would like to convince you to go vegetarian but I don't have any right to. However I do issue you to make a stand of any kind.
You can go to People for Ethical Treatment of Animals and learn more about how you can help.
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