A slow, silent war against animals: why I can no longer eat meat
I feel I need to come clean: I still eat fish.
This tears me apart. In a way, eating fish is worse than eating meat. At least a cow, pig or sheep can feed more than one person.
As it is, I've not eaten meat for almost a year now (I remember my last – a German sausage from one of the stalls at Bristol's Christmas market in 2012). It wasn't that I decided not to eat meat any more. It wasn't a particularly conscious decision.
Something psychological appears to have shifted and with it my body seems to have rejected meat. I'm not striking a pose, trying to be right-on or to get attention. It's not even an act of will. I just can't eat it.
I know why I stopped – for the same reason I stopped being afraid of spiders: my cat re-educated me about animals.
Anyone who has a pet will tell you how lovable and loving they are – and curious, communicative, surprising. But it wasn't until I got one of my own that I experienced what I kind of already knew but wasn't really bothered about: animals have feelings too. They are fully-sentient beings with rich inner lives, more intelligent, sensitive and perceptive than many people – myself once included – realise.
One reason why many don't realise this may be because many of us bought in to a con sold to us by a source I feel should have known better. When the Bible declared that man should 'have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth' (Genesis 1:26, King James Version) it became responsible for one of the greatest sadnesses of humanity.
This sadness is the way in which animals always have been, and continue to be, treated by many humans. Because of what the Bible says, animals exist to be subservient to us and to do our bidding. Not only do we eat them, but we take them for granted, pen them up, keep them in cages, drag them around, neglect, abuse and generally treat them – well, like animals: dumb, stupid creatures for entertainment and sport, as commodities, accessories, status symbols, exotica – and yes, even erotica, for some.
Think I'm exaggerating? Look around you. The abuse of animals is all around, in daily life and on TV, and in the name of business and progress all over the world. Not only do we treat animal habitats like dustbins with our litter and dump waste in the sea, we rip out forests and fields for transport, hunt and poach animals for body parts, cull them without evidence that it is necessary, torture them in laboratories, and pluck them from their natural environments – rainforests, jungles, deserts – and traffick them on the black market, a process in which they suffer the most appalling trauma. 'After drugs and weapons, animal trafficking is the third most profitable illegal trade, making billions of dollars a year' reveals this Channel 4 News report.
Then there's the torture of animals as reported by the RSPCA. 'Used on animals, faced by us,' says one RSPCA newspaper campaign, which shows images of hammers, crossbows, knives and other weapons used to inflict pain on defenceless animals by their cruel owners. At least, however, people are made aware of the existence of animal cruelty, and the message is sent out that this is wrong.
What also needs confronting is the casual, everyday, socially-acceptable forms of animal abuse. Most people aren't alive to it and so it forms part of the white noise of everyday life. At certain times of the year, for example, the pavement just outside our house turns into a cemetery, littered with the squashed corpses of caterpillars trod on by people who probably barely notice what they've done. But even if they did, no matter, eh? They're just stupid caterpillars. Never mind that butterfly numbers have been down for years.
Walking along the beach I see all manner of plastic objects washed ashore. Who knows how many more have been ingested by marine life and birds? On the same beach, and round about town, I see working dogs kept as pets, dragged around by the neck, and posters advertising pig racing (I wanted to take them down – maybe one day I will).
Quite regularly at the bus station of a nearby town I see small children chasing pigeons, running at them, stamping at and shouting at them, and their parents do absolutely nothing to stop them. Pigeons are vermin, right? Wrong. Just because they're not cute doesn't mean they're not intelligent and don't know fear. It's wrong to give children the message that it's OK to frighten animals or birds, whatever their species.
I say this, but I may as well be pissing in the wind. I've written before about how spiders and insects are treated (LINK) because of the way they look and what they are perceived to represent in the collective (un)consciousness. Not that it helps to be cute either, particularly. In the news I see that a circus llama was 'kidnapped' and taken on a pub crawl by drunken French students, who took it on a tram and made it pose for photographs. In an advert on TV a dog is the butt of the joke and made to look ridiculous (LINK). And remember Lady Gaga's meat dress? How edgy and avant garde. It might not have been quite so bad if it were a political statement about the treatment of animals, but no – too much to hope for. Instead, dead animals are the ultimate accessory – the ultimate leather clothing. Shocking for shock's sake. If only her music could be so noticeable.
Why do we do treat animals this way? I think there are a number of reasons. We just can – because we were given permission to by the Bible, which is responsible for peddling one of the biggest misconceptions of all time. We allow ourselves to believe what we're told to believe, because then we don't have to think and take responsibility. We do have power over animals: in the face of us, they are defenceless 'beasts of burden'. The problem is we abuse our power, and by doing so reveal our own animality.
We're brought up to treat animals wrongly from an early age, so in many ways we know no different. The magician pulling a rabbit from a hat is an enduringly iconic childhood image, but an illogical one. Why put a rabbit in a hat, FFS? For the same reason that parents don't stop their children terrorising pigeons (the same parents who no doubt would object to their children being bullied). It's just a stupid animal that has no feelings.
Here's the thing. I don't think animals should be treated like animals. The word 'animal' incorrectly suggests something dumb and stupid, without feelings and perception, and which doesn't know the difference between good and bad. This is a myth. As it says on Wikipedia, "The word 'animal' comes from the Latin word animalis, meaning 'having breath'." I would go further: the word 'animal' comes from the Latin anima, meaning 'spirit' or 'soul'. Animals are conscious beings. Without ego, they are effortlessly present and mindful when often we humans are not. In thrall to our own feelings and ego, we humans are not alive to our own consciousness most of the time, let alone to that of animals.
Animals do know right from wrong, and they communicate with us – it's just we don't listen, or notice. It was my cat Vincenzo who really brought this home to me. My little Buddhist master, he is more present and mindful than I can ever be, and he has more emotional intelligence than some humans I know. If he does something wrong, he knows it, and apologises. This was illustrated recently when we latched on to my hand and wrist while I was plugging my laptop into a socket in the living room wall, drawing blood. He knew I was cross and upset, and after sitting in his cardboard box for a while, he came over to me as I was sat on the sofa and pawed my lap – as if to say, "I'm sorry, Mummy!" before snuggling up for cuddles.
And I wish I'd had a camera the time he accidentally knocked over a glass of water by my side of the bed. I walked into the room and saw him there, looking up at me, eyes wide, again in complete contrition. I didn't get cross with him as it was only water on the carpet and he's normally so careful – as if he knows that jumping up on the kitchen surfaces is not what we want him to do – and these incidents are rare. It's like he wants to be good for us. When he lashes out, he often has a reason, and it serves as an important reminder of his wildcat heritage.
Most of the time it's as if Chenny wants to be like us. Right from the start he's always made such an effort to get to know me, and continues to do so, enough to put any human to shame. Studying and observing me at all hours of the day, he can read me like a book and I'm sure he has enough material for a PhD in me. When I'm in the kitchen preparing food he will jump up onto his accustomed spot on the pedal bin and watch me closely. You could say he's hoping I'll throw a tasty morsel his way, but he watches me getting showered and dressed in the mornings too. At around 5.30 each evening, if I've not left my desk, he will miaow until I stop working – just so we can be together and snuggle on the sofa, where he'll gaze up at me radiating love. He loves being with us, and is part of the family. Along with my husband, we're the three amigos.
I see Chenny doing his best to relate to me, to know me, to communicate with me, and so I'm always trying to extend the same courtesy to him. He can't use human speech, but he communicates clearly in every other way possible, earnestly, sometimes forcibly, and his facial expressions are often more articulate than if he spoke English. If husband and I argue, Chenny will often sit between us at our feet, looking up, his head tilted, eyes, wide, taking it all in. Those huge golden eyes, slightly confused, seem to say, "Why are you cross, Mummy? I love you!" Shrek's Puss in Boots has got nothing on him.
Like any cat, Chenny is cute. 7 years old now, he's retained a lot of his kitten-ness. He's very easy to love, but this isn't why we're so close. I've done my best not to over-empathise or anthropomorphise. Brought up on farms, where there was no room for sentimentality when it came to the treatment of livestock, I've always been wary of projecting my own feelings on to animals and I've always questioned our interactions with him: did he really do that? Have I read too much into this? He's a cat, not a human, not a baby. Yet, as cardiologist and psychiatrist Barbara Natterson Horowitz writes in her book Zoobiquity: 'My education included stern warnings against the tantalizing pull to anthropomorphise. In those days, noticing pain or sadness on the face of an animal was criticised as projection, fantasy, or sloppy sentimentality. But scientific advancement over the last two decades suggest that we should adopt an updated perspective. Seeing too much of ourselves in other animals may not be the problem we think it is. Underappreciating our own animal natures may be the greater limitation.' (p.12).
A child-free couple, my husband and I don't see ourselves as the cliched parents of a surrogate baby cat. We're in awe of his cat-ness, and honoured that he appears to want to be with us. Yet he has a 'personality', and we try to give him space to express this personality, and to be as attentive to him as he is to us. If that makes us sad, batty cat people then so be it.
And it all gets me wondering: is Chenny representative of animals in general? Are wild animals just as sensitive and communicative as domestic pets? If Chenny's any indication, there's a whole ocean of animal wisdom, kindness and love out there, as this list of animals demonstrating their feelings illustrates. Or this report of the girl who was guarded by lions, who protected her from men who wanted to capture her for a forced marriage. Imagine all those millions of animal spirits and souls, complex, misunderstood, ignored, with much to show us, and much that we can learn from.
This all goes some way to explaining why I can't eat meat any more. When I think about what animals have to go through to get to my plate it breaks my heart: an animal like Chenny has had to die, sometimes in ways too terrible to know, just so I can eat. This when food is in such abundance I don't even have to, and on top of all the other unspeakable cruelties inflicted on animals by humans.
We too are animal, and animals have more in common with us than we realise. Like us, animals, fish and birds are evolving (and from my experience it seems to me that cats and humans are evolving towards each other). As Zoobiquity explains, animals suffer many of the same diseases and neurological conditions as we do: cancers, heart disease, diabetes, clinical depression, OCD, substance addiction, anxiety disorders, STDs, arthritis – even gout...
Is it too much of a stretch to say that they experience similar emotions and characteristics, too? I perceive dignity in Chenny. His mind is always clear and focussed, and I've learnt that he has values. He knows when I'm not well – when my period makes me horizontal, for example – and when he jumps on the bed, I know I'm in good paws. When he jumps on my lap, it's always magical. He's a little healer, his presence is soothing. He knows about goodness and evil: if he's right with something, so am I.
As Darwin himself wrote: "Animals – whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. Animals with affections, fear, pain, sorrow for the dead... If we choose to let conjecture run wild then animals are our fellow brethren in pain, disease death and suffering and famine; our slaves in the most laborious work, our companion in our amusements. They may partake from our origin in one common ancestor and we may all be netted together."
I know there's a contradiction in me not eating meat while still eating fish, and I'm working on that. In the meantime, I think it would benefit humanity to rethink our relationship with animals. I wish everyone could relate to all animals better, and cherish them like friends, so that we can learn more about them, and ourselves. It does me good to acknowledge what I have in common with Chenny and all animals. I'm not ashamed to be an animal too.
This tears me apart. In a way, eating fish is worse than eating meat. At least a cow, pig or sheep can feed more than one person.
As it is, I've not eaten meat for almost a year now (I remember my last – a German sausage from one of the stalls at Bristol's Christmas market in 2012). It wasn't that I decided not to eat meat any more. It wasn't a particularly conscious decision.
Something psychological appears to have shifted and with it my body seems to have rejected meat. I'm not striking a pose, trying to be right-on or to get attention. It's not even an act of will. I just can't eat it.
I know why I stopped – for the same reason I stopped being afraid of spiders: my cat re-educated me about animals.
Anyone who has a pet will tell you how lovable and loving they are – and curious, communicative, surprising. But it wasn't until I got one of my own that I experienced what I kind of already knew but wasn't really bothered about: animals have feelings too. They are fully-sentient beings with rich inner lives, more intelligent, sensitive and perceptive than many people – myself once included – realise.
One reason why many don't realise this may be because many of us bought in to a con sold to us by a source I feel should have known better. When the Bible declared that man should 'have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth' (Genesis 1:26, King James Version) it became responsible for one of the greatest sadnesses of humanity.
This sadness is the way in which animals always have been, and continue to be, treated by many humans. Because of what the Bible says, animals exist to be subservient to us and to do our bidding. Not only do we eat them, but we take them for granted, pen them up, keep them in cages, drag them around, neglect, abuse and generally treat them – well, like animals: dumb, stupid creatures for entertainment and sport, as commodities, accessories, status symbols, exotica – and yes, even erotica, for some.
Think I'm exaggerating? Look around you. The abuse of animals is all around, in daily life and on TV, and in the name of business and progress all over the world. Not only do we treat animal habitats like dustbins with our litter and dump waste in the sea, we rip out forests and fields for transport, hunt and poach animals for body parts, cull them without evidence that it is necessary, torture them in laboratories, and pluck them from their natural environments – rainforests, jungles, deserts – and traffick them on the black market, a process in which they suffer the most appalling trauma. 'After drugs and weapons, animal trafficking is the third most profitable illegal trade, making billions of dollars a year' reveals this Channel 4 News report.
Then there's the torture of animals as reported by the RSPCA. 'Used on animals, faced by us,' says one RSPCA newspaper campaign, which shows images of hammers, crossbows, knives and other weapons used to inflict pain on defenceless animals by their cruel owners. At least, however, people are made aware of the existence of animal cruelty, and the message is sent out that this is wrong.
What also needs confronting is the casual, everyday, socially-acceptable forms of animal abuse. Most people aren't alive to it and so it forms part of the white noise of everyday life. At certain times of the year, for example, the pavement just outside our house turns into a cemetery, littered with the squashed corpses of caterpillars trod on by people who probably barely notice what they've done. But even if they did, no matter, eh? They're just stupid caterpillars. Never mind that butterfly numbers have been down for years.
Walking along the beach I see all manner of plastic objects washed ashore. Who knows how many more have been ingested by marine life and birds? On the same beach, and round about town, I see working dogs kept as pets, dragged around by the neck, and posters advertising pig racing (I wanted to take them down – maybe one day I will).
Quite regularly at the bus station of a nearby town I see small children chasing pigeons, running at them, stamping at and shouting at them, and their parents do absolutely nothing to stop them. Pigeons are vermin, right? Wrong. Just because they're not cute doesn't mean they're not intelligent and don't know fear. It's wrong to give children the message that it's OK to frighten animals or birds, whatever their species.
I say this, but I may as well be pissing in the wind. I've written before about how spiders and insects are treated (LINK) because of the way they look and what they are perceived to represent in the collective (un)consciousness. Not that it helps to be cute either, particularly. In the news I see that a circus llama was 'kidnapped' and taken on a pub crawl by drunken French students, who took it on a tram and made it pose for photographs. In an advert on TV a dog is the butt of the joke and made to look ridiculous (LINK). And remember Lady Gaga's meat dress? How edgy and avant garde. It might not have been quite so bad if it were a political statement about the treatment of animals, but no – too much to hope for. Instead, dead animals are the ultimate accessory – the ultimate leather clothing. Shocking for shock's sake. If only her music could be so noticeable.
Why do we do treat animals this way? I think there are a number of reasons. We just can – because we were given permission to by the Bible, which is responsible for peddling one of the biggest misconceptions of all time. We allow ourselves to believe what we're told to believe, because then we don't have to think and take responsibility. We do have power over animals: in the face of us, they are defenceless 'beasts of burden'. The problem is we abuse our power, and by doing so reveal our own animality.
We're brought up to treat animals wrongly from an early age, so in many ways we know no different. The magician pulling a rabbit from a hat is an enduringly iconic childhood image, but an illogical one. Why put a rabbit in a hat, FFS? For the same reason that parents don't stop their children terrorising pigeons (the same parents who no doubt would object to their children being bullied). It's just a stupid animal that has no feelings.
Here's the thing. I don't think animals should be treated like animals. The word 'animal' incorrectly suggests something dumb and stupid, without feelings and perception, and which doesn't know the difference between good and bad. This is a myth. As it says on Wikipedia, "The word 'animal' comes from the Latin word animalis, meaning 'having breath'." I would go further: the word 'animal' comes from the Latin anima, meaning 'spirit' or 'soul'. Animals are conscious beings. Without ego, they are effortlessly present and mindful when often we humans are not. In thrall to our own feelings and ego, we humans are not alive to our own consciousness most of the time, let alone to that of animals.
Animals do know right from wrong, and they communicate with us – it's just we don't listen, or notice. It was my cat Vincenzo who really brought this home to me. My little Buddhist master, he is more present and mindful than I can ever be, and he has more emotional intelligence than some humans I know. If he does something wrong, he knows it, and apologises. This was illustrated recently when we latched on to my hand and wrist while I was plugging my laptop into a socket in the living room wall, drawing blood. He knew I was cross and upset, and after sitting in his cardboard box for a while, he came over to me as I was sat on the sofa and pawed my lap – as if to say, "I'm sorry, Mummy!" before snuggling up for cuddles.
And I wish I'd had a camera the time he accidentally knocked over a glass of water by my side of the bed. I walked into the room and saw him there, looking up at me, eyes wide, again in complete contrition. I didn't get cross with him as it was only water on the carpet and he's normally so careful – as if he knows that jumping up on the kitchen surfaces is not what we want him to do – and these incidents are rare. It's like he wants to be good for us. When he lashes out, he often has a reason, and it serves as an important reminder of his wildcat heritage.
Most of the time it's as if Chenny wants to be like us. Right from the start he's always made such an effort to get to know me, and continues to do so, enough to put any human to shame. Studying and observing me at all hours of the day, he can read me like a book and I'm sure he has enough material for a PhD in me. When I'm in the kitchen preparing food he will jump up onto his accustomed spot on the pedal bin and watch me closely. You could say he's hoping I'll throw a tasty morsel his way, but he watches me getting showered and dressed in the mornings too. At around 5.30 each evening, if I've not left my desk, he will miaow until I stop working – just so we can be together and snuggle on the sofa, where he'll gaze up at me radiating love. He loves being with us, and is part of the family. Along with my husband, we're the three amigos.
I see Chenny doing his best to relate to me, to know me, to communicate with me, and so I'm always trying to extend the same courtesy to him. He can't use human speech, but he communicates clearly in every other way possible, earnestly, sometimes forcibly, and his facial expressions are often more articulate than if he spoke English. If husband and I argue, Chenny will often sit between us at our feet, looking up, his head tilted, eyes, wide, taking it all in. Those huge golden eyes, slightly confused, seem to say, "Why are you cross, Mummy? I love you!" Shrek's Puss in Boots has got nothing on him.
Like any cat, Chenny is cute. 7 years old now, he's retained a lot of his kitten-ness. He's very easy to love, but this isn't why we're so close. I've done my best not to over-empathise or anthropomorphise. Brought up on farms, where there was no room for sentimentality when it came to the treatment of livestock, I've always been wary of projecting my own feelings on to animals and I've always questioned our interactions with him: did he really do that? Have I read too much into this? He's a cat, not a human, not a baby. Yet, as cardiologist and psychiatrist Barbara Natterson Horowitz writes in her book Zoobiquity: 'My education included stern warnings against the tantalizing pull to anthropomorphise. In those days, noticing pain or sadness on the face of an animal was criticised as projection, fantasy, or sloppy sentimentality. But scientific advancement over the last two decades suggest that we should adopt an updated perspective. Seeing too much of ourselves in other animals may not be the problem we think it is. Underappreciating our own animal natures may be the greater limitation.' (p.12).
A child-free couple, my husband and I don't see ourselves as the cliched parents of a surrogate baby cat. We're in awe of his cat-ness, and honoured that he appears to want to be with us. Yet he has a 'personality', and we try to give him space to express this personality, and to be as attentive to him as he is to us. If that makes us sad, batty cat people then so be it.
And it all gets me wondering: is Chenny representative of animals in general? Are wild animals just as sensitive and communicative as domestic pets? If Chenny's any indication, there's a whole ocean of animal wisdom, kindness and love out there, as this list of animals demonstrating their feelings illustrates. Or this report of the girl who was guarded by lions, who protected her from men who wanted to capture her for a forced marriage. Imagine all those millions of animal spirits and souls, complex, misunderstood, ignored, with much to show us, and much that we can learn from.
This all goes some way to explaining why I can't eat meat any more. When I think about what animals have to go through to get to my plate it breaks my heart: an animal like Chenny has had to die, sometimes in ways too terrible to know, just so I can eat. This when food is in such abundance I don't even have to, and on top of all the other unspeakable cruelties inflicted on animals by humans.
We too are animal, and animals have more in common with us than we realise. Like us, animals, fish and birds are evolving (and from my experience it seems to me that cats and humans are evolving towards each other). As Zoobiquity explains, animals suffer many of the same diseases and neurological conditions as we do: cancers, heart disease, diabetes, clinical depression, OCD, substance addiction, anxiety disorders, STDs, arthritis – even gout...
Is it too much of a stretch to say that they experience similar emotions and characteristics, too? I perceive dignity in Chenny. His mind is always clear and focussed, and I've learnt that he has values. He knows when I'm not well – when my period makes me horizontal, for example – and when he jumps on the bed, I know I'm in good paws. When he jumps on my lap, it's always magical. He's a little healer, his presence is soothing. He knows about goodness and evil: if he's right with something, so am I.
As Darwin himself wrote: "Animals – whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. Animals with affections, fear, pain, sorrow for the dead... If we choose to let conjecture run wild then animals are our fellow brethren in pain, disease death and suffering and famine; our slaves in the most laborious work, our companion in our amusements. They may partake from our origin in one common ancestor and we may all be netted together."
I know there's a contradiction in me not eating meat while still eating fish, and I'm working on that. In the meantime, I think it would benefit humanity to rethink our relationship with animals. I wish everyone could relate to all animals better, and cherish them like friends, so that we can learn more about them, and ourselves. It does me good to acknowledge what I have in common with Chenny and all animals. I'm not ashamed to be an animal too.
Comments
Post a Comment