Kesher Talk

End Vegetable Oppression Now: Instapundit linked to a story on how vegans won't eat honey because it takes advantage of oppressed worker bees. This brought about discussion of cruelty to flowers, and ultimately, vegetables. I figured it was time for me to cart out an excerpt from a little satire piece I wrote a while back that deals with the topic. Enjoy!

It is a sad fact of modern life that murder happens ever so frequently. Yes, the human toll is sometimes too much for a gentle heart to bear, but it is important to remember there are more than just humans on this Earth. Our delicate ecosphere is home to millions of different life forms, only one of them human. Is murder any less of a shame, or dare we say, a crime, if it’s carried out on a non-human? To mercilessly kill any living thing that does not want to die is tragic beyond words. The grossest violators are the fast-food restaurants that practice this brutal form of murder on a wholesale basis. These multi-national, capitalo-fascist corporations take the profit motive to the sickest and most inhumane levels in their exploitation of living creatures to satisfy people’s unnatural hungers. While some look at a Big Mac and see a sandwich, we see it to be one of humanity’s greatest crimes with a gruesome body count boasting “Over 99 billion served.” This has got to stop. We will no longer allow callous humans to practice mass herbicide with a clear conscience. Please, the lettuce, tomato, and onion have suffered enough. After hearing the tales of horrible cruelty inflicted on poor, unsuspecting vegetables, we hope the masses will be shaken from their blissfully ignorant reverie and lose their taste for murder most foul.

Our goals are simple: Increase visibility of the vegetable rights movement, contribute persuasive arguments to the debate against eating vegetables, and eventually, wean humanity off of vegetables altogether. You no doubt have many questions about what we do and why, so for your convenience, we have prepared this list of frequently asked questions and answers that we think you will find helpful.

Q: What’s wrong with eating vegetables?
A: Vegetables are living creatures. They eat, breathe, and when severed from the ground, die. It is immoral and wrong to intentionally inflict harm on another living thing. To eat them is just sick.

Q: Vegetables can’t think and don’t feel pain. Why should I worry about them?
A: First of all, it has not been unequivocally concluded that vegetables can’t think or feel pain. Their situation is akin to a blind, paraplegic, deaf-mute child with a severe mental handicap. Just because we cannot communicate with him does not mean he isn't hurt by our actions. In addition, even if it would be proven that vegetables can’t think or feel pain, a person who is brain-dead or has had a full frontal lobotomy can’t feel pain or think either, but the thought of killing and eating them would make most people nauseous. If it’s wrong to kill and eat people who are in a vegetative state, it’s just as wrong to do the same to vegetables themselves.

Q: Why is it okay to kill and eat animals but not vegetables?
A: For the same reason you can legally kill a violent intruder in your house, but not a blind, paraplegic, deaf-mute child with a severe mental handicap. Animals are instinctively programmed to survive at all costs. They have no cognitive discernment between right or wrong. Therefore, if it ever came down to it, an animal would kill and eat you without having any second thoughts. Slaughtering animals for food is essentially the same as shooting a lion that is trying to kill you, and eating the meat so it shouldn’t go to waste. If an animal doesn’t fight or run away at the moment of slaughter, one can say that there was tacit consent to the act, like assisted suicide, which, while questionably moral is at least understandable. If it does fight back, the animal was obviously killed in self-defense. Conversely, vegetables are immobile, and therefore completely harmless to humans. It is their lack of mobility and absence of natural defense mechanisms, such as horns or teeth that make the vegetables case so much more pitiable. When a vegetable “sees” the farmer coming, it can do nothing, and therefore the onus is on humans as sentient guardians of this Earth to protect those that cannot protect themselves.

Q: Eating vegetables is natural. Animals do it all the time.
A: Animals also wallow in their own feces but that doesn’t mean we should follow suit. More importantly, as mentioned previously, animals will do anything to survive. A cow has little chance of stalking animal prey and killing it. The cow therefore has no choice but to prey on the most gentle and innocent of life forms, vegetables. Humans, on the other hand, have another choice and it is our sacred duty to choose it.

Q: Eating vegetables has been going on for millions of years. It is part of our evolution.
A: In fact, it’s the opposite. If we were evolutionarily destined to eat vegetables, our teeth would be straight and flat like a cow’s. Instead we have canine teeth suitable for ripping flesh. Also, the evolutionary record does not support this claim. Many of the primates from whom we descend are vegetarians, but as hominids and eventually, humans, evolved, we became hunter-gatherers. Thus, eating meat comes along further on the evolutionary ladder as far as humans are concerned. One could say that we are awaiting the final evolutionary epoch where humans will entirely divest themselves of vegetables .

Q: If we stop eating vegetables, will there be enough food?
A: More than enough. The answer lies in the proud tradition of the Native-Americans who let none of the animal go to waste. There will surely need to be an increase in the amount of animals bred, but with the elimination of cruel, oppressive, vegetable farms, there will be plenty of space for the additional herds.

Q: If I eat all that meat, won’t I get fat?
A: Not at all. As any proponent of the Atkin’s Diet will tell you, exclusively eating meat and dairy products will make you lose weight, not gain it. This is just one of the added bonuses to ending vegetable murder.

Q: Aren’t there important vitamins in vegetables that we need to survive?
A: Yes, but there are other, less cruel methods to get the nutrients we need. One example is by using safe, animal-tested, nutritional supplements. The technology is also being developed to genetically engineer animals to carry the nutrients currently only found naturally in vegetables. Thanks to scientific advances, it is conceivable that we could see the complete obsolescence of vegetable ingestion in our lifetimes.

posted by Rami @ 7/09/2002 05:57:21 PM