One Native American tribe puts it this way. Before they eat of an animal's flesh, they say "ho, mitaque oeyasin," which means "I respectfully acknowledge you, all my relations." We are all kin, beast and bird and tree and grain, hunter and hunted, red blood and white bone and spiralling arch of DNA, and we all share in the complex dance of life that is our global ecosystem.
Whether you see this as a spiritual metaphor or a more scientific and practical one is less important than that you see it at all. Civilization provides a great deal of insulation to the individual, to the point that the average individual is no longer involved in or even aware of the complex processes that are essential to his survival. I believe that it is too much insulation, and that it would do the average meat eater good to get his or her hands bloody and to take on the responsibility of making meat at least once in their lives. Not as a macho deed, not for bragging rights, but simply for the sake of making a conscious choice.
To some extent, job specialization demarcates societal progress, but we have reached a level of specialization that takes the human animal out of the environment it evolved in and into one that is completely alien. Our survival and continued sanity as a species—though many would question the latter assertion—is a testament to the remarkable adaptability of homo sapiens under conditions that would be considered abusive if we inflicted them on zoo animals. We have done to ourselves what would be illegal to do today to any large mammalian species in captivity, building what is effectively a human zoo—and not a particularly good one for our species, by zoological standards.
We are divorced from our meat. No longer recognizing it as food in its original form, we pay others to kill for us so that we can retain the luxury of detachment. Pigs, cows and sheep are now pork, beef and mutton, words that no longer signify the living animal, but familiar, neatly portioned slabs of food in clean styrofoam packages. We have successfully forgotten on a polite cultural level that these foods were ever attached to living animals, and we do not think of death at all when we consider steak.
Yet, if you invoke an unfamiliar animal and speak of killing it, our guilty sympathy arises, and the outcry begins. How strange, and how horrible, to kill an animal instead of a roast of beef. To test this hypothesis, talk in polite company about dismembering a chicken for roasting, and note the response of awakened appetite and salivary anticipation. Then mention dismembering an ostrich, or a seal, or a goat, and witness those reactions.
We are not yet numbed to the deaths of all animals, only a few. For those few, we have special words that allow us to politely forget an activity that is taboo to talk about or even think about, but that forms the essential economic and dietary basis for our society. Death is only taboo when we cannot cover it up with polite words that permit social forgetting and the forgoing of uncomfortable ethical responsibility and conscious choice.
It is interesting to note the prejudices we hold about what animals are appropriate to eat as food, to keep as pets and to feed to other animals. Why do we slaughter and consume cows, pigs, rabbits, birds and sheep, while rejecting equines, canines and the perfectly edible guinea pig?
Desmond Morris explains our reactions in some of his works on shared social mythology and behavior, The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo. If a creature, particularly in neonatal or juvenile form, shares the morphology of a human infant, it offers the stimuli to trigger in us parental responses of protectiveness. In shorter words, if it is "cute", helpless, soft to the touch and especially with large eyes and a high pitched crying, some primitive part of our brains thinks it's a human baby and responds accordingly, incorrectly identifying the stimuli in question as coming from a human child.
While compassion for animals is a noble sentiment, discriminating between species based on emotionally biased and incorrect biological impulses is not as easily justified. Intelligence is not the criteria here, despite fumbling efforts of self-justification from society in this direction. Rats are better at direct problem solving than cats, and pigs excel dogs in almost any laboratory trial of intelligence. Yet most of us have more of an emotional reaction at the thought of a kitten's death than a rat's, and we breed immense numbers of pigs, cows and sheep for no purpose other than to die feeding consumer appetites.
Margaret Visser says, in The Rituals of Dinner: "This is what is meant by "sacrifice", literally, the "making sacred" of an animal consumed for dinner. Yet sacrifice, because it dwells on the death, is a concept often shocking to the secular modern Western mind—to people who calmly organize daily hecatombs of beasts, and who are among the most death-dealing carnivores the world has ever seen."
There is nothing left that is sacred in the slaughterhouses of today. There is no memory and no conscious awareness of the choice to take an animal's life that we may live and feast. As for me, I will choose to bring back that memory, and to take life by my own hand with full awareness of what I do and why. I will make sacrifice. This is my choice, to be a conscious carnivore.
Ho, mitaque oeyasin.
Regards,
Tanith Tyrr
"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it is safer to harrass rich women than motorcycle gangs."More food quotes
Would you prefer to be a more Compassionate Cook?
Here's a PETA sponsored site with some pretty good vegetarian recipes if you've decided that you'd rather not make the
conscious choice to eat meat. And for some excellent meat-eater's resources and a view from the other side of the
fence, check out People Eating Tasty Animals. Some really useful facts
about white-tailed deer can be found in the excellent Hunting FAQ
by Rich Young.
