Confessions of a Meat-Eater (editorial)

Confessions of a Meat-Eater

There’s long been a war between vegetarians and carnivores, a battle that focuses on everything from animal cruelty to the environment to healthy cuisine. Your typical meat-free character is nice about their choice, realizing it’s a personal decision. On the other hand, you have the agenda-pushing, in-your-face, “Meat is Murder!” type, the ones who strip naked outside of KFC and push pamphlets of decapitated poultry into your hands. Organizations like PETA are on a crusade to end the production of animal flesh, doing so in such a way that aggravates and alienates your average McDonald’s connoisseur and even people who genuinely care about animals.

As an unrepentant meat eater, it wasn’t until recently that I considered the merits of these anti-meat arguments, realizing there actually was some validity. I always assumed those videos of pigs kicked in the groin and cows with their throats slit were part of a propaganda machine and the images came from slaughterhouses in third world countries. None of that happened here, not in America.

The truth is, animal-based industries are not pretty. Yet, as Oscar Wilde once said, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

PETA does work like a Soviet-era propaganda machine, sometimes comparing the conditions of factory-farmed animals to the Holocaust and heavily editing their footage to seem more extreme. Their agenda stretches far beyond just using animals for food; they don’t want you to wear fur, test on animals or even keep pets. To many, it sometimes seems like their positions are so drastic they prefer animals to people. Indeed, PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk sent a letter to Yasser Arafat about a donkey used as a suicide bomber, essentially saying it’s okay to blow each other up, just don’t involve animals. Newkirk told the Washington Post: "It's not my business to inject myself into human wars."

Radical organizations like PETA are why many people ignore what’s actually happening to livestock in America. Sure, you can’t believe everything you hear, but some of it is true. Chickens, for example, are placed in stocks and their heads are dipped into an electrified pool called a “stunner.” Some birds aren’t fully dead when they’re hacked into. At birth, pigs are castrated without anesthetic, their tails chopped off and at death, electrocuted. Again, this method doesn’t always work, sometimes just breaking the animal’s backs. The animals are miserable from birth to execution and the list of cruelties is nearly endless.

The real issue isn’t whether humans should eat meat, it’s how to do it in less barbaric ways. In most cases, animals today are shoved into unsanitary conditions, living out their short, miserable lives in windowless sheds until harvest. The side effects contribute to weird diseases, boils and bacterial infections. So then the meat is treated, and those chemicals go into those that eat it. The piles of waste left by the animals contribute to greenhouse gases (much more than transportation) or the poop is thrown into rivers and lakes, poisoning the water and killing fish.

But the only option isn’t to go meatless. A recent article in Time promotes the idea of keeping cows in pastures instead of slaughterhouses. By putting the large, methane-producing animals in a field, they mash their manure into the ground and cultivate the grass. The grass becomes healthier, retaining moisture and microbes but most of all, keeping CO2 in the soil, not in the air.

Even the grass the cows eat makes up a smaller carbon footprint, instead of the grain cows on feedlots are fed, which must be grown using fertilizers, pesticides and transported hundreds of miles. Feeding cows in pastures doesn’t just reduce carbon emissions; it actually makes the result negative. Some researchers predict that curbing feedlots could be the solution to capturing the entire planet’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

And all this contributes to a much healthier cow, leading to healthier meat and a healthier consumer. Pasture-fed cows produce meat lower in saturated fat and higher in healthy fat cells called omega-3s. Similar equations, such as free-range chickens or pigs, result in the same thing.

Nearly all the problems associated with eating meat can be solved with how we cultivate it. Except for one, obviously -- the killing.

Most vegetarians are against all exploitations of animals, especially killing. Treating livestock humanely and slaughtering them humanely all equals murder to the vegetarian mind.

Hypocrisy of this sort is just what makes PETA and friends so unbearable. It’s not okay for humans to use animals for anything, not to even befriend them as pets, yet the rest of the animal kingdom has been doing so since the beginning of time.

When a lion attacks a gazelle and mercilessly tears out its throat while the herd watches from afar, that’s ok. Taking a bird to a chopping block for a quick and easy finish, however, is not.

We are human beings. Our canines are specifically designed to tear apart meat. And if that meat is prepared as humanely, healthfully and environmentally safely as possible, there is no reason not to enjoy it. We haven’t reached a dream industry of this sort yet, at least not popularly or cheaply, but it would be good to note that vegetarians and carnivores alike share many of the same goals.