Double Standards

The decision by PETA to boycott Mars fills me with indecision and reminds me of my own answer to this whole animal question. It may not be a good solution, but it keeps me well-fed and still, I hope, a kind and considerate person.

I refuse to be simplistic and rally against animal cruelty. That's hardly a contentious position since there's not much in the way of an army of pro-animal cruelty. Taking that position is about as controversial as being for breathing. I own animals, I find them cute as can be, and I can't even look at roadkill without getting sad and wincing.

Still, perhaps to keep my sanity or to allow me to enjoy animal products, I seem to have developed a system. This wasn't intentional, but it seems to evolved into one that works for me.

As a general rule, I have different standards for wild or natural animals, and raised ones, though I obviously don't think either should be tortured or abused.

Wild animals, pretty much, should be left alone to enjoy their lives until they die of starvation or are killed by a larger, or more hungry, animal. I don't think we should hunt them or kill them for fur or ivory. It's okay, I guess, if we put them zoos to look at them, but I say that because everyone I've ever known who worked at a zoo is a nice enough guy.

For some reason, though, I think it's fine for us to "create" or raise animals and then kill them for food or supplies. These particular animals, I'm thinking, wouldn't have existed without our intervention, so we pretty much get to use them. If someone causes twenty foxes to exist, raises them with care and then kills them to craft a fine looking and warm coat, I'm okay with that. This isn't reducing the fox population and isn't depriving any foxes of their natural lives in the woods. These foxes wouldn't have existed without human intervention, so our removing and using them isn't really having any effect on nature.

There are a lot of people who eat meat and many more who eat plants. Simply put, both are grown by some people for others to eat. It was a tragedy and wrong for Buffalo Bill to slaughter herds from the train, but if someone is growing buffalos to slaughter, that doesn't bother me too much. There are an awful lot of people who like bacon and hamburgers, enough that producing those things is a business, and like all businesses, it becomes a matter of efficiency.

To feed the world probably takes a lot more cattle and pigs than I can count. I'm guessing well over a thousand. Just as doctors see patients more as symptoms or diseases than as people because of the huge numbers they see, or the way ambulance drivers become numb to gruesome or sad sights, I think those who deal with cows and pigs just see them as product after awhile. They become no more than an in-box of work, and while this is sad, it's normal.

I am willing to believe that people who work at slaughterhouses aren't sadists. I'm also willing to believe that mistakes do happen just because of the numbers involved, and that sometimes a killing doesn't go as easily, painlessly, and quickly as everyone wants. The large numbers involved pretty much guarantee that.

I know the US has a history of trappers gathering beavers and selling them back to Europe to make into fine looking hats for gentlemen, and I don't think we should be doing that any more. If someone wants to do that, they need to raise the beavers themselves and not take them from the wild.