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rfmcdonaldI found this article difficult to read.
The idea of eating cat meat, apparently particularly common in Cantonese-speaking areas, appalls me. Mass protests against cat-eating in China, besides signalling the growth of a vibrant civil society, seem entirely justified to me. Eating cats? There are things more disgusting, but still.
As people note in the comments to that post, in the West there are plenty of animals which suffer greatly before being killed for their meat. Take the factory farming system, say. I find the argument that one can't oppose a specific wrong unless one opposes specifically all like wrongs specious, just another way to delegitimize opposition to something morally objectionable by making the very idea of moral objection impossible. Supporters of the seal hunt frequently repeat this logic as well.
There is something to be said for the idea that all found animals share common interests. On the Toronto subway system, chooseveg.ca has been sponsoring a series of ads, contrasting pictures of pairs of animals--a dog and a calf, a cat and a chick--while listing information below the mirror-image pictures of how the food animals are actually quite smart and socially, with horribly images from factory farms filling the bottom of the poster along with ads imploring readers to be vegetarian.
In J.M. Coetzee's provocative The Lives of Animals (available here at Google Books), the protagonist Elizabeth Costello expressed her fears that human beings are inflicting a terrible ongoing holocaust on the animals of the world. I wonder if Costello is right; I wonder if I should become vegetarian.
Thoughts?
Shortly before 8 a.m. on a recent weekday morning a no-nonsense woman from the local food industry pulled up in a truck with one of her staff, determined to get quality for money.
When a vendor reached into a metal cage with his iron vice-grips and seized one cat by the throat, she waved him off:
"Not that one, it's too lean."
The vendor released his grip and let the cat drop.
Another was chosen and promptly wrenched from the cage, swooped through the air and – with the handler using one hand to grip it firmly by the tail – stuffed through a tiny hole into a fine-wired carton already crowded with cats.
Each cat had tried to make one last lunge to break free as it was being yanked from the cage – but to no avail.
The idea of eating cat meat, apparently particularly common in Cantonese-speaking areas, appalls me. Mass protests against cat-eating in China, besides signalling the growth of a vibrant civil society, seem entirely justified to me. Eating cats? There are things more disgusting, but still.
As people note in the comments to that post, in the West there are plenty of animals which suffer greatly before being killed for their meat. Take the factory farming system, say. I find the argument that one can't oppose a specific wrong unless one opposes specifically all like wrongs specious, just another way to delegitimize opposition to something morally objectionable by making the very idea of moral objection impossible. Supporters of the seal hunt frequently repeat this logic as well.
There is something to be said for the idea that all found animals share common interests. On the Toronto subway system, chooseveg.ca has been sponsoring a series of ads, contrasting pictures of pairs of animals--a dog and a calf, a cat and a chick--while listing information below the mirror-image pictures of how the food animals are actually quite smart and socially, with horribly images from factory farms filling the bottom of the poster along with ads imploring readers to be vegetarian.
In J.M. Coetzee's provocative The Lives of Animals (available here at Google Books), the protagonist Elizabeth Costello expressed her fears that human beings are inflicting a terrible ongoing holocaust on the animals of the world. I wonder if Costello is right; I wonder if I should become vegetarian.
Thoughts?
