Why am I not a vegetarian?

Given my loathing of animal cruelty and knowledge of agricultural reality, given my dire fears about the degradation of the environment, given the hazards that consuming meat enials regarding disease and nutritional imbalance, I examine my reasaons for not being vegetarian.

A vegetarian diet is not difficult to maintain. It takes a little more attention toward getting appropriate nourishment, but there are many attractive options available there.

I believe that a balanced diet can be managed with or without meat. I don't manage a good diet in either mode, so no real advantage to being vegetarian, only some minor inconvenience in that the default setting is still for omnivorousness in public catering.

Diseases transmitted through meat products are scary. BSE is one biggie, but appears to be anomolous and confined to exotic climes. So far. Ditto bird flu. I am uncertain about the veracity of claims that undigested meat lingers in the digestive tract for a harmful period of time.

I like meat. When I go on a vego kick, I miss meat. When I eat well prepared meat, I enjoy it.

On the ethical front - the area most likely to inspire me to make a profound change to my diet - I feel conflict. I do object to factory farming. I've seen it first hand in egg production, and it is thoroughly inhumane. Regulations don't improve animal wellbeing unless they are adhered to, and they are not adhered to unless they are enforced. I did not see much sign of enforcement when I was working on an egg production farm. Admittedly that was many many years ago, but I can see that the same potential exists for abuse.

Dairying is something I have seen a lot of, and the practices there are distressing to me despite even the very best efforts of the most humane and empathetic farmers out there. Calves are removed from their mothers, to the distress of both, and the unwanted calves are trucked off to become meat products at a couple of days of age or as soon as their umbilical cord is dry. Or at least, that's the rule. Calves that are to be kept for rearing are taught to drink form artificial sources of nutrition. The care and effort that is put into calf survival varies wildly. Disease and casualties are not uncommon.

The suffering of the cows in producing milk for human consumption is largely unavoidable. Genetically, dairy cows are being custom bred to be more efficient producers. In some instances this leads to breakdown in compatibility between their different systems - for example, when their ability to produce milk exceeds the capacity of their udder to hold it, they suffer swelling and inflamation and the ligaments that hold the udder are over-stretched and damaged. Even after the milk supply tapers off to a manageable level, such cows with low hanging udders are disposed to kick their udder as they walk, step on their own teats and suffer infections. For this reason, they are usually culled, and trucked off to become meat products.

Of course, consumption of animal products that are humanely produced - free range eggs, milk from the pet house goat etc, is ethically acceptable.

Eggs that are used in commercially produced pastry won't be from free-range hens. Neither will the milk products. If I choose the vegetarian option at a resteraunt, I'm still supporting the default farming techniques of caged hens and large-scale dairying, aren't I?

Seriously folks, if I were a vegatarian, I'd have to be a vegan.

And that leads me to contemplate the environmental impact of broad acre crop production. Okay, so feeding the grain to a bullock and then eating the bullock is far less efficient, therefore requires far more grain than simply feeding the grain to a human, but the production of that grain is still of detriment to the environment. If I were a vegan, I'd have to be sure to consume only organically grown produce, or produce gleaned sustainably from natural systems.

About there, I collapse form exhaustion at the very thought, and go roast a slab of some deceased animal.

I have to ask - is feral rabbit meat, humanely harvested, ethically acceptable meat? Feral rabbits are being eradicated by far less humane means than a careful shot to the head, or digging them up and despatching them. Ditto for carp. Some don't like the taste of carp, but when prepared properly, they are good eating indeed, and it's far less wasteful than dumping them into landfill. As for leaving a small number of carcasses to natural predators, I've been cautioned against that, as it is a potential source for spread of the species.

There is an old saying: "Wherevery you've got livestock, you'll get dead stock." I have to ask whether ethical vegetarianism allows for the use of suitably dead stock for human consumption. Say one of the goats that is tethered to the fence breaks it's neck? If the body could be recovered in a timely fashion, would I skin it for it's hide and butcher the carcass or simply bury Pollyanna wholesale?

I vote for an impromtu goat roasting party/wake for Pollyanna, myself...