I went to the grocery store today because I needed broccoli and ended up impulse-buying some shrimp, because shrimp sounded good and I haven’t had them in forever.
Long story short, some lady coming down the aisle in the opposite direction decided that I, amongst the fifteen or so individuals milling around the meat section, was the one she would not-so-subtly criticize as she strolled by with her cart. She basically insinuated that I had no morals whatsoever, and my purchasing of meat was a direct ticket to hell—a ticket the righteous vegetarian would never purchase.

And so I must rant.

I know I’ve already posted a “why I’m not a vegetarian” blog before, but obviously the issue must be readdressed here. I suppose I can understand where this lady (and many others) is coming from. I’ve seen Earthlings, I know all the animal cruelty that goes on in slaughterhouses and fisheries, and I know that that’s what a large proportion of vegetarians/vegans oppose.
However, I also know that a decent proportion of vegetarians don’t eat meat because they have issues with taking the lives of animals for food that humans can live without. As I said in my vegetarian post, it strikes me as extremely contradictory that we assign so much more value to the life of, say, a pig, than we do to the life of a stalk of wheat or a sunflower. I understand that the sentience of a pig and the sentience (or lack thereof) of wheat aren’t the same, obviously. But I do believe that everything in the universe has some form of life, and if we promote the saving of certain lives, it just seems wrong that we don’t treat other lives the same way, you know?
So yeah, maybe plants don’t process getting chopped in half the same way a cow would, but do those who subsist solely on vegetation take into account the billions of lives that are extinguished to provide their food? Pain-perceiving or not, there’s no denying that there are lives being cut short (no pun intended).
Sorry, that just really got to me. Why value the life of a shrimp more than the life of a grain? Humans can, of course, subsist without meat, but that doesn’t, in my opinion, act as a suitable excuse for the difference in value between what we deem sentient beings and beings like grains and flowers.

Bah, I dunno.

Today’s song: Jimmy Olsen’s Blues by Spin Doctors