by Santi Meintjes

Created on: March 11, 2008

Humans are, by their anatomy, morphology and physiology, neither exclusively carnivorous nor exclusively vegetarian. Humans are omnivores - equipped and evolved to eat meat and well as plants. From their teeth to their digestive system to the biochemistry that allows them to assimilate nutrients from food and use it for different purposes in their bodies, they function best when provided with both kinds of food.

It is a human invention to be either/or carnivorous or vegetarian. Very few people have serious health conditions that require them to renounce either of these two basic foods for all of their life.

The question of which of vegetarian or carnivorous is "right" is a human affectation. Biologically speaking both are "right". Your body needs the nutrients supplied by both sources and has the means to use it. It is only in the modern age where nutrients are manufactured artificially that we can afford the choice of eating only certain kinds of foods.

"Eat or be eaten" is a harsh sentiment that was true for a long time in human history but we have moved beyond that into a society where we do not have to provide for ourselves in the sense that the vast majority of us do not have to plant and harvest the crops ourselves, nor do we have to milk the cows and eventually slaughter them for meat. All those things are available in the supermarkets or speciality stores or wherever you buy your food. Yet, some-one out there still has to provide the animal from which the meat is sourced to make your hamburger patty.

And this is of course the crux of the debate around the "rightness" of vegetarian versus carnivorous life styles. When a family had to provide for themselves only, they could slaughter one or two animals in a year and they could do it with compassion and in a humane way. But as the need grew for less and less people to provide for more and more other people, the methods had to be adapted - and became, in the opinion of most people who have witnessed the methods used today, utterly inhumane and devoid of compassion.

Like most other areas in life, people have given up on relying on the law and legislation to ensure that these actions are taken in a way that would preserve some human dignity and enable us to call ourselves the peak of creation. On the contrary, legislation seems to continue the time-honoured tradition of favouring the human with the money and not the human with the moral consciousness. And so people resort to the only protest that they are capable of - boycotting the industry by diminishing the demand for their services.

The question is - does the removal of those that are vegetarian have any effect on the practices in the slaughterhouse? They may reduce the demand for meat by a very tiny fraction, but meat is still produced accompanied by the most awful moans of animals in dire straits (to put it politely since I do not fancy being sued by anybody).

Is it right to eat meat when you know that the animal from which it was sourced was treated like an inanimate piece of machinery? Each person has to answer that question for themselves and if the answer is no, then come up with a way to improve slaughterhouses because merely refraining from eating meat does not improve the lot of the animals at all.

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