I heard from a friend, who is currently studying natural farming in Wakayama, that his fields were trashed by the local louts. In his case, not teenagers from the local housing project as one might expect in the West, but a troop of macaque monkeys coming down from the mountains in search of food.
As any vegan who has ever tried allotment farming will tell you … anyone that has faced a pestilence of bugs and slugs lunching on the fruits of their labour … there is nothing more like attempting to grow your own food to turn you into a Natural Born Killer*. Nature is war and they are out to get you.
Let us be honest … veganism is, to a degree, an impossible Utopianism. Animal death and suffering is inevitable even within the Vegan model. It is just a question of how and where one draws the line. And it is not so much a line as a grey area, a moral no man’s land which few vegans are willing to venture into.
Utopianism is the ideal of a perfect Earthly society, virtuous and satisfying. It has a long history in literature, politics, religion. It is a myth of perfect happiness and fulfillment where there is harmony between humankind and The Creation, when needs are few and desires limited to harmless ones, and of an abundance provided by nature.
No war or oppression. No need for hard and painful work. A time or place where human beings are simple, pious and close to the gods or nature. The word is related to the Greek “eutopia“, meaning ‘good place’, and “outopia“, meaning “no place”, in the sense that it did not actually exist.
For vegans, perhaps it is Vegtopia, or exists in some another dimension … a heavenly “Planet Vega” where we can all go and reincarnate to, and where there is no MacDonalds spewing litter and pollution, raping and pillaging the animal nations; no holocaust of Yakitori bars wafting burnt corpse out into the thick, humid evening air.
Utopia is still worth striving for … but it is a goal we need to be realistic about.
Now pass me the slug pellets and rock-salt shotgun cartridges.
Animal Rights? OK, I accept … but here is the moral dilemma. If an animal is going to kill you – either directly as a predatory or indirectly by opportunistically eating your source of sustenance – how far do your rights go to defend yourself? And how practical can one’s defence be?
It is really is not practical to humanely relocate every slug and bug (ahem … to someone else’s field?) by hand as some veggie do mice, nor to guard 24/7 a cornfield against morally primitive and ethically deficient primates. As anyone that has traveled to India or Thailand will tell you, these little bastards, and not so little bastards, are damned strong, can be damned vicious and are into gang warfare.
In the Developing Nations, this becomes even more complex as the competitors for land become even more large and dangerous. Humanity, at its edges, is currently at war with many other species for their land and resources; elephants, tigers, gorillas … even at sea there is a war going on between humankind and all the other large predators. If it does not stop, all there is going to be left is us, plankton and bacteria.
So what are the ethical equations involved?
It has always struck me that the Vegan lifestyle is a metropolitan lifestyle. It is not “natural” at all. Veganism is a very good and very rational metropolitan lifestyle. Veganism is a nigh perfect antidote to the unnatural imbalances of life in our great, high tech metropolises.
But if you get between me and my food … the gloves come off.
More later …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P70hbHBdl0
* Natural Born Killer is a 1994 cult Oliver Stone movie, incidentally starring the vegan actor Woody Harrelson. Yup, vegans can do mean and bad too.
I heard from a friend, who is currently studying natural farming in Wakayama, that his fields were trashed by the local louts. In his case, not teenagers from the local housing project as one might expect in the West, but a troop of macaque monkeys coming down from the mountains in search of food.
As any vegan who has ever tried allotment farming will tell you … anyone that has faced a pestilence of bugs and slugs lunching on the fruits of their labour … there is nothing more like attempting to grow your own food to turn you into a Natural Born Killer*. Nature is war and they are out to get you.
Let us be honest … veganism is, to a degree, an impossible Utopianism. Animal death and suffering is inevitable even within the Vegan model. It is just a question of how and where one draws the line. And it is not so much a line as a grey area, a moral no man’s land which few vegans are willing to venture into.
Utopianism is the ideal of a perfect Earthly society, virtuous and satisfying. It has a long history in literature, politics, religion. It is a myth of perfect happiness and fulfillment where there is harmony between humankind and The Creation, when needs are few and desires limited to harmless ones, and of an abundance provided by nature.
No war or oppression. No need for hard and painful work. A time or place where human beings are simple, pious and close to the gods or nature. The word is related to the Greek “eutopia“, meaning ‘good place’, and “outopia“, meaning “no place”, in the sense that it did not actually exist.
For vegans, perhaps it is Vegtopia, or exists in some another dimension … a heavenly “Planet Vega” where we can all go and reincarnate to, and where there is no MacDonalds spewing litter and pollution, raping and pillaging the animal nations; no holocaust of Yakitori bars wafting burnt corpse out into the thick, humid evening air.
Utopia is still worth striving for … but it is a goal we need to be realistic about.
Now pass me the slug pellets and rock-salt shotgun cartridges.
Animal Rights? OK, I accept … but here is the moral dilemma. If an animal is going to kill you – either directly as a predatory or indirectly by opportunistically eating your source of sustenance – how far do your rights go to defend yourself? And how practical can one’s defence be?
It is really is not practical to humanely relocate every slug and bug (ahem … to someone else’s field?) by hand as some veggie do mice, nor to guard 24/7 a cornfield against morally primitive and ethically deficient primates. As anyone that has traveled to India or Thailand will tell you, these little bastards, and not so little bastards, are damned strong, can be damned vicious and are into gang warfare.
In the Developing Nations, this becomes even more complex as the competitors for land become even more large and dangerous. Humanity, at its edges, is currently at war with many other species for their land and resources; elephants, tigers, gorillas … even at sea there is a war going on between humankind and all the other large predators. If it does not stop, all there is going to be left is us, plankton and bacteria.
So what are the ethical equations involved?
It has always struck me that the Vegan lifestyle is a metropolitan lifestyle. It is not “natural” at all. Veganism is a very good and very rational metropolitan lifestyle. Veganism is a nigh perfect antidote to the unnatural imbalances of life in our great, high tech metropolises.
But if you get between me and my food … the gloves come off.
More later …
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P70hbHBdl0
* Natural Born Killer is a 1994 cult Oliver Stone movie, incidentally starring the vegan actor Woody Harrelson. Yup, vegans can do mean and bad too.
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