If people didn't kill and eat animals both people and animals would be safer and better off. Meat = murder. I don't really differentiate between the deaths. The animal holocaust is endless and appalling.
I am certain cows or.pigs, were our positions on the food chain reversed, would keep us in herds and eat us without a second thought. Fuck them.
I remember Oilcanboyd (Dennis) used to post that same sentiment. I think most vegetarians are more objecting to the factory farming aspect. I am okay with a hunter-gatherer spearing and then thanking the prey it's going to eat. That animal had a free life, natural bonding with its fellows, then a swift death when it was old and too slow to outrun the ape-things. The agricultural revolution, around 9500 BC, was mostly the end of treating our prey with some respect.
Factory farming animals bad, factory farming vegetables is ok? Consider this:
She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.
- VN
I read your Nabokov quote, weeping while I stuffed myself with jalapeno cornbread from my favorite local deli.
I missed your NYT rhapsodizing about Hungarian naked men.
I've heard this Hungarian looked pretty good in a Speedo....
Signs and Symbols is my second favorite short story of all time, right after The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg. Freely available on line, though some.versions follow the original published version rather than what VN actually wrote. That last line was truncated, sadly.
The naked Hungarian men shamed me into going from the Hotel Gelert steam room directly into the bain froid despite my having just enough French to know what that meant.