The Vegetarian is naturally aggressive?
Okay, this is an interesting point.
In The Naive Vegetarian, the author makes this point:
These days, it seems that there are more and more reasons to protest against the way our society is being run. There are voices of disseat everywhere. (It is the reason for this website!) but there is a much more worrying trend - violent protest.
Have you noticed the increasing numbers of occasions when small groups of very militant people demonstrate against all sorts of things: animal experiments, butchers' shops, new roads, footpaths, nuclear power stations, civil rights, homosexuals' rights or anybody else's rights. The odds are that the majority are vegetarians.
As we know, when it needs food, our body indicates this to us with the feeling of hunger. But there are also other signals if specific nutrients are deficient. Meat is the best source of several nutrients. When our bodies are deficient in these, we become irritable and aggressive. This is a perfectly natural signal built into our genetic make-up over our evolution: our bodies are telling us to go out and kill something to eat. This is why strict vegetarians tend to be so vociferous. It is a trait that was recognised long ago; it was, after all, the vegetarian Cain who killed the carnivorous Abel, not the other way round. The vegan Kikuyu tribe in Kenya were the perpetrators of the murderous Mau Mau in the 1950s, not their wholly carnivorous, but peaceful, neighbours, the Maasai.
The butcher's shop in my village has had its windows smashed so often that it is now boarded up when it is closed. Have you ever heard of a meat eater bombing a greengrocer's shop?
Heh.
There are some other rather startling ideas presented in the article. Although it's long, and tends towards the demeaning of vegetarians, there are some very interesting ideas presented. Like, oh, this one:
About half our brain and nervous system is composed of complicated, long-chain, fatty acid molecules. The walls of our blood vessels also need them. Without them we cannot develop normally. These fatty acids do not occur in plants. Fatty acids in a simpler form do but they must be converted into the long-chain molecules by animals - which is a slow, time-consuming process. This is where the herbivores come in. Over the year, they convert the simple fatty acids found in grasses and seeds into intermediate, more complicated forms that we can convert into the ones that we need.
Our brain is considerably larger than that of any ape. Looking back at the fossil record from early hominids to modern man, we see a quite remarkable increase in brain size. This expansion needed large quantities of the right fatty acids before it could have occurred. It could never have occurred if our ancestors had not eaten meat. Human milk contains the fatty acids needed for large brain development - cow's milk does not. It is no coincidence that in relative terms, our brain is some fifty times the size of a cow's.
The vegetarian will be dismayed to learn that while soya bean is rich in complete protein, and grains and nuts also combine to provide complete proteins, none contains the fats that are essential for proper brain development.
I have not investigated his sources, although he does have a bibliography for his notes.
In The Naive Vegetarian, the author makes this point:
These days, it seems that there are more and more reasons to protest against the way our society is being run. There are voices of disseat everywhere. (It is the reason for this website!) but there is a much more worrying trend - violent protest.
Have you noticed the increasing numbers of occasions when small groups of very militant people demonstrate against all sorts of things: animal experiments, butchers' shops, new roads, footpaths, nuclear power stations, civil rights, homosexuals' rights or anybody else's rights. The odds are that the majority are vegetarians.
As we know, when it needs food, our body indicates this to us with the feeling of hunger. But there are also other signals if specific nutrients are deficient. Meat is the best source of several nutrients. When our bodies are deficient in these, we become irritable and aggressive. This is a perfectly natural signal built into our genetic make-up over our evolution: our bodies are telling us to go out and kill something to eat. This is why strict vegetarians tend to be so vociferous. It is a trait that was recognised long ago; it was, after all, the vegetarian Cain who killed the carnivorous Abel, not the other way round. The vegan Kikuyu tribe in Kenya were the perpetrators of the murderous Mau Mau in the 1950s, not their wholly carnivorous, but peaceful, neighbours, the Maasai.
The butcher's shop in my village has had its windows smashed so often that it is now boarded up when it is closed. Have you ever heard of a meat eater bombing a greengrocer's shop?
Heh.
There are some other rather startling ideas presented in the article. Although it's long, and tends towards the demeaning of vegetarians, there are some very interesting ideas presented. Like, oh, this one:
About half our brain and nervous system is composed of complicated, long-chain, fatty acid molecules. The walls of our blood vessels also need them. Without them we cannot develop normally. These fatty acids do not occur in plants. Fatty acids in a simpler form do but they must be converted into the long-chain molecules by animals - which is a slow, time-consuming process. This is where the herbivores come in. Over the year, they convert the simple fatty acids found in grasses and seeds into intermediate, more complicated forms that we can convert into the ones that we need.
Our brain is considerably larger than that of any ape. Looking back at the fossil record from early hominids to modern man, we see a quite remarkable increase in brain size. This expansion needed large quantities of the right fatty acids before it could have occurred. It could never have occurred if our ancestors had not eaten meat. Human milk contains the fatty acids needed for large brain development - cow's milk does not. It is no coincidence that in relative terms, our brain is some fifty times the size of a cow's.
The vegetarian will be dismayed to learn that while soya bean is rich in complete protein, and grains and nuts also combine to provide complete proteins, none contains the fats that are essential for proper brain development.
I have not investigated his sources, although he does have a bibliography for his notes.