Why I'm Veg; Or, The Dinner Fiasco

[ravensong]

So, my latest online obsesssion is Hyperbole And A Half. I've known about this little blog for a long time, but only ever bothered to read whatever Allie had most recently posted instead of going back through her archives (with the one exception being the one about never growing up). Well, yesterday and today, on breaks from writing I began going

Comments

[softpaw]

...wow....I'm sorry but...what a jerk! You just dont DO that to a kid!

[ravensong]

Well, at the time I wasn't a kid. When that dinner occurred I was in my early twenties. But still...yea, a jerk :P

And if he HAD to tell me what it was I was eating, couldn't he have phrased it a different way?? Did he have to use her NAME? D:

[ladyinthewood]

wow...
I have no words, but tears for the story.. how awful to kill a pet, a friend, you just don't do that....

[ravensong]

No, you don't. But that's my dad for you.

I just hope no one else ever has to go through something like that.

[elvenforever]

I probably would have thought of going vegan after that too. I still eat meat and seafood, and periodically pick a lobster out of a tank at Red Lobster that I then have boiled, cleaned and served, just so I can fundamentally CONNECT my meal was alive and breathing not a half hour before. The Native Americans and other cultures honored the animals they killed for food and other purposes. Since animals also eat other animals, I view my consumption of them as part of the great cycle of life. That having been said, I am very against inhumane treatment of animals.

[ravensong]

I have thought about going vegan, and I hardly ever touch dairy as it is (save for in the form of Cheez-it's and maybe the occasional cube of cheddar cheese if it's in the house).

I don't have problems with people who eat meat--especially if they somehow give thanks to that animal or honor it in some way. Lila, for example, is a meat eater. I think it's a choice everybody has to make for themselves, and just as there isn't a "one size fits all" religion, there isn't a one-size-fits-all way of eating. I don't eat meat because I seem to have been guided down a veg path (and I just tend to find meat itself kinda gross), but I don't expect everyone else to go veg either.

Here's what I do expect from every human: treat animals humanely. Don't torture them. Don't tease them. And even if they are being raised strictly for your consumption, don't treat them cruelly. Let them live their lives as much as you can. I realize that is't the reality of what happens, but that's what I feel should happen.

[elvenforever]

Sounds like a well-balanced approach towards life. :) And hear hear for treating animals humanely!! :)

[gentle_dream]

Oh that is just horrible!!!! Who does that? I don't understand how parents can give their kids trauma's like that.. that's just cruel.

[emploding]

I know SO many people that have similar stories from their childhood, about pets ending up as dinner. It's really really cruel of parents to do that, or to actually say it.