Vegetarians

I have little respect for vegetarians. But I have even less respect for carnivores who are grossed out by the knowledge that animals are dying for their food.*

I've never stalked an elephant with a crude hand-ax and 20 cohorts in hopes of carting off enough raw meat before the hyenas arrived to feed my tribe for a week. But I have killed a turkey.

Once upon a time, for Thanksgiving, a group of us who lived too far from college and/or were too poor to fly home decided that we'd spend the long weekend and our friend's dad's farm in southern Jersey. We arrived around 3am Wednesday night** and were awakened at 6am Thanksgiving morning by the dogs barking at the roosters to shut the hell up.

Pops*** came into the room and asked who wanted to kill the turkey. My other city-boy friends freaked out (my city-girl friends were spared by Pops' gentle sexism), but once I realized that I'd lived 19 years as a meat-eater without ever taking responsibility for it, I volunteered.

At first, I wasn't sure I could do it.

That's because I'd never met a turkey before.

I assumed that, when you walk out into a field of free-range turkeys, the first thing you notice is the sound. Or maybe the smell. But really, the main thing you notice is the fact that dozens of turkeys are pecking at your legs hard enough to draw blood, as if they think there are seeds hidden somewhere in your veins. You shoo them away, and then walk around in circles for a couple minutes and come back to bury a beak in your flesh.

These are hideous, foul-natured fowl. It's hard to call anything so stupid evil (W's saving grace), but it's hard to find anything nice to say about them. By the time Pops handed me the axe and explained how to do the deed, the only hard part was lifting 25 pounds of vicious attack-bird up onto the stump.

Still, I didn't enjoy killing it.

But I did enjoy eating it.

Yeah, I know, just another way of putting the old joke, "Meat is murder... and murder tastes damn good with A-1 sauce." Still, having never actually killed a soy plant, I'm not entirely sure I can eat tofu in good conscience--but I have enough understanding of where my meat comes from before it's injected with water and covered in plastic wrap that I can make the choice. I wouldn't want to kill a cow, but if I were starving in a field of cattle, I could.

Anyone who can't say the same, maybe they should stick to fungus. And if you can't bring yourself to kill a mushroom, you deserve to starve.

Footnotes follow. I like blogs with footnotes; it's such a silly idea. So here:

* Of course I don't have much respect for hunters, or people who work in slaughterhouses--or animals. And definitely not plants. I guess I don't have much respect in general.

** I know, officially Thursday starts at midnight, but if 6am is good enough for TV Guide, it's good enough for me.

*** Pops was not his actual name, and his sons weren't named Speed and Rex, but it sounds like a good farmer-dad name.