Mad cow scare doesn't affect vegetarians
Barbara Yaffe
Vancouver Sun
Thursday, May 22, 2003
When you order your next sirloin steak, take a good look at what's on the plate. You may recognize the flesh as a slice right off Bessie's hide.
Of course, that's only if you think about it. Most people don't. A few more, however, may be inclined to in light of Tuesday's revelation about mad cow disease.
In January, a slaughtered Alberta cow was found to be diseased. Ottawa is assuring Canadians there's no evidence the animal entered the food chain and mad cow doesn't spread from cow to cow.
But could tainted feed that presumably caused the one cow to become infected have been fed to other Alberta cows? Or are there other Alberta cows from the same source also infected? Difficult to be certain.
I'm not a bit worried about the mad cow scare, even though human beings consuming infected meat become candidates for Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease. I'm a vegetarian.
Beef industry beneficiaries, of course, are frantic. Theirs is a $5-billion a year industry and their livelihood; to me, the billions merely represent an unimaginable amount of misery for an inestimable number of cows.
I can't rationalize why I should think of a cow any differently than I think of the four sensitive animals I share my home with. Perhaps bovines aren't as responsive or manipulative. But what's the basis for assuming they feel no pain?
Those who start contemplating such things find themselves bound to turn away from meat consumption, and chicken and fish for that matter. Because such thought results in a transformation that, I posit, is akin to being born again for those who find religion.
Those who aren't born again think of those who are as a bit bonkers. That's the way I viewed vegetarians before I became one.
It happened to me and my husband several years ago after watching a video, Babe, a clever flick about a pig that lets the viewer see the world from the animals' perspective.
The next day, meat didn't quite look the same. We began pondering the cruel and careless things done to animals to prepare them for our dinner plate. It's nothing short of torture. If the animals could communicate, what might they say?
A visit to the slaughterhouse or industrial chicken farm or a trip on a transport truck full of animals bound for market might do the trick just as well as watching Babe.
As instant vegetarians, we had no idea how to go about eating in a healthy way. For us, the transformation was a process of discovery that revealed there is indeed life after cooked flesh. And vegetarianism reduces the chances of obesity, high blood pressure and colon cancer.
I never knew how good tofu could taste when fashioned into "chicken drumettes" for example, or how delicious legumes and grains are. (For the ABCs of vegetarian eating: www. nms.on.ca/secondary/vegetarian_eating.htm)
Where do you draw the line, we were often asked; some vegetarians eat fish, for example. We decided anything that had a mother and a father was off limits for consumption, and never looked back or craved our former diet. Which we now see as archaic and inhumane.
We have company -- but not a lot. Surveys show about four per cent of Canadians are vegetarian and the number isn't growing. A third of vegetarians say they want to eat healthy; 21 per cent do it for the animals.
Canadian meat eaters annually consume 32.2 kilograms of beef, compared to 45.2 for Americans.
Meat eaters must be people who don't have much feeling for animals, or folks who don't think about what's experienced by the animals. They're in denial.
The idea of eating meat might be more bearable if production practices were more humane. But the population has yet to demand higher standards from the factory farms increasingly taking over the industry.
If you want to learn more about the lack of legislation governing animal practices and the torture farm animals sustain, read Charlotte Montgomery's recent book Blood Relations: Humans, Animals and Politics.
It will make you sick. And very angry.
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