Row and Bee

Author notes

Meat is Murder

Kilre

on Nov. 15, 2009

I know images like this have been done before. Quite frankly, I don't care; originality in art is something so rare it's a miracle–ha ha. Artists borrow from one another, steal ideas, and reverse engineer concepts enough to make them seem original. But I don't have any such preconceptions about this one: I'm well aware of demotivationals and tee shirts rolling around saying this exact same thing.

And they're all correct, in a way. Semantically, meat by itself is just meat. It's when you actually kill something for its meat does it make it murder. And quite honestly, it really pisses me off when a holier-than-thou vegan makes some kind of bull shit moral argument that it's better to kill plants than it is animals.

Sure, I'll grant that animals have a nervous system, and grant that they feel pain, but I've never had it satisfactorily demonstrated to me that killing plants for food is any more moral. It may make what I'm trying to get across seem one-sided, but for us as a species to keep living, we have to kill things to digest their energy. I'm sure a day'll come when we can synthesize everything, and then we won't have a moral leg to stand on when it comes to whether or not we should kill to live: we'll be able to get our meals from something other than living organisms.

Until such a time comes, however, I find it hypocritical to kill plants for sustenance and deride people that are omnivorous.

I also find it only slightly funny that "militant" vegans don't try and stop other omnivorous creatures in the animal world from eating meat…perhaps they're being as speciesist as those of us that eat meat as well.

Once again, however, I will acknowledge that not all vegans insist upon everyone following their way of life, and for that I respect them, and would never force them to eat the same diet I do; that's just what respectable people do, not forcing opinions on each other. I am merely calling out to those that hold an extremist, nigh evangelical veganism.