“Dear you say you love flowers
And you pluck them from the fields,
you say you love animals
And you eat them.
Darling, when you say you love me,
I am afraid!”
Some people become vegetarians or vegans, however, to plants they talk to them or make them listen to music. An act of kindness put into practice because, in general, it seems to help plant beings grow better as well.
If this is true (it seems it is) it should prompt reflection on the incompatibility that the act itself highlights, between the vegetarian diet and the loving care of plants that, in some of their versions, are used as food or in construction, furniture, fashion … exploiting their characteristics … which are, however, only usable by interrupting their vital functions.
Be that as it may, if you speak to the plant world, it means that you consider it to be composed of living, sentient creatures, capable of reacting to stimuli. And this puts you on the same level as those who love animals, and at the same time do not disdain chicken breast, slice, ham, etc.
On closer inspection, there is no food and social behavior that can be sensibly motivated with respect to what one excludes from one’s diet or the use of its derivatives in various areas.
All of us, each in our own way and without obvious qualms, divide both the animal and plant worlds into two distinct classes that we can summarize as “expendable or not”
It should therefore be apparent that when we call ourselves “sensitive” we are actually referring to a personal, subjective, legitimate, relative construction resulting from a mix of conditioning, awareness, knowledge, curiosity, mental elasticity, intellectual honesty … as well as a myriad of other more or less rational factors.
We say we love animals, and to show it we hold them close to us by covering them with “things” to the point of considering them fellow human beings, humanizing their behaviors.
We give them more attention than our fellow humans and spend billions on “pet” foods without caring what it means to produce those foods that are, too, necessarily composed of both plant and animal sources:
https://moreaboutchicken.com/what-does-your-cat-eat/
The animals from whom we seek companionship we turn them into replicants of our expectations and needs. And in order to achieve these results, however, we do not hesitate to sterilize them and to accustom them to comply with our own habits and limitations, denying them — in fact — the experience of being free and independent, welcoming them into enclosures that we call homes that are objectively unnatural for animals. And we do this to indulge our fantasies of “loving masters.”
We do not realize that those loving cares condition that being to adapt to situations of ease that will “change” it. These forms of departure from the “wild” state also occur spontaneously in situations that we, however, have difficulty accepting: the cases of bears, wild boars, foxes, … that approach population centers, aware that they will find more convenient feeding opportunities there, demonstrate how animals willingly take advantage, as we do, of comforts when they become available.
This is without taking into account other utilitarian functions that we attribute to the animal world, such as sports and play activities for which they are domesticated and turned into instruments of our pleasure and entertainment.
Then there are people who, in addition to exerting the consequences of their beliefs, also try to influence those with fragile beliefs on these issues by directing their attention only to certain representatives of the animal world. That is, those destined for human food, calling them victims of abuse not only because they are destined for cooking recipes, but going on to analyze every aspect of the breeding stages.
For chickens-for example-they regard protected intensive farms as places of torture where the animal is denied the right to express natural behaviors, when the opposite is even true
These people, having no direct dealings with poultry supply chains, roguishly procure video materials that belong to out-of-control realities … and disseminate them, despite the fact that those images are not representative of the livestock sector of the controlled professional supply chains.
Even when proven untrue to them, these people go out of their way to denounce precautions (taken on chicken farms to prevent animals from injuring each other and getting sick), portraying them as evidence of cruelty and in fact misrepresenting facts that have quite the opposite purpose instead:
https://moreaboutchicken.com/what-do-we-know-and-by-whom-about-poultry-farming/
And to say that those who bring forward these “complaints” are the same people who, just to give an example, sterilize their “friends” (because “… if it then makes puppies where do I put them…”) and heavily condition the natural expression of their instincts: social life, mating, food gathering, instinctive defense of territory, the needs to expel feces and urine where and when needed, etc.
On the question of plant sensitivity, some claim that “plants have no nervous system, so they do not suffer.” Probably they themselves are endowed with a different nervous system as well … a system that potentially transforms the different into an entity that should be treated differently just because it does not correspond to the idea of pain as understood by humans … It should be explained to them that there is no such thing in “creation” as something already dead or inanimate–and at the same time organic regardless–that is destined by divine will for our nourishment.
We attach more reflections here: https://moreaboutchicken.com/food-illusionism/
What about you? Have you made your own list of which animals and plants are “expendable or not”?
