Our Hypocritical Relationship With Meat

A logical outlook about the hypocritical reaction of non-vegetarians towards meat consumption and animal cruelty.

Our Hypocritical Relationship With Meat

A lot of us, me included, love gorging on a delicious plate of Chicken Kebab or Mutton biryani but ask the same people to witness a butcher slitting the throat of a Chicken or Goat and most would cringe at the thought of that.

Humans are violent beings, it’s only recently with the advent of modern society and the concept of human rights that we have been living in a relatively peaceful world. Turn on the national geographic channel and you will find bloody wars between packs of lions. For much of Human history, we were not much better than those animals and still many of us aren’t. Afghanistan, South Sudan and Syria should be enough of an evidence for the assertion.

Unlike Newton’s laws of motion, Moral and ethical standards have always been varying with time. Many of the deeds and undertakings we consider illegal now, were considered normal back in the day. In the not so ancient history, Teddy Roosevelt, the President of the United states during World War I, once referred to Africans as, “ape-like naked savages, who…prey on creatures not much wilder or lower than themselves”. Churchill too is known for his own share of utterly racists and downright ignorant comments by today’s moral standards. Before modern science debunked all theories, it was considered mainstream knowledge that some humans were superior to others. This was the justification for our forefathers to have slaves and treat people of a different race just as animals.

The change in moral standards from a hundred years ago to now begs the thought; will the historians of the future look back to the humans of the early 21st century in utter disgust and disdain for the savagery, callousness and ignorance shown by them towards animals?

Presently, we slaughter conscious, intelligent animals by the millions for leather and meat. We rip apart young calves from their mothers as soon as they are born, in the hope that we can take all the milk the Cow produces for ourselves. We purposefully create genetically modified Chickens without feathers and proper legs because their ultimate purpose is to end up on our plates. And we justify all these actions by the moral standards we have set up for ourselves so that we can sleep at night.

On most days, I personally don’t have any qualms about having meat. Like the majority of the non-vegetarians on the planet, I choose to ignore the pain the animals are put through while consuming a plate of Mutton biryani or a bucket of Chicken Wings from KFC.

On the few instances I come across articles and videos of cruelty towards animals in slaughterhouses, I contemplate my choice of having milk and meat. The contemplation though is short lived, I love Chicken too much to be able to give it up now. I though, feel equally bad whether the animal being killed is a Chicken, a Dog, an Orangutan or a Goat.

The problem is that not everyone thinks like this. The people that trigger me the most are those who denigrate the practice of consuming Dogs in China while themselves having Beef and Chicken. Their highly hypocritical criticism of the practice of having meat does more harm than good. If you are against eating meat, you should be against all kinds of it.

Then there are those who believe that drinking milk is okay but having meat is not. They are the ones who haven’t seen or choose to conveniently ignore the condition the Cows and Buffaloes are put through to get just a liter of milk. If the Cows could speak our language, they would plead to be killed for meat rather than being tortured everyday for their milk.

Until you go the way of a vegan you have no right to cringe or feel sad for the animals, be it dogs, cats or pigs in captivity being butchered. Stop this hypocrisy.