Years ago I was driving to Utah when I pulled into a restaurant and ordered a hamburger.
As I was eating, I looked out the restaurant’s window, and saw some cows grazing.
After that I tried to finish my hamburger, but couldn’t.
My wife told me that one time her parents took her and her sisters to pick out a live turkey for thanksgiving. They did, had it killed, took it home, and prepared it for the meal. The sisters refused to eat it. The sight of seeing something alive, then dead lying on the table aroused their sensibilities – the surreal nature of the moment struck them as not making sense, or better stated, as not having any sense.
Sometimes when I’m at McDonald’s eating a Big Mac, I look around. and see the absurdity of all of us sitting at plastic booths and on light weight furniture munching on meat. This is going on all over the world seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. We’re just sitting there chewing and swallowing cows, and of course guarding our scrap of meat more closely than a pride of lions would after bringing down some non flesh eating prey in the African plains. Just think of what we would do if some little kid would come up and try to take our hamburger away. We’d snatch up our bag, and tell the little hyena to get out of our space.
But without eating large amounts of meat, Homo Sapiens would not have been able to provide enough energy to fuel the needs of a growing brain two hundred thousand years ago.
The paradox is obvious isn’t it. Without consuming large amounts of meat, I would not be the recipient of a brain that now allows me to question the sanity and morality of killing other animals for my meals.
What’s the solution? If you’re a believer, ask God, he started this whole thing. And while you’re doing that, look at one of those National Geographic Wild animal series. Once I saw a pride of lions taking down a baby elephant. But, The baby wouldn’t go down immediately. It took hours before the lions could kill the calf. During those hours the baby kept screaming out. I refuse to watch that series anymore.
With an attitude like that, someone once told me to become a vegetarian. My response: “YOU become a vegetarian. Saying that to me doesn’t even come close to solving the paradox.”
I have no clearer answer than, that’s evolution. Maybe the next round of adaptation we’ll learn how to do this thing better.