The inside of the TTC is plastered with a wide variety of advertisements, presented to the discerning viewer in a variety of ways ranging from the reasonable (Join Ryerson University!) to the desperate (Please, please visit the UK!) to the morbid (Thinking of suicide !?! Let us help!). Recently, the Vegetarian Society has put up a few ads which probably belong in the last of these categories. Each of these ads features two little animals sporting illegal levels of cuteness. One of them is a a puppy, or a kitten or some such pet wannabe. The other is a calf or a piglet or a similar aspiring main course. The poster goes on to talk of the cruelty of factory farming and exhorts the reader to turn vegetarian. Above the whole affair, in large judgmental letters is the question: Why LOVE one but EAT the other !?!
I suppose a lot of Koreans reading the ad ask the exact same question - WHY love one but eat the other !?! If you like dog, eat dog. Anyway, jokes aside, I do agree factory farming is cruel, unnecessarily so. And perhaps the kind thing to do is to stop animal product usage or convert to free range or whatever. The thing is though, that the ad is put up by the Vegetarian Society... Mark that. Not the Vegan Society but its softcore sibling. That brings me to my question:
I eat meat. I don't eat much pork or beef or even fish. Chicken is pretty much it on most occasions. A lot of my friends (especially the Muslim and Jewish ones), eat only beef and chicken. Now, would there be ANY benefit to the animals if we converted to vegetarianism !?!
The reason I ask this is thus: Beef and chicken are meats from 'dual purpose' animals. That is to say, they supply milk and eggs as well as meat. I would assume that the efficiency focus of factory farms would mean most of the cattle raised for meat are also milked. Similarly, meat chickens are, umm, egged. So, even if people stopped consuming their flesh, they would still be kept in similar numbers (if not the same) for their other products. Considering that the main objection of the Vegetarian Society is not how these animals are killed (which is a pretty highly regulated practice and which would be carried out by the egg and milk industry anyway; old animals would be killed to make way for younger high productivity ones), but rather the conditions in which they are kept alive, isn't vegetarianism going to make little to no difference to the animals in the poultry and beef industry !?!
In summary: would giving up all meat apart from beef and chicken be morally equivalent to becoming a vegetarian !?!
(The argument assumes that the most chickens and cattle are used for more than one purpose. I am not sure why I am assuming this when Google is at hand. Whatever - live with it.)
