SAVE THE COWS, EAT A VEGETARIAN

SAVE THE COWS, EAT A VEGETARIAN


These were the words on someone’s t-shirt as I cycled past him on campus. My initial reaction was that something had been printed wrongly. It wasn’t until five seconds later that the full meaning of the message dawned on me. I could not help but shake my head and smile wryly.

Doesn’t the message seem paradoxical on so many accounts? First, it highlights the apparent paradox of kindness. How in the hell do we know at times whether something we perceives as kindness is really kindness? Vegetarians think themselves as saviors to other animals by refusing to slay them, but the same animals probably see them as competitors for food. I think the same logic can be applied in cases where people think they are doing a great service to humanity by being universally charitable. Or this old Gary Larsson cartoon that I remembered: A fly was having a nightmare, and images of fly papers, bug sprays and fly swatters were in his dreams. In other words, a human being might think he is doing something good for the hygiene of other human beings if he annihilates all pesky flies in the vicinity. Not if one is a fly. Thomas Malthus probably got it right on his essay on population and scarcity of resources. I think Jared Diamond provides an update on this idea in his book. Betrand Russell also had something to this effect in one of his essays, although he was talking about moral and ethics in general.

The second irony I see is this: One sometimes has to be cruel in order to be kind. (Of course one can go into the relativistic arguments of what it means to define “kindness” and “cruelty”, but as this is just a blog writing and not a philosophy thesis, we will not go into that). Note that an act of cruelty (i.e., cannibalism) is suggested such that other life-forms (i.e., cows) are saved (i.e., an act of kindness). Many a times in our lives, we think the best way to be kind to other people, well, is to be kind to them. Well, sometimes this works, but most of the time this fails. I mean, which one of us have not looked back and thought that something we perceived as “cruel” at the point in which it happened was in fact an act of kindness? Or something that we thought was “kind” to us was in fact something nasty when we perceive it many years down the road? Remember the old Chinese saying about losing your horse and not knowing whether it is a fortune or misfortune? The same logic can probably be applied in this case as well. Just change “lose your horse” to “charitable act” and “misfortune/fortune” to “kindness/cruelty”.

Or how about this: there is no kindness or cruelty in the world? Whoa, depends on whose perspective you take then, isn’t it? Anyway, as I’m a human being rather than a cow (or pig or chicken or prawns or vegetables etc), I think I’ll stick to eating meat, just to save the vegetarians from being victims of cannibalism.