meat-eating chimpanzees
Blogger stole my post about Paul Martin's fabulous speech last Monday. I'm mad.
So, I've gotten in a bit of a discussion about vegetarianism on a mailing list, and this got me to thinking... do chimpanzees eat meat? Because they are, as I'm sure you know, our closest relative and they share a measly 98.5% of our DNA. (Pretty neat, eh?) Anyways, my search led me to this: The Predatory Behaviour and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees. Turns out that we became omnivores long before our previous incarnation split into chimps/humans. So vegetarianism is pretty much a new spin on things, as far as humans are concerned. That makes sense, seeing as vegetarianism requires access to information about how to get which vitamins and how much you need, and access to things like tofu, which I'm assuming most people in Europe weren't too familiar with. This isn't to say that vegetarianism is bad/unnatural/etc., just to say that... meat-eating monkeys aren't your run-of-the-mill variety, but the ones that are closest to us just happen to be that type, so maybe eating meat isn't bad.
Seriously, folks, vegetarians are fine by me. I know a few of them, and they are fine folks, and cute at that. I just don't really get it. I mean, okay... look at the cute little lamb, don't you want to pet him? Yes, I do. But I also want to cook him up and eat him, because let's face it, lamb is good. The cuteness just doesn't override the pure tastiness for me. Is that selfish, to say that my enjoyment of food should override his will to live? Yeah, probably, but life's a bitch. I mean, it's not like we're totally immune from life's bitchiness either, we get killed by other beings, like AIDS and smallpox and sometimes the plain old flu. It's not like that's fair either, stupid viruses killing me so they can live longer, but I don't think that the viruses are being immoral.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't feel bad. And I suspect the chimps don't either.
(waiting for the reply from Dani in 3...2...1...) ;)
posted by Heather Ann @ 7:05 PM
3 Comments:
I was mad that blogger ate your post too, cause I was going to comment.
All I was going to say was that I saw Paul Martin leaving his house when we were in Ottawa. It was neat.
Also, about how you can't outlaw sin...so when do we get to kill?!
Well, the post is still there (the html page at least) and I've contacted Blogger to see what I can do about getting it linked from these pages again. Weird.
re: sin - Sins are things that offend God. Murder is against the law because it hurts people, not because it offends God. The same goes for theft, cheating on your taxes, doing heroin, etc. Just because the two categories overlap doesn't mean that you can outlaw something just because it's considered a sin. We don't outlaw murder because it's a sin, nor should we outlaw gay marriage because it's a sin. Murder is outlawed because it hurts people, whereas gay marriage doesn't have that property.
I was sort of being sarcastic when I said that, cause I do realize the harm principle is applied.
Which made me sort of think...we were talking in class last year about the harm principle & pornogrpahy, which most would classify as a sin. So should that be outlawed? (Is it even outlawed? I should know that, but I can't remember...I think there are certain things that are allowable and certain things that aren't). It's just a question from the peanut gallery here, not saying I have an opinion on either issue.
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