I will not eat anything that walks, runs, skips, hops or crawls. God knows that I've crawled on occasion, and I'm glad that no one ate me.
– Alex Poulos.
Vegetarians make much of the fact that nothing was killed for the sake of their meal, and yet nothing could be further from the truth.
Today, while I was out harvesting rice in the fields, I couldn’t help but take note of all the creatures I was killing in order to produce this quintessential vegetarian staple. Barreling over the fields in my giant Mitsubishi MC 6000 combine, I could see Yae-yama-ao frogs (Owston's green tree frogs) and short-horned grasshoppers literally jumping for their lives.
“Do frogs scream?” I wondered. “Can a grasshopper sense when two tones of steal is heading its way?” Of course they can, or else why would they be fleeing?
Some (the lucky few) are able to escape the hurling juggernaut as it lurches toward them. Others (the unlucky majority) are either smashed under the thick rubber treads or gobbled up, along with the rice; and then, if they are not squished by the gears that pull the rice stalks down into the belly of the machine, they are pulverized by the mechanical thresher, which first separates the head of the grain from the stalk, and then further separates the kernel from the head.
“Frogs in a blender,” I thought, as the machine pushed on, wanting for a more appetizing analogy.
A keen rice farmer might be able to tell you that, on average, you’ll yield about four tones of rice per hectare, but no farmer could put an average to the number of frogs that are annually gobbled up or smashed by combines and ploughs in the process of maintaining just one rice paddy. The figure would be in the hundreds.
Nor could one, even if he desired, count the number of tadpoles, frog eggs, water skippers, spiders, baby fireflies, pond snails, leeches, worms, helmet shrimp and fire belly shrimp (to name but fraction of the creatures that make their homes in wet rice paddies) that are killed in the weeks prior to harvest, when the paddies—which were basically man-made ponds up until that point—are suddenly drained of water, and left to bake in the hot sun. That number would be in the thousands—if not millions.
Hitler, were he still alive, could certainly appreciate the efficiency of my Mitsubishi MC 6000.
“OK,” your vegetarian friend might interject. “Some amphibians and a few insects are killed. So what? I think we can all agree that a dead bug is not quite the same thing as a dead cow.”
Vegetarians are quick to point out that each animal has a variety of species-specific abilities and behaviors. Pigs, for example, are smarter than dogs, and incredibly social animals. Much like humans, they form into complex social hierarchies and reinforce their status through contest. Also, like humans, they are highly sensitive to stress; and can easily faint or go crazy when confined in close quarters. And yet, despite how similar to humans they are, we tend to look down on them. Perhaps you have heard the phrases, “sweat like a pig” or “as happy as a pig in shit.” In point of fact, pigs don’t sweat, and they don’t wallow in feces. Overheating is a major problem in pigs, and wallowing in mud is a way of regulating their body temperature. And when it comes to defecation, pigs choose a location to deposit their feces and faithfully return to it. Given the choice, pigs choose to live in clean conditions.
I know all this because a vegetarian was kind enough to teach me. However, I’ve never received a vegetarian lecture on the species-specific behaviors or intrinsic worth of, say, a frog. Wanting to learn a little more about the critters I was mowing over, I decided to pull out the encyclopedia, which states (and here I might add that, if you already know how badass frogs are, feel free to skip ahead):
Like other amphibians, frogs can breathe through their skin, but they can only do so if the skin is moist. Most frogs are active at night, which is when the air is more humid. Humid air helps them keep their skin moist. During the daytime, these frogs sit still in moist places, like under a rotting log, in a muddy place, underground, or in the crack of a rock. Even when frogs are active at night, they spend a good part of the time sitting still. This is how many species hunt. They remain in one place and wait for an insect or other prey animal to wander past, either grasp it with their mouths or flick out their tongues to snatch it, and swallow it whole. Most frogs have sticky tongues that attach in the front of the mouth and flip outward. Some frogs, including the poison frogs, take a more energetic approach to hunting, and hop about looking for their next meals.
Frogs often mate based on the weather. Those that live in warm, humid places may mate any time of year but usually only do so during or after a rainstorm. Frogs that make their homes in colder climates commonly wait until the temperatures warm and the spring rains have come. For species in especially dry areas, the rainy season is the time for mating. The males of almost all frog species call during the mating season. They make the calls by sucking in and letting out air from the vocal sac, which is a piece of balloon-like skin in the throat area. Most frogs, like the spring peeper, have one vocal sac, but some species, including the wood frog, have two. The males of each species have their own calls. The calls not only attract females, but sometimes tell other males to stay away and find their own mating places. In a few species, calls may not be enough, and two males may fight. Most fights are little more than wrestling matches, but in some species, like the gladiator frogs, males have sharp spines and often injure one another. In many frog species, the males call together in a group. This type of group calling is called a chorus. In some species, the males all call and mate over a very short time, often within a few days. Frogs that breed over such a short time are called explosive breeders.
To mate in most species, the male scrambles onto the back of a female in a piggyback position called amplexus and hangs onto her. As she lays her eggs, he releases a fluid. The fluid contains microscopic cells called sperm that mix with the eggs. This mixing is called fertilization. Once fertilization happens, the eggs begin to develop. The tailed frogs do things a bit differently. The males have "tails," which are actually little bits of flesh they use to add their fluid to the eggs while the eggs are still inside the female's body. Depending on the species, a frog may lay less than a dozen eggs at a time or more than a thousand. The typical female frog lays her eggs in the water, often in underwater plants, and she and the male leave the eggs alone to develop on their own. In a few species, one of the parents stays behind to watch over the eggs and sometimes stays to cares for the tadpoles, too. The typical frog egg develops in the water into a tadpole. In some species, the egg develops instead in a moist spot, and in a few species that moist spot is inside a pouch or on the back of one of the parents. A number of the frogs that have their young on land lay eggs that skip the tadpole stage and hatch right into baby frogs. In most frogs, however, the eggs hatch into tadpoles that continue growing in the water. Most tadpoles begin to change into froglets within a month or two, but some remain tadpoles for a year or more. The change from a tadpole to a froglet is called metamorphosis. In this amazing process, the tadpole's tail becomes shorter and shorter, tiny legs sprout, and the tadpole begins to take on the shape and color of the adults. Soon a tiny froglet, often still with a little bit of the tail left, takes its first hops.
So, in other words, frogs are basically like little Zen monks, peacefully sitting zazen for the greater portion of their day, accepting whatever nature happens to ‘drop in their bowl’ so to speak—whether it be a water skipper or a two-tone combine.
Like humans, pigs and everything else that contains the breath of life, frogs eat, sleep, propagate and, one would assume, have fun—albeit in a particularly frog way. And yet, why do we value pigs over frogs? Why would it be acceptable to kill a few frogs in order to make a bowl of rice but not a few pigs?
Quite simply, because we are biased.
Humanity tends to identify with and pay sympathy to those creatures with whom it bears the greatest similarity, and to shun those of least similarity, thus creating a great chain of being: in which the nematode’s life is worth more than amoeba’s; the insect’s is worth more than the nematode’s; the frog’s life is worth more than the insect’s; the mouse’s life is worth more than the frogs; and so on, all the way up to large animals and ‘higher order’ primates, above which, in all its glory, stands homo sapiens—the species that named itself ‘wisdom.’
And then there is the rice itself. Is not rice a living thing—possessed of the same self-preserving anima we find in all living things? It drinks water and eats the sun’s energy, pure. It bears seeds, which like the egg of a frog or the child of a woman, are its progeny, serving the propagation of its species. And yet we, by harvesting rice, kill it so that we might eat its precious seeds. No, I’m not going to argue that plants are conscious (although they may be), or that we shouldn't eat them because they are alive. My point is that, the premium we place on consciousness itself is a byproduct of our biased worldview, which places it at the pinnacle of the great chain of being we preside over.
To sum up that worldview in a nutshell: We value the large (human scale) over the small (microscopic), the sentient (animals) over the insentient (plants), the emotional (mammalian) over the unemotional (reptilian), and the cognitive or rational (human) over the emotional and instinctual (animal). It is precisely this system, the presumption of an intrinsic hierarchy of life, that allows the vegetarian to eat rice—and thus kill frogs, mice, spiders, newts, worms and other small ‘pests’—but makes eating, say, a pig anathema.
It is a sick calculus, in my opinion, that values the death of 1,000 frogs less than that of a single pig or a cow. How could one even begin to compare such things? By body weight? By amount of consciousness or pain involved? By the size or number of their respective souls? There simply is no way to quantify or compare such things. All death is a tragedy; and I am one with the vegetarian in that, were it possible, I would rather not kill anything in order to eat. Unlike the vegetarian, though, I am aware that—no matter what one eats—one must kill in order to live. To believe otherwise is to live in delusion.
By this I am not suggesting that you should continue eating CAFO-raised beef or give up vegetarianism. Clearly, not all killing is the same. My point is simply that you should open your eyes and recognize what it means to be alive: namely, that in order for you to live, something must die; and that someday, you too will become something’s dinner.
No amount of broccoli and tofu can change that.
