Seminar Week 5

Kat Thompson
Week 5 Seminar
820 Words

Triggering Passages:

“My first reservation about the animal-rights movement,” O’Hearne begins, :is that by failing to recognize its historical nature, it runs the risk of becoming , like the human-rights movement, yeat another, Western crusade against the practices of the rest of the world, claiming universality for what are simply its own standards.” (Coetzee, pg 60)

For Akwasasne people, much like many other native people, eating from the earth is about more than diet, Left to right: Kerri Helms, Alex Pocknett, Danielle Hill, Courtney Turner. Mashpee Wampanoag women at the tribe’s 95th annual Pow Wow, one of the oldest in the nation. 5 it is about cultural continuity. It is about the recipes, methods of harvest, the cycle of the seasons, and holidays. It is identity. (Deetz, pg 5)

The county, in court filings, raised a range of concerns, including harm to an area set aside for agriculture and the possibility that a wastewater-treatment system would not prevent harm to an aquifer. County attorneys also questioned whether the Interior Department had properly verified a significant increase in the tribal enrollment. (http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/cowlitz-tribe-opening-510m-casino-complex-they-hope-will-draw-45m-visitors/)

The readings this week have left me deep in thought. It would be easy to get distracted by the rhetoric in the Lives of Animals. The comparison of slaughterhouses to the death camps at the holocaust, I assume, is a lot for anyone to take in. I could talk for hours about how offensive this is, but I feel that most students in this program already agree.

Instead I will focus on disgust and distaste and what drives those things within us. In reading a book called the Anatomy of Disgust during a program last year, one thing really stood out to me. It is the idea of “us and them.” The idea that humans have a tendency to look at those who are different with disgust.

If you think about it, your family’s dirt-and I mean real physical filth- is not nearly as disgusting as a strangers. I do see that we have taken this tendency to assume that our way is the best. Our way: shoving chickens into cages so crowded and in such a rough way that we break their legs. Cutting off chickens beaks so that they don’t peck each other to death under the stressful circumstances.

It is easy to see how vegans and vegetarians can look at carnivores as beasts. This summer it will be 22 years since I became a vegetarian. I have never meat shamed anyone. I don’t think that shaming people for their eating habits is effective or appropriate.

An example:

I was taking a program with a young man who could only be described as a young “Montgomery Burns”. Really the child was horrible. He made it a point every time a class mate referred to a non-profit business to cut them off and tell them that non-profits were not businesses and they did not make money.

I came to class one day with a bag of Hershey’s kisses-they were left over from work and I brought them to share. The kid asked for one. It occurred to me that this very self-interested young man had probably never had the hankering to commit a random act of kindness. I told him when he asked that indeed he could have the entire bag if he gave half away.

The boy was dumbfounded. I was just giving things away? That did not fit within his mode of thinking. Still, he took the bag and went around the room to offer a kiss to our program mates.

The very first person he offered one to yell at him that she “would never eat cow torture” she loudly embarrassed him with the self-assured arrogance that only a teenage-vegan know it all could conjure. Then she went back to her phone and used the touchscreen-probably to tweet to her friends of her holiness.

As a long-term vegetarian, I wanted to puke, and then eat a cow-burger!

I think it is easy to look at others and judge what they do, no matter what criteria that we use to separate them into the “them” category. This is not calling people in. I can’t think of too many people who would have conversed with this little hipster know-it-all and decided that they wanted to be just like her.

When I was sixteen, a busload of hippies came through my home town. I fell in love. They were all mostly vegan and why they did not push their beliefs on anyone-they were giving away free food. Here was this beautiful group of people with incredibly loving and accepting energy giving away free food. I wanted to be just like them. I became a vegetarian that day and never went back. Nobody told me to. No body asked me to. They simply led the way and through their actions and PERSONAL choices created a change that has lasted 22 years.