meat is meet

Today I learned that there is such a thing as cowboy poetry.  While it's far from what I aspire to, we should all appreciate the contributions cowboy poets have made to the American literary landscape.

Be careful following the trail of Baxter Black -- that man could talk you into an ouroboros.  His piece about bovine uterine prolapse is particularly entrancing (the words "whopping big burrito" feature prominently).

Now, as to the above, I've never been much for vegetarianism.  The word alone is enough to get my hackles up.  There are many seemingly good reasons a person might choose not to eat meat -- not wanting to participate in industrialized or spiritual suffering, fearful about health concerns, desiring to feel superior to others -- but these are all fatally flawed.

To exist is to perpetuate and prolong the suffering of others.  We are just misery distributors, at the bottom of it all.  Beyond that, there is zero metaphysical value to "causing suffering."  It is a non-factor.  Stab a man, stab yourself, or just give everybody hugs.  The end is the same.  Your purchase of a piece of cow doesn't change that.

My little rant aside, there's a deeper point to make.  Where does the value of a life come from?  If a cow lives its whole life in a pen before being slaughtered, would it have been better off it it'd never been born?  Does the pain it feels negate any of the joys it might have felt at eating, or even the simple pleasure of being alive?

More importantly, if there's value in those little joys, then there must be less value if there are less fewer.  And if people don't buy meat, then fewer cows will be bred -- less joy overall.  The only consistent viewpoint, as far as pain is concerned, is to think of animals as metaphysical pain machines -- capable of nothing but feeding humans meat and guilt.

As to the health aspects of eating meat, we must recognize that the body is agnostic when it comes to the source of the food going in.  Digestion is a series of chemical processes, and all that matters, really, is quantities.  If you're bad at limiting your intake of certain foods, fine, but it's a mistake to act as if certain foods are straight-up bad for you.  Everything's bad for you in certain quantities, and some things take less of those quantities than others before they start affecting your health adversely.  But you gotta get protein somewhere, and never eating meat is a somewhat draconian approach to monitoring your diet.

I can't argue with the aspect of superiority, though.  If you want to think you are better than others, vegetarianism is a great start.  You will get a lot of support from the like-minded.  I only hope that this little post, to some extent, reduces the value of that position.

You better believe Baxter Black eats meat, though, and you know what that guy is about.