Do Not Try This On Your Own Planet

So far in this series on vegetarianism I've thrown out two assertions:
1) It's not right to treat animals as less than animals.
2) Treating animals well doesn't give us the right to eat them either.

However I'm not fool enough to think that these arguments alone will convince a lot of people to change their ways. I myself managed to skate by those two thoughts for more than a decade.

I liked my meat too much to give up a cherished habit that easily.

But those two thoughts didn't come alone. They were just appetizers.

The full course had a lot of meat to it. (Hardy har har...)

Yes, the reasons to take this leap kept piling on into my head this past Sunday while I walked about a park on that sunny morning.

I was preparing to again ignore pleas for the welfare of the animals...

...but then I was assaulted by a plea for the welfare of mankind.

There is a certain category of beliefs that drives me nuts: the beliefs that would produce disastrous results if everyone lived by them.

For example, consider immunizations.

I've known a few people who declined to give their kids polio shots. Their reasoning was, "The shots have a 1 in 2,000 chance of doing XYZ harm to my child. And besides, nobody has polio anymore."

I find that kind of thinking very irritating. It's the free-rider problem.

The reason, the very reason, nobody around here has polio is because we've all been subjecting our children to these shots.

When polio has been wiped from the planet, we can stop. Until that day, people who don't inoculate their kids are free-riding on the backs of those who do. If everyone took the free-riding route, polio would return to every continent within a generation.

Or how about this one: family planning.

I have known couples who decided to have piles of kids. And that's fine. What troubles me is when someone who has made that decision argues that we all should have "all the children God gives us."

Meaning... no birth control.

There's a gentle rebuke to this assertion, which is to simply point out that if all humanity took this view, we'd destroy ourselves and the entire planet pretty quickly. Large families worked when infant, child and adult mortality rates were much higher.

But if we all had 10 kids and none died? The global population would first soar... and then crash. Starvation, disease and war would soon provide practical solutions to our insanity.

So, No. No, no, and No. A few stragglers can certainly practice and preach the "as many children as God gives you" insanity with very little harm done.

Widespread adoption of this lifestyle? It would destroy the planet. Period.

Where am I going? Let's return to the meat industry. And guess what?

It only works if just the Americans practice American eating habits.

If we attempted to replicate the American diet across the globe, the consequences would be no less dire than if every American and every European decided to have 10 kids. And didn't give them polio shots.

A diet that includes lots of meat would lead to global Armageddon.

If everyone did it.

Why? The details can be found elsewhere, but in short it's because it takes more than ten pounds of corn to produce one pound of beef.

Much of the globe has enough problems as it is, keeping starvation at bay. And that's with people eating stuff like corn, wheat and rice.

Imagine what kind of land and water resources would be required to give everyone the American burger. In quantity.

Let's talk about turning the entire Amazon forest (all of Brazil and more) and turning it into farmland. And that.... that would not be enough to give the world the McDonald's habit.

Insanity.

So as I walked through the park a few days ago, I was reminded (though I didn't want to hear it) that I myself was practicing what I hate to hear other people preach: a habit that cannot be safely practiced by anything more than a spoiled and wealthy minority of the global population.

So no, I don't think history will look that kindly on our current American diet of meat or the industry that caters to it.

I didn't want to hear that.

But I did.

And the thoughts didn't stop there.

To be continued...