Insufferable Animal Lovers

I saw this post on social media. 

I glanced at it, smiled at the good things that not eating animals does, and then I moved on. I don't get on Facebook very often because there's nothing to see there except ads for stuff I don't want. So when I do hop on The Facebook, I scroll for approximately 45 seconds and then get back to whatever I was doing. Sometimes I even count to 45 to make sure I don't give it a full minute of my time. In this case, I scrolled past the happy reminder and then thought, "Hmm, I don't usually see nice things posted about veganism. I wonder how it was received." 

So then I looked at the comments. 

Out in real life, I don't bother trying to explain veganism to people. I don't usually mention that I don't eat animals and I wouldn't try to explain that I don't eat animals as an economic protest of how we treat the industrially farmed animals, which are the only ones available to buy in grocery stores. It's kind of like choosing not to have kids - people don't actually want the answer. They want me to confirm that I'm weird and selfish so that they can approve of my decision. In the case of not eating animals, they want to hear me claim that I'm better than them, so they can confirm that vegans are brainwashed snobs. (This may not be entirely universal but it's certainly what I thought about vegans....until I actually listened to some.)

In the case of the comments on this post, I became exasperated by the non-vegans' exasperation. First, I don't know why they are offended enough to try to deny the post. It's not about them. What does it have to do with their existence? (Seems like it hit a nerve.) Second, I don't know why they think the post is inaccurate. It's unlikely they have studied the environmental effects of industrial agriculture, so I'm stunned by the willingness to deny unfamiliar information. All of their questions and comments can be answered, not that they want to hear them. Third, why are so many of the sentences incoherent? If I was going to argue on a topic that I haven't studied, I'd at least form complete sentences so that I seem like I had some sense.

So I scrolled through the comments and mulled over what I thought about veganism and environmentalism before I knew anything about it. Growing up, we heard that people concerned about climate change and the planet were "wacky" people. Hippies and freaks and nerds. People that didn't eat meat were trying to be better than other people. They were making a statement about how the laypeople live - or something like that. They definitely weren't any fun and couldn't relate to us normal people. 

I realized I never came up with those thoughts on my own. They were passed down or subliminally tucked into my brain without me ever looking into it. That's fine - that's how a person's entire culture and worldview is created. We don't often question the ideas we are surrounded by. Why would we? Everyone around us says it's true. 

It happens with all the unflattering "isms" we can be carrying around; racism, sexism, ageism. It's not usually blatant statements that make us all a little racist. It happens through a thousand little subtleties; casting choices in movies, folks that prove stereotypes true, having a singular unpleasant experience, etc. So I reckon it was some Peta vegans that marched around with their chins higher than everyone's else's that made us all think that plant-eaters are the worst. (The Peta people are just too much sometimes. Definitely can't relate to us laypeople.) 

As for these Facebook commenters that are mad about the positive outcomes of a plant-based diet and subsequently deny them with grammatically incorrect ravings, well, multiple studies show (not to be snobby) that the folks that get fussy about their right to eat meat, usually do so because they love animals. Isn't that cute? Apparently, the awareness of a vegetarian or vegan person subliminally reminds meat eaters that they are "hurting" animals. And most people don't want to hurt animals. And they aren't "directly" hurting animals, so it feels like a real allegation to lay on their shoulders. It's the people unbothered by plant-eaters that really don't care one way or the other. 

The opposite of this picture post would say, "Everyday as a meat eater: you kill one animal, dump out 5000L of water, ignite 2.7m of forest..." etc. And that isn't true is it? My sweet mama hasn't killed anything besides bugs and would never go to the park with an arm-full of fireworks. She couldn't possibly be one of these seemingly terrible meat-eater people. Right? 

Right. 

Just like the vegans don't save an animal a day or use any of the saved water to control the fires in the Amazon. What the post is saying is, "We've done the math and the average Australian person consumes 220lbs of meat each year. It takes x,y,z, to create 220lb pounds of meat. Therefore, one less person putting economic demand on industrial ag, results in a savings of this many animals lives, this much water, grain, and forest consumed by animals, and this much co2 emitted by animals and degraded land after one years time. Then we divided by 365 days and came up with these approximated numbers." (These are the figures for Australia's industrial agriculture. If you're curious, Americans eat slightly more meat per year.)

And if you do the research and the math, it is technically correct. The figures can give a little in either direction depending on the culture and country being illustrated. My one allowance is that an animal life will not be saved each day, however "approximately one less animal will be brought into the system." It's a supply and demand concept, and also, they don't mean a whole cow - it refers to smaller animals including our oceans friends. I understand why the missing context in this image could lead some to wonder, but if you got worked up about it, wouldn't you just google it to find out?

So, when you know a good bit about industrial agriculture, and you read comments like those from Gael and Kyle, you wind up frustrated as well as embarrassed for them. They're so mad they can't control how fast they're typing, so they wind up making a question that can't exist. For example, Kyle asked. "How many crops do we need for animal byproduct loss?" 
You don't need any crops for that, Kyle. Animal byproduct doesn't have anything to do with the amount of crops they ate. Also, "byproduct loss" is kind of an oxymoron. Come on, Kyle!

In conclusion, being that I care an awful lot about animals and the planet, I wish people could forgo the juvenile knee-jerk reaction of having their preferences questioned, and instead, lean in with curiosity. You don't need to walk away with a different mindset. Just do a little listening. 

And if you still don't like it, mutter about it to yourself on your way home to do some research about it. Maybe they ARE actually all wrong. 
Now you possess the knowledge to gently explain it to them next time. 

Writing Prompt #312

The view from my childhood bedroom window was the kind they write into the backgrounds of novels about devastatingly beautiful people who stare through bubbled glass at the rolling countryside while considering their trials. In the movie adaptation, the camera moves from their perfectly painted faces and pans out to the wide, lush world that contains them. I would sit in my window and wonder if anyone would mistake me for a literary heroine. I wondered if I looked beautiful in my window. In reality I looked more like Steve Urkel than Elizabeth Bennet, but that's the power of daydreams; you don't have to be you in your daydreams, and certainly everything would be different if I wasn’t me. 

The view itself was a verdant display of coastal beauty; palmetto trees, hydrangeas, and mossy oaks dotted across a green lawn that gently sloped into the salt marsh. The marsh grass stood tall, bright green or nearly golden depending on the season, and it stretched across iridescent pluff mud and oyster beds until it gave way to Charleston Harbor. I could sit in my bedroom and count the church steeples Downtown or watch cars cross the bridge into Mt. Pleasant. I’ve decided that giving a view like this to a sensitive and imaginative child sets them up for a lifetime of gentle sentiment and nostalgia. My sister’s bedroom window looked out over our hot, tar driveway and she turned out to be a real bruiser. 

Please enjoy this fabulous sky we had a few nights ago.

Because of the window, I did a lot of sitting and thinking. I was six or so, and I created a fantastical inner world that made it hard to relate to the sticky kids I had to hang around at school. I would recoil into myself to think deeply on why they were always so loud and damp. I figured something must be amiss at their homes, and I would complete my assignments while wondering about the unmet needs of my classmates. 

And now that time has passed, I can look back and see that people are mostly already who they will be when they’re still in elementary school, but we have to wait thirty years to be able to turn it into anything. Maybe twenty if we're lucky. I was a squeamish, nervous, introvert in kindergarten, and very few things have progressed from there. My sister was a bossy, impatient, hall-monitor of a kid and she’s still just as frenzied. My dad; a door-to-door bubblegum salesman at five years old. He goes on to dominate in international sales. So it’s all right there in the elementary school squirts. We just have to let them age nicely in temperature-controlled cinderblock institutions until the precise moment of their own clarity.

But back to the view from my window. My formal education was a background character of my childhood. The main character and my real education was my homelife - an ongoing study of the people that were raising me, the potential harms and benefits of my burdensome older sister, the girl next door who I wanted to be just like, my ten cousins, four strange grandparents, and the unnerving people at church on Sunday. Who cares about writing in cursive with so much wonderful chaos to study at home?