Yep. When Tom Sawyer is being a total asshole and leaving Jim in slave prison so he can pretend to be noble and free him. Huck didn’t know, he’s doing the noble thing and risking eternal damnation, but Tom’s being a jerk.
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If I’m jumping on anyone (and I don’t think that’s entirely fair, but I’ll accept it for the sake of argument), it’s the person who described a hunter as a vegan; unless he/she is referring to themselves in the third person, we haven’t heard from the hunter herself.
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I think veganism is a principled stance, and I admire people who can stick to it (notwithstanding my stupid joke about them making poor eating). It’s not a stance I agree with, but their arguments have a moral force that I sometimes find unsettling (but not so much as to stop me eating meat, dairy or eggs).
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Likewise, I think the decision to eat only that meat which you have killed yourself is a principled and admirable stance. It is, however, one I cannot take to, even I was so inclined, thanks to the paucity of edible game in my neighbourhood. (I have tried squirrel, but I didn’t like it, and it strikes me you’d have to kill an awful lot to make them a regular part of your diet.)
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The philosophies mentioned in #2 and #3 are not the same thing. Nor are they variations on a theme. “Eating only what you kill” deserves a snappy name of its own. If it has one, I don’t know what it is; but whatever it is, it’s not veganism.
Words are precision tools: if you use them incorrectly, they get blunt. We’ve already lost the distinction between meticulous and scrupulous; that between uninterested and disnterested is under threat. Neither vegans nor “kill to eat” hunters will thank you for blurring the lines between them.
A final analogy. There is nothing wrong with being a virgin. There is nothing wrong with not being a virgin, whether you’ve had one sexual partner or a hundred. But saying “I’m a virgin, except for that one person I fucked” is a contradiction in terms.
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[quote=“milliefink, post:41, topic:59685”]
My guess too. The part where the seriously good novel descends into farce when Tom and Huck imprison Jim in a backyard shed, if I’m remembering right.
[/quote]It’s actually Tom’s Uncle Silas who has Jim imprisoned, based on leaflets from the Duke and Dauphin, who want to abscond with a quick buck by selling Jim. Huck (and Jim) doesn’t know Jim was freed by the Widow Douglas’ will, but Tom does. That’s where the book goes off the rails and destroys any good feeling I ever had for Tom Sawyer as a character.
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[quote=“SheiffFatman, post:43, topic:59685”]
We’ve already lost the distinction between meticulous and scrupulous; that between uninterested and disnterested is under threat.
[/quote]Literally. Like irony.
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Along with all the standards out there for building green, organic produce,fair trade and such, I kind of wish there was some kind of scale for eating animal flesh. From rain forest burgers at the fast food place, to free range, organically raised kobe beef. Halal and Kosher meats strike me as a good idea, but they don’t emphasize the things I most care about. What’s the carbon footprint? How much by-catch was wasted? Antibiotic load? How smart is the creature I’m eating? How badly abused was it before it was killed? Was the flesh irradiated during packaging?
I don’t think there’s any single standard that would satisfy everybody, but it’s the kind of social conversation I’d like to see on the labels for these things.
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Thanks for explaining, but while I do have my own accuracy bugaboos, I’m rarely in practice a prescriptivist (that is, I usually keep them to myself), and I still see no good reason to be one in this case.
I understand what you’re saying just fine, and I’m not saying that you’re wrong (though I still do think you’re being pedantic). Still, I would have no problem with someone saying that she’s a vegan and/or that she follows a vegan diet except when it comes to this or that exception; I would understand what she’s saying just fine, and I’m sure you would too, even if the strict definition of “a vegan” doesn’t precisely fit her. I’m okay with the efficiency of saying “I’m a vegan most of the time,” instead of the cumbersome “I avoid consumption of all animal products most of the time.”
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We’re going to have agree to disagree, as by my count our discussion constitutes a full quarter of the posts on this thread, and we could justly be accused of hogging it.
May I say that I did not know what I was going to do tonight, and swapping arguments with you has spared me an evening of hunting for something to watch on NetFlix. Thank you.
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Sleep well!
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Capybara are not cute. They are 120 lb rodents. I’m also not sure why we’re discussing capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) at all. The guy was roasting a guinea pig (Cavia porcellus). They are as closely related as sheep are to antelope.
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Personally I believe that eating the flesh of another (formerly) living creature is abuse.
But I try to let everyone make their own decisions for themselves (not always 100% successfully judgment-free though). I would not distinguish between the person who kills and the person who eats, although generally I hold those willing to face the consequence of their choices in higher stead than those who try to hide them at arm’s length.
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Sorry to bust your bubble, Dobby, but guinea pigs will bite if handled roughly. Big trouble that I’ll remember forever happened when an older kid up the block started flipping my pet pig, EJ (named for KC Chiefs linebacker E.J.Holub, ca 1965) from hand to hand. “'No, Adam, quit it, he don’t like that!” EJ bit him HARD on the palm between fingers, and Adam bled, well, like a stuck pig. He went crying home, his folks called mine, repercussions in the form of lawsuits for doctor bills & possible confiscation of my beloved pet were mentioned. The only thing I could think of to do was to sneak up on Adam, fresh home from the emergency room sitting on his front porch nursing his stitched-up hand, and shoot him in the other hand with a dart from my Daisy M1911 replica BB gun. That’s when the trouble really started. All ended up well for me & EJ. Adam & I kept on being friends for years. I don’t look to a gun as a problem solver anymore. My daughter has been in Ecuador for a couple weeks now and is probably chowing down on some delicious cuy right about now.
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I’m on the opposite side of the spectrum from you, diet wise (not a strict carnivore, but definitely a meat eater), but we share a similar mindset on one issue. I have worked in animal production (which is why I do not eat delicious bacon…), and briefly did a stint in a small slaughterhouse as a college student. Felt it was my responsibility to know what goes into my food. I’m not comfortable with asking someone to do something that I wouldn’t be willing to do myself. Consequently have no problem with wild game hunting (for food) etc…
I do have some degree of contempt for the “styrofoam platter and cling film” meat eaters out there. People who wouldn’t be willing to kill and process the meat themselves.
I’ve got a friend who rarely eats meat, and only then if it’s wild game. She’s also seen the “inside view” of meat production and has decided that the only meat she’s comfortable eating is the “walking happily in the wild until BOOM!” kind.
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I think she saw herself as taking a principled stand where she became part of a circle of life not unlike a mountain lion or other apex predator. She would not intentionally participate in any form of agricultural exploitation of animals but thought that converting a deer or elk who had lived a free range life into meat in a few seconds was acceptable, IIRC she was against bow hunting as needlessly cruel for humans with faster killing tech.
I do see the weirdness though of saying “I understand vegans”, comma, “I identify with person who would eat hunted wild animals”. It is a result of trying to compress too many ideas into too small space, but damnit I know what I mean!
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I suspect the ethnicity of the person doing the eating plays a part in our response too.
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Why? Once it’s dead, what is there left to abuse? 
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I was going to object and say that they’re both in different families taxonomically, but with brief googling I see that sheep and antelope are in the same bovidae family as each other. So yeah, guinea pigs and capybara are generally taxonomically classified as about as related as sheep and antelope.
I didn’t know sheep were in bovidae. I thought they’d be in the same family as goats, but it turns out that caprinae is a sub-family of bovidae, and goats are bovines as well.
I guess my motto is working: be sure to learn something new every day.
I had to look this up since I didn’t want to believe that they would dress up their guinea pigs in cute suits and then eat them. Alas, this is actually a thing they do in Peru. The horror.
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I just skimmed this thread, but there are no absolutes in the world.
Even herbivores will eat meat some times. Warning, last two video has animals being eaten. First one is safe to watch.
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well, cause i posted a picture of roast cuy, then as a visual counterpoint posted an intensely cute photo of a capy eating corn.
and because i will take any, even slight excuse to post pictures of capybaras…
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