Virgil Evetts

The following are some of my least favourite arguments against eating meat.  Included are my standard responses. Hopefully this will save us a bit of time and effort later on.

• ‘Eating animals is cruel’: Come on, really? Nature is cruel. Get over it.
• ‘You have no right to take the life of another animal’: Yes I do. I’m an omnivore; I’m designed to consume flesh. I have both right and motivation.
• ‘Eating animals makes you a murderer’: No, killing another person makes you a murderer. (The jury’s still out on killing dumb-dumbs though.)
• ‘How would you like to be kept in a cage, awaiting your death?’: Obviously I wouldn’t like that much at all, because I’m a fully self-aware organism . Most free-range or open-farmed animals in all probability have no concept of their captivity, let alone the finality of their situation. You are confusing farms with death row. I hasten to add that the same cannot be said for factory-farmed cattle, crate-raised pigs or battery chickens.

And so the naivety goes on, and my interest in engaging dwindles.

The thing is, I know that my opinions are just MY opinions, but as is rather de rigour with agitators in general, animal-rights campaigners tend to regard their opinions as absolutes. I don’t believe in absolutes: there is simply what you believe and what other people believe.

I firmly believe that it’s ok to eat animals, but take the ethical provenance of any meat I consume very seriously.  In other words, I do not believe that it’s ok to eat factory-farmed pork and chicken, nor battery-farmed eggs. And you better believe I judge you if you don’t agree. But hey, what do I know?

This week sees the official launch of the RNZSPCA Blue Tick animal welfare accreditation programme, for providers of cruelty -free egg and meat products. I like the RNZSPCA – well who doesn’t?  I particularly appreciate their realistic approach to commercial animal welfare. They don’t judge meat eaters – nor farmers for that matter. They provide guidelines for humane farming practice and animal husbandry. This is infinitely more constructive than ‘liberating’ chickens and hurling abuse at anyone who enjoys a crispy rasher or two. The Blue Tick scheme is a way of identifying producers (with a distinctive Blue Tick, no less) that offer the highest possible level of care and humane treatment to livestock. I trust the RNZSPCA unreservedly, and the Blue Tick now forms the basis of how I choose pork and chicken products. No Blue Tick, no sale. To say that I urge you to do the same is the extent of my animals-rights campaigning here.

On a less preachy note, I went along to the official media launch/brunch for the Blue Tick programme, held atop the Hyatt Regency in Auckland the other day. Keynote speaker, and the nation’s favourite chefing son, Peter Gordon, talked at length and with some conviction about his personal commitment to ethically raised animal products. Hopefully a patron of his calibre will give serious cache to the Tick. He also designed the not-insubstantial brunch menu, which consisted of various clever ways with free-range eggs, bacon, ham, pork and duck. Star highlights for me were the smoked salmon with ham on a kumara rosti, with a quite-miraculous clear tomato jelly; and crispy deep-fried eggs served with a spicy citrus dressing. The boy sure can cook.

I will leave you now with a rather sobering story PG told about pigs. A group of pig farmers he knows in Spain kept losing pigs from one particular paddock. Convinced that swine-rustlers were to blame, they set up night-vision cameras and waited to pounce. But the cameras didn’t capture any night time raids, but instead revealed some alarmingly clever hams-to-be. The pigs had outwitted the normally impassable barrier that is a cattle-stop. They dropped and rolled. Simple yet brilliant! Thank god chickens, sheep and cows are so blissfully dim.

For more information about the Blue Tick, click here. ^[1]

Method