Why I eat meat

A couple of weeks ago, on the way home from work, I saw one of the saddest things I have seen for years. Sitting in the middle of the Stratford Road was an old, brown, myxomatosis ravaged rabbit. He didn’t seem to have much of an idea where he was, but when I stopped the car, got out and tried to shoo him to safety, he was having none of it. I didn’t want to pick him up, so I put a shoe under him and sort of half carried, half kicked him to the side of the road. As soon as my foot came out from under him, he turned round and hobbled back to the middle of the carriageway at just the same spot, the spot where he was most likely to be squashed. Now, I am not sufficiently anthropomorphic to suggest that this rabbit was consciously suicidal, but he did seem to have a very acute idea as to what he needed to do to put himself out of his obvious and terrible agonies. When I drove to work the next day, he was nothing but a contoured squish of fur and blood.
A couple of days later, I stopped again on the way home from work, this time just off the Stratford Road. I called in at Jo Brassington’s place to pick up half a pig that had been killed a couple of days before. Jo keeps his pigs in a field that I pass every day on the way to work and for six months I watch them rootle in the mud. I watch them chase each other, lie in the sun and blow steam in the snow. Then, when the time comes, Jo puts them in the back of a trailer, drives them to Cinderford where they are stunned, have their throats cut and are butchered to my order.
Neither of these deaths makes me happy, but I am considerably more at ease with the latter. The pig that I subsequently turned into salami, bacon, sausages, mince, chops and joints had a good life and he knew nothing about his death, with the possible exception of a moment of fear as he reached the abbatoir, but modern improvements suggest that even this is unlikely. The rabbit had probably been suffering greatly for months, if not years, and nobody cared. He was left to find his own pathetic solution to his sorry existence, which was to be squashed on the Stratford Road.
That is why I eat meat. I eat meat so that I can engage with how animals live and die. I hesitate to make any assumptions about vegetarians, but I do think that they often make one fundamental error in their thinking: not eating meat does not mean that animals won’t die. We all die. I am going to. So are you. And the terrible truth is that if animals do not have economic value, they will be left to die slow and painful deaths because nobody will care. Animals that do not have value will get old, get sick and nobody will call the vet. Animals that get old and sick get predated and will get eaten alive by other bigger, stronger animals. I would much rather give animals economic value and engage with how they live and die.
I was a vegetarian for seven years, at a time when it was difficult to buy good meat. Now it isn’t. With just a little time and effort it is easy to source good quality, relatively cheap meat that has been produced from animals that have had happy lives and died well. You do not have to, and I won’t, eat factory meat made from animals that have never seen the sun or been allowed to express their natural behaviour. And don’t be fooled into thinking that this makes meat expensive: it doesn’t. Although I see the pigs I eat in the field in Flyford and I see the lambs I eat in the field in Wyre Piddle and I sometimes see the cows I eat in the field in front of my house I am willing to bet that I spend less on meat that people who buy it from the supermarket.
If people choose not to eat meat, that is their affair and it is really none of my business. Lots of my friends choose not to and I am happy to accommodate them when we eat together. But do not be fooled into thinking that their abstention is doing animals any favours, because it isn’t.