4th Paper
Cruelty in Nature
I don’t think the debate over being a vegetarian or not would ever cease. Just this day, I was having my lunch in 7th restaurant in campus. The veggie meal there recently caught my appetite. And that was when I spotted the TV news reporting that there was a shop in mainland China still provides meat of dogs. Then I asked my friend, what’s wrong with eating dogs, since they’re nothing more than another kind of animal? It could be that people had already see dogs not as any animals but human’s best friends, she answered. We give them names, feed them, and play with them. They’re not like pigs, whose consummation is destined to be human’s consumption. But for those who kept pigs as pets, which are given names as well as dogs, they wouldn’t think of their pets as meal. So in a word, it still comes back to how we treat them. The value of these animals’ lives is simply at our hand.
Just like eating veggie, some may claim that this is the best way of not “taking life” (殺生). The opponent might say, plants and vegetables all have life, too. That’s the debate I mentioned that would never come to a solid conclusion. Furthermore, as posted at the restaurant, an obvious slogan said “save our earth from eating vegetables”. I sincerely doubt that. Doesn’t that mean cutting down forest for more plantations? Things are never that simple, including this issue on vegetarianism.
Let’s focus more on this “cruelty in nature”. Food chain is an indubitable rule. So what makes it condemnable of eating meat? Just like the water bug that sucks the life out of a frog, there is nothing unnatural about it. Though shocked by the fact that the existence off one creature’s life depends on another’s lose of it, we shouldn’t accuse any of this. Therefore I would not say eating meat is ever a bad thing. Still, just like the predators in nature, we generally think of them as villains, in contrast to those harmless animals like a herd of sheep or gazelle. Then again, what’s wrong about them? They’re simply following their basic instinct and the biological need for food. This traces everything that happens in the food chain to the mystery of nature. Is there such idea of cruelty in the creation of nature? Why one creature must feed on another? Why do people have to eat meat, regardless of eating vegetables also as ingesting a form of life? Killing animals for food seems a sin or a crime act.
How about human nature? On moral ground we say someone cruel because of his or her way of treating people, perhaps physical abuse or brutality. Committing domestic is cruel, homicide as well, which gives me a new idea about cruelty. We should not think too highly of this term. It is after all a term that was coined for human society, which is somehow believed to be segregated from the genuine wilderness. Killing animals is not in the realm of cruelty, while killing people is. This could suggest that the situation of dog eat dog is a kind of cruelty, whether pressured by any condition or not. Need for food is an excellent alibi for that.
How about eating dogs? Why do we think of eating dogs an improper thing? Dog is an animal which is not higher species than human races. So by this, we may roughly say that dogs, as “human’s best friend”, are characterized, or even personified, into a higher level, given a value of life which is being appreciated by us. This renders it a sinful thing to do to see them as meat.
In conclusion, cruelty after all is never a term of Nature but in human nature. And this human nature is far from the primitive setting for us. That is to say we create an entirely new environment for us and establish principles for it. This society is a totally different creation from that of the earth. What’s ridiculous may not be eating dogs or not, but concerning eating meat as a destruction to nature and think of food chain as the cruelty in nature. This proves that even when we set ourselves away from the true nature, we want to bite more than we could chew by applying all these rules, based on morality, to the wilderness. Nature itself has always been too vast and profound for us to understand. This way of generalization or identification of it into our own society or moral values would turn out to be nothing but running counter to the natural way it goes. The best way is still follow what the nature path leads to, instead of trying to simplify things but actually complicate them.
