MEAT-EATER OR VEGAN? The Danger of the EITHER OR FALLACY

Part 5 Moving Toward Vegetarianism


There are many health reasons and moral reasons for all humans to become non-meat eaters. (See my previous blog articles on this controversy for the reasons.)

So, ideally, not eating meat would be good for humans.

But it all gets more complicated—like so many controversies--when one gets down to the real daily level of life for specific humans.

For instance, years ago, I decided to try out being a vegan like Murray Rose, the famous Olympic gold medals winner. I read a biography on his amazing life.

Very bad, tragic results however! I lost 50 pounds and suffered malnutrition! Was put under a health doctor’s care who was a vegan, and she tried various methods to help me. None worked.

Another medical profession, head of the hospital in Pennsylvania where I worked told me that veganism wasn’t beneficial, for me at least, but the entire hour she talked to me, she chain-smoked!

Clearly, it seemed lucidly obvious that I shouldn’t take her advice. Why was she smoking cigarette packs a day as a medical professional?!

HOWEVER—HERE is a vivid CASE of the EITHER-OR-FALLACY!

Just because, the hospital chain-smoker wasn’t wise in her choices didn’t automatically mean that then my vegan health doctor was correct her views.

It turned out that both were drastically wrong.

While the famous Olympic star Murray Rose won gold medals as a vegan, that didn’t mean that everyone else ought to follow his views.
Some humans can’t digest plant protein well, some can’t get enough protein from vegetables, fruits, and nuts alone.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everyone ought to go whole-hog in meat eating, either. And then there is also, ‘foul’ food.

I’m am still a work in progress, especially after the very severe stroke of the spine I got 4 years ago.

While I quit pork years ago (how can anyone continue to eat a sentient animal smarter than dogs and cats?!)...
And in the last 15 or so years ago, I stopped eating beef.

Not that I am harming beef raisers. I grew up in rural southeast Nebraska where we got ¾ a cow every year from my grandparents and have worked on a huge ranch as a cowhand in Montana, so I’ve done my bit for cattle owners and for being from the Beef State (though I am still a Corn Husker;-)—that’s the other mascot of my childhood home. Go Big Red!

At present, I am a cheesy-fishatarian, on my way to get back to the Garden;-)

More in the next section...

In the LIGHT

Dan Wilcox

"Get Back to the Garden"--moving toward vegetarianism

Murray Rose won six Olympic medals, including 4 Gold, 1 Silver, and 1 Bronze and held the world records in 3 different swimming races.
Because of his vegan lifestyle, he was nicknamed the “The Seaweed Streak.”

And according to a biography written by his father, the meatless health food diet was largely responsible for Murray’s athletic success.

As a young adult, I was deeply impressed—I wanted to be very healthy and strong, too. How could emulating an Olympian’s health regimen not lead to a robust healthy life?

Furthermore, the main person who opposed my new way of eating was a chain-smoking hospital RN. Despite her medical degree and position, she seemed to be an unreliable judge, since she abused nicotine.

I didn’t like to see animals suffer. So why have animals killed so that I could eat supper?

And, besides that moral reflection, and the testimony of Rose, the Olympian Gold-Medalist, another significant motivation for me to move to a health food diet was that a brilliant young woman, who I liked, had just embarked on the vegetarian life. Why not follow her lead?

Plus, didn’t Genesis speak of a meatless Garden before humans chose to do wrong?
“And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Genesis 1:29-31ESV

Yes, “got to get us back to the Garden” like Joni Mitchell wrote and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sang.*

So I launched pell-mell into a healthy program of nuts, fruit, vegetables and grains, ostracizing ham, chicken, and beef.

Did I become an Olympic star? Hardly.

I lost about 50 pounds, dropped down to 112 pounds at 6’3’’—looked like a pale, bony, lethargic Gandhi...actually became malnourished...

I had to quit my job and be put into a doctor’s care.

Oops...I learned the hard way, just because one side of a controversy is wrong, doesn’t necessarily mean the opposite side is right.

So I eventually forsook “health foods’ living. Oh, and the girl quickly quit vegetarianism after only several months, long before me, and dropped out of my emaciated life. So much for youthful error and illusion.

But then how had the Olympic star Rose achieved the opposite?
Who knew?
Maybe he a very different physical body to begin with. While I came from a genetically skinny family background, maybe Murray Rose’s family tended to be heavy set.

-- Fast-track 35 years forward and I again decided to move down the food levels toward the Garden. Because of a transcendent quest to become more and more moral in how I lived.

Only this time, I was going to do this slowly, not become, again, a fundamentalist convert to “health foods,” like in my disastrous past. Move toward ethical living carefully and quietly.

So, I mostly eat grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts, again, but also fish, shrimp, eggs, and cheese. I’ve become a fish-atarian this time around:-)

Since, my recent stroke of bad luck at the age of 72, our doctor and my specialists think it is very good that I eat salmon, not red meat.

Now if I gave up cookies, they would be even happier.

To be continued

*”I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road
And I asked him tell where are you going, this he told me:
(He) said, I'm going down to Yasgur's farm, going to join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land, and set my soul free.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

by Joni Mitchell

In the Light and the Kind,

Dan Wilcox

Widening Our Circle of Concern: Vegetarianism

"Pigs by nature are every bit as loving, sensitive, and full of personality as the animals we call "family."

"Pigs dream, recognize their names, and are gregarious and affectionate being who form loyal bonds with each other and other species including humans."
--

If so, why do millions of American citizens sit down to fancy feasts of ham, pork, sausage, and bacon, especially at Thanksgiving and other holy days?

Sometimes these pork-barrel* times include their deeply loved pet dogs in attendance, waiting impatiently for any pig scraps to gobble up.
("Chester Collins Maxey in the National Municipal Review...
claimed that the phrase originated in a pre-Civil War practice of giving slaves a barrel of salt pork as a reward and requiring them to compete among themselves to get their share of the handout.")
from wikepedia

YET, "the curious and insightful pig is the smartest domestic animal in the world, with intelligence beyond that of a 3-year-old human child."

"In their natural setting, pigs spend hours playing, mother pigs sing to their piglets while nursing, and groups of pigs enjoy lying close together in the sun."
--from vegetarian poster

Consider these startling facts from scientists:
from "Pigheaded: How Smart are Swine?"
By Andy Wright
"Candace Croney is an Associate Professor of Animal Sciences at Purdue University and once taught pigs to play video games...
she participated in a study that set pigs to a task that previously only Rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees had been asked to perform."

"The pigs were provided with specially made joysticks that they could control with their mouths or snouts and then tasked with the job of moving a cursor around on the screen to make contact with different target walls that would shrink and move away."

"Croney did not think the pigs would be able to do it. But they could..."they’re really very fast learners... learn novel things quite quickly and quite well.”

"She soon set her pigs to other tasks...They were given odor quizzes, correctly picking out, say, spearmint, from an array of other smells that included mint and peppermint."

"Some studies have shown that scent is so important to a pig that if you cover up a part of a pigs’ cheek, they have trouble recognizing each other because that is where they emit a certain pheromone."

"Croney says the pigs were extremely clean, that they housebroke themselves and that at the end of a play session they put their own toys away in a big tub."

"Pigs are social, they remember locations well, they remember negative and positive experiences, can tell the difference between individual pigs and humans, recognize themselves in mirrors and learn from other pigs," says Dunipace.

"Kristina Horback, an ethologist (a person who observes animals in their natural habitat): “The social structure of pigs is just like elephants, they have the increased prefrontal cortex like primates and humans because they eat meat and they have the need to hunt and forage."
from "Pigheaded: How Smart are Swine?"
By Andy Wright
READ the whole insightful article at Modern Farmer:
https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/pigheaded-smart-swine/
--

Of course, for those of us who are moving toward vegetarianism, who have long ago quit pork and beef, but who still eat salmon, cod, and shrimp-- and sometimes fowl food at family meals to be courteous--for us in transition toward non-face food, there is this problem:
"Seth Dunipace, a veterinarian and post-doctoral fellow at University of Pennslyvania...thinks we should be asking ourselves why we care how smart a pig is. “I don’t think that’s necessarily fair because they’re using intelligence as a stand-in for suffering."

“And its this kind of thought that allows us to eat fish, and fish suffocate to death or bleed out over a course of thirty minutes, but a cow or pig must be rendered instantaneously insensible at slaughter. It’s a double standard."

"And fish do feel pain, fish do have memory. But we just don’t think of them as intelligent. And intelligence, I don’t think, should factor in to how greatly an animal can suffer.”

Hmm...we need to work toward a world of a widening circle of deep ethical concern, but keep in mind that we are all on this life voyage at different places.

Hopefully, we will live deeper and deeper into ethical truths,

Daniel Wilcox

Car Sign Close to the Heart of God

Car signs come and go.

I've followed them for years down the freeways and byways-- slogans or pictures so political, athletic, off color, scenic or religious. There are the countless Fish symbols...

...and more recently the counter Darwin images eating the Fish...

Of course, there are signs extolling various candidates who quickly disillusion even their drivers who then can't get rid of the politicians or the stickers from their bumpers so they accelerate faster and faster hoping to leave "them" behind.

Fascinating, sometimes disgusting, the signs and decals stick to my mind, but the only ones that deeply trouble me are the "God bless US" ones. Yes, the "God, give to the U.S., because we are the greatest nation---us, us, us...

Not only is the sentiment arrogant and self-centered, but it fails to consider those who really need God's blessing--the lost, the hurting, the hungry, the destitute, and, yes, even the bad all the world round.

That's why when I first saw the bumper sticker which said "God Bless the Whole World: NO EXCEPTIONS"
I was truly thankful and rushed out to get myself a copy.

Imagine that, a sign which doesn't fixate on us and our own, doesn't exclude or denigrate, but instead gives to everyone else, which blesses all others, a sign which is an evangel to the world to all those who are so in need. Yes, a call for those of us who have plenty to focus on all of humankind and be generous, peaceful, and kind.

May we live that car sign out.

I John 4:7 Beloved, let us love one another; for love comes from God, and everyone who loves is a child of God and knows God...because God is love.

In the Light of God,

Daniel Wilcox