But as I grew up to be able to contemplate on pain and death and, one Dashain, saw fear in the eyes of the goat brought for sacrificial killing, and the way it fell to the ground shaking after its head was severed, I didn’t like where and how the meat came from.[break]
But still I didn’t stop eating meat. My heart would shed ‘crocodile tears’ but saliva continued to ooze in my mouth at the thought of having meat. You see, I liked meat so much.
But the ambivalent feeling of whether to quit or eat it hung over my mind every time I swallowed a morsel of meat.
I could not be like some meat-eaters who enjoyed meat guiltlessly. But broaching the subject turned them grumpy, which I sensed was either simply out of irritation or a feeling in some corner of their heart that all was not right and good about killing animals for meat when there are hundreds of other ways to satisfy both our hunger and tastes and the body’s quest for protein.
Most meat eaters have common ruses. They say how else can the growing number of animals be checked? They completely ignore the fact that these days many animals are raised under induced conditions to make them reproduce faster to fulfill the demand for meat.
In some countries, the situation is even worse: animals are force-fed all sorts of ‘enhancers,’ some of which can cause cancer in humans who eat the meat!
Then there is another argument that no other food can fulfill the need for protein that meat provides. Does that sound like telling all the vegetarians of the world are living with some sort of physical or nutritional deficiency? I think we know better than that.
We can get sufficient protein from lentils, beans and other pulses, in addition to some other good sources.
Yet some present forth extreme notions like what should carnivores (tigers, lions, wolves) do? Isn’t that like comparing humans with beasts? It puts a question mark on our ability as humans to make choice, have discretion and act according to our conscience, all of which beasts can’t do.
I mean we can, if we so choose, survive on vegetarian food but that’s not how things are with carnivores.
Another of the extreme arguments is: Don’t plants feel pain when they are cut for food?
Well, I don’t want to go into what researches say, but everybody will agree to the fact that plants have poorly developed nervous system; therefore, they are less likely to feel as much pain as animals and humans who have much well developed nervous system by comparison.
Always-been-vegetarians and meat-eater-turned-vegetarians also have interesting reasons for their being so. Apart from religious grounds and disinclination from childhood, some come up with bizarre reasons like the man who said he quit meat after watching a speeding bus crush a man whose insides (you know, gidi, bhudi, andra and all), as he lay splattered on the road, resembled the insides of a goat!
Yet for another man it was a moment of awakening that made him renounce meat forever. He heard his guruji say, “Our stomach is not a graveyard for dumping carcasses of animals!”
As for me, I have become a reluctant meat eater who is on the way to become a full-fledged vegetarian for a reason that might sound even more bizarre: a message from my subconscious.
Once I found myself walking along a dark passageway, both sides of which were tall buildings with balconies hanging over it from each floor.
The walls of the building were blood-splattered and the passageway itself was littered with chunks of rotten meat that gave off nauseating stench.
As I fretfully negotiated my way, it felt as if somebody was following my movement from the top of the building. I looked up queasily and was shocked to discover that those eyes were of nobody but those of mine.
Call it a stupid interpretation, but immediately after I woke up I realized what the dream was all about.
The narrow passageway, apparently, was my stomach and the tall buildings with protruding rows of balconies my rib bones. As for the bloodstains and rotten chunks of meat, it appeared as if my subconscious was giving me a tour of my own entrails and letting my eyes see how it was full of unsavory stuffs.
It led me to conclude that my body conspired with my subconscious to drive home the message: can’t take meat anymore!
The writer is a copy editor at Republica. He admires Gabriel Garcia Marquez and wishes to someday write a novel imitating his style
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