by Akim Reinhardt
No longer eating meat was similar to no longer believing in God. I can’t pinpoint a moment when it ended, for abstinence did not come upon me suddenly. Rather, what had once been a bedrock of my existence slipped away after years of contemplation. Some time in 1995, I realized it was no longer part of my life. This coincided with me moving to Nebraska, which did not make giving it up any easier. Meat, that is. God was a few years earlier.
But why?
More and more it seemed to me that the differences between dogs and cows and monkeys and horses and pigs and cats and us were not so vast. Mammals were too much like each other for me to feel okay about killing and consuming them for pleasure, as it were, since I didn’t need to eat meat. If it were 18th century America, of course I would. What alternative would I have? But with the 21st century rapidly approaching, meat was a luxury I could forego. And it felt hypocritical to ask someone else, anonymous minimum wage workers on slaughterhouse assembly lines, to slay and gut animals for me if I were now unwilling to do that myself.
I still enjoyed fishing once in a rare while, so I went on eating seafood. Fish still seemed like creatures from another world. But I could look most any mammal in the eye and see a little bit of myself in there.
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