Guardianship: the position of protecting or defending something.”
Eating meat is increasingly condemned as an unethical choice that
murders sentient beings. But we need to understand that more animals die
in plant food production than in abattoirs.
Those deaths in industrially-farmed fields and grain silos are
terribly cruel and painful: minced alive by farm machinery or poisoned
by the millions around silos. The insect apocalypse from pesticide use
in industrial agriculture is creating a wave of extinctions of the birds
and smaller species that eat insects.
Is the taking of one life any different to the taking of another
life? Is a human life more important than a dog’s life? A dolphin’s? An
orangutan’s? A cow’s? A hamster’s? A mouse’s? How about a cockroach? A
social city-building insect then, like a bee or an ant? What about
plankton? Amoebas?
Where do you draw the line between which life we should give a damn about and which life is unimportant?
