Vegans for Veal

Several years ago, on a trip to Boston to visit one of my daughters, a college student at the time, I saw a group of demonstrators in a public square. They were holding signs. I have no recollection what they said, except that they were in the format "X" (group of people connected by some common interest) for "Y" (the cause or person they were supporting). So it could have been "College Democrats for Ron Paul," but I'm pretty sure it wasn't. While I cannot recall what it was, I do recall that the "X" and "Y" didn't seem an obvious match.

I was seized by a mischievous impulse, the sort of impulse by which I am seized many times a day. I usually manage to resist, but sometimes they seem irresistible. I began thinking of "X for Y" combinations that were improbable but somehow ultimately plausible. The one flitting across my cerebral cortex that most appealed to me was "Vegans for Veal."

I was a vegan myself for about five years, having decided to follow that diet to lose weight and lower my cholesterol. I didn't stay with it permanently, though, as it presented too many lifestyle challenges. But it had nothing to do with religion or animal rights. So I could be a vegan while still supporting the rights of those who want to eat veal, or foie gras, or anything else the production of which is anathema to animal rights activists. And I could be a vegan while staunchly supporting the use of animals in medical education and research.

Facebook offered the temptation to go public with my mischievous impulse, and I started a Facebook group with that name. In one of Facebook's mysterious moves, all of the nearly 100 members of the group have been purged. All, in fact, except me. Oh, well. It was fun while it lasted.

When my first child, who is now a school teacher, was a newborn, my dad came to visit. One day we went out to lunch, and we were approached by two young women asking us to sign an animal rights petition. My dad, never one to beat around the bush, said the idea that animals have rights was absurd. I was intrigued and wanted to know what the young ladies really thought about the value of an animal's life relative to that of a human. I posed a hypothetical situation. Suppose, I asked the one holding the petition, you were in a car crash and were brought, seriously injured, to the emergency department at the hospital where I work. You have two choices. First, I have been trained in a surgical skills laboratory, using dogs, to perform procedures that make it possible for me to save your life. Second, I have received no such training (because humans have no right to use animals for their own selfish purposes), and, because I lack the requisite knowledge and skill, you die. She said she would choose option two. That occasion provided my first real insight into the mindset of animal rights activists - and was the last time I tried to have a serious discussion with one of them.

In August 2008 my daughter Diana and I spent part of a day driving across South Dakota. As she put it, we were in the land of cattle, wheat, and 75 mph speed limits. The number of sleek, fat, black Angus cattle visible just from the highway was astonishing. There was a time, before the upper plains states were settled, that the considered opinion of that part of the country was that it was completely useless and uninhabitable. But Americans like a challenge. So now those lands are used for grazing millions of cattle, and in late summer and early fall the fields are dotted with large collections of baled hay to feed the livestock during the winter. As you might imagine, PETA is not popular in those parts. Americans in that sector of our nation hold in very low regard those who tell them their very way of life is immoral, unethical, and unjustifiable. In pondering this, I found myself falling back on my libertarian musings about how there are so many people in this world who are sure they know how others should live their lives and have no compunctions in making pronouncements about such matters.

I recall an episode of Law & Order in which the character portrayed by S. Epatha Merkerson was engaged in a conversation about a shooting in which the victims were members of a party of deer hunters out in the woods in upstate New York. She wondered - apparently as a matter of general principle regarding deer hunting - whether the deer were armed. It was certainly no surprise that this sort of anti-hunting remark would find its way into a TV script. But it got me thinking about how many people who are opposed, in some measure, to hunting are animal rights activists and vegetarians who are philosophically opposed to the killing and eating of any sentient being. On the other hand, how many are just people who could not bring themselves to shoot an animal and so think no one else should, either, but they're perfectly happy to eat meat, poultry, and fish that they can buy in a supermarket or order in a restaurant, safely insulated from the reality that there was someone else who killed the animal for them?

"What caused the wreck?" I asked.
"I swerved to miss a deer."
"Next time hit the deer."
"Really?"
I see people all the time who swerved to miss a deer and lost control of the car and wrecked. I almost never see people who hit a deer.

"I brake for animals," says the bumper sticker. Do you? All animals? As long as they are big enough to see? No matter what the road conditions or traffic patterns? As a blanket policy, this seems a bad idea. I try to avoid animals if I am confident that I can do so safely. This is more of an issue for some animals than others. I would probably take my own advice and hit the deer if I could not easily avoid it. But one winter I was in Vermont, on my way back from Stowe, where I was lecturing at a conference, to the airport in Burlington. A road sign said, "Moose Crossing Next 15 Miles." Moose are big. Very big. I think I would try harder to avoid a collision.

People who are in single-vehicle crashes at 2 or 3 in the morning are, more often than not, inebriated. But they rarely admit that, saying instead that someone ran them off the road or that they swerved to miss a ... fill in the blank. One imaginative fellow told me he swerved to miss a water buffalo.

"A water buffalo? You mean the tanker truck that hauls water?"
"No! The animal."
"Really? They're not indigenous to the Upper Ohio Valley." (OK, maybe considering the other participant in this dialogue I didn't actually use the word indigenous.) "Except in zoos, they are not found on this continent."
"I'm telling you, there was one in the road."

Well, I would swerve to miss a water buffalo, but I think around here they appear in the road only when a driver has been hitting the sauce - the same stuff that draws vehicles off the asphalt and causes them to crash into trees and utility poles and bridge abutments.

Would you rather not have to worry about swerving to miss a deer? Then at every opportunity thank a deer hunter - and encourage them all to get out there during the season and bag the limit.

So "Vegans for Veal" was an attempt to capture the notion that whatever we choose for ourselves in life, we should recognize that others must remain free to make choices of their own.