Some Comments on Your Comments

It's always exciting when people comment and humor me on my musings that may seem off-the-wall. In addition to meditating and exercising, blogging helps my mental health tremendously. I have a mind that won't stop and I'm insanely (as in: could drive one insane) curious and see the world as a series of puzzles that I can't stop trying to solve. 

The Myers-Briggs post, for instance, came out of a theory about intuition, and also about introversion and extroversion. I don't expect vegans to be introverted or extroverted, but the combinations (such as IN) tell me something. Though I can work a room, doing so exhausts me and that's common for people who are more introverted than extroverted, but I wouldn't call myself an introvert. And as I wrote in a comment to Angus, I can go either way on Feeling/Thinking and Perceiving/Judging, and even on Introversion/Extroversion. The only trait I'm consistently not strong in (for decades) is sensing. Extraverted Sensing is my Achilles heel. It's my husband's dominant function. Hmmm.

Elaine made a good point that readers of this blog might share characteristics. And that's probably true, as like attracts like. However I do have a mix of readers that often surprises me, and I like having that mix. I don't want to surround myself, in cyberspace or anywhere else, with people who are just like me. I lived with someone who was just like me for years and to this day I insist I broke up with him because we were so much alike and he reminded me of how annoying I am without even trying.

There was also discussion with bunny and Bea about happy meat being the new dairy and Nick is annoyed, as I am perpetually, that environmentalists tend to be happy meat people. I do understand why, though, as a locavore who eats animals his neighbor raises and kills (his neighbor not having the surname Perdue or Tyson) can easily have a smaller carbon footprint than a vegan who eats Tofurkey and frozen, boxed meals all day. What irks me most is that environmentalists have such a passion for the planet, but the animals, who are sentient, don't have needs that are as pressing (like the desire to live).

Next, greentangle beat me to tomorrow's book review in The New York Times, particularly "The Carnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Shae. Shae reviews two books.

"These are not the happiest times for beef lovers. They have to tune out doctors’ warnings about saturated fat and stories of E. coli outbreaks, not to mention worries about mad cow disease. Raising and processing cattle on an industrial scale is an environmental catastrophe (among other things, the United Nations has accused the world’s livestock industry of being responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire global transportation fleet), and if it has made cheap beef democratically available to the many, it has also made a truly tasty steak harder to come by.

Such a litany of negatives may be presumed to create a sense of unease, if not a downright bad conscience, among those who take pleasure, guilty or not, in eating beef. Both Betty Fussell’s 'Raising Steaks' and Andrew Rimas and Evan D. G. Fraser’s 'Beef' hold fast to the cause, but both are shadowed by an anxiety that an ancient pleasure may come to be shunned out of fear and disapproval — an anxiety that causes them to rise at times to distinctly overheated defense.

Fussell is almost too polite to tell us what her own book makes obvious: if we’re going to eat beef, we should restrict ourselves to meat raised for quality rather than quantity, in ways both humane to the animals and respectful of the environment."

From this review, it's fair to say that reading these books would not be a good use of my time. The "carnivore's" only dilemma seems to be one of sourcing: where to buy his "meat." If you think killing animals for food when you don't have to can ever be called "humane," you certainly aren't having a serious ethical dilemma.

As always, I appreciate all of you who find time to visit Animal Person, whether you comment or not.