Veganism is Juvenile and is Killing Beautiful?

The bad news is that I accidentally subscribed to Utne Reader last year, and the good news is that year has come to an end.

There are two problems:

1. It comes by mail and I don't like to have paper used in my name if I can help it.
2. Each issue, if it contains content that addresses animals at all, does from an assumption of usage point of view. I don't recall any serious consideration of the interests of the nonhuman–except of course for the planet.

I've always appreciated how Utne champions just about anyone (or the planet) considered downtrodden. It raises awareness of issues that may seem small, but that affect individuals nevertheless, and individuals are important.

As long as they're human.

Or planets.

In the November/December issue, a section called (in a painful stroke of the ironic) Mindful Living, has one of those articles that makes your jaw drop and breeds certainty that you're on Candid Camera.

Let's deconstruct "Blood and Guts."

• The subtitle is "An urban farmer talks about butchering the turkey she raised." At first I was thinking that, unlike those who call themselves compassionate carnivores, at least this woman does her own dirty work. But then the chilling reality that she chooses to kill set in and left me feeling more uneasy with the farmer than with those who cannot bear to see "their" animals being slaughtered.
• The farmer, Novella Carpenter, lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland, California and has a small yard and vacant lot that is her farm. She raises turkeys and cannot tell them apart. "They all look the same."
• And here's the rub, right at the beginning: The interviewer says, "You were vegetarian at some point, a real 'meat is murder' person." Carpenter responds:

• When asked about that period, she says:

• Fortunately, the interviewer comes back with: "Some people have argued that a life lived for the purpose of dying is not a real life." To that, Carpenter says:

Finally, Carpenter only eats meat from animals she has killed. "A lot of my vegan and vegetarian friends have told me, 'This is the only acceptable way for you to eat meat.' I think that's true." There's a hint of the notion that her vegan and vegetarian friends approve of what she does. At least for me. And therein lies the most dangerous message of this article and others like it: That there's a way to raise and kill someone that makes it okay to do so. The fetishization of small farms, urban farms, and killing the ol' fashioned way is nothing more than rationalization for slaughter because we want to keep eating animals.