Saying no to meat

By Roshan Peiris

Increasingly both in Sri Lanka and Europe, man is turning quietly but surely to a vegetarian diet rather than a carnivorous one. In Sri Lanka it is no longer a mere topic of conversation at social gatherings, nor an academic issue to be debated and then laid aside, but a reality for many.

Penny Jayewardene, daughter-in-law of the late President Jayewardene, supported by Ravi her husband, has taken up the issue of vegetarianism.

Tolstoy mentions in his book that his aunt who was fond of food when offered only a vegetarian diet was indignant and said that she could not eat any old filth and demanded that she be given meat or chicken the next time she came to dinner.

There are many like Tolstoy’s aunt who consider a diet sans meat to be an offence to one’s dietary tastes.

Today Penny observed that our minds have become so programmed to accept that meat in the diet is normal, that we overlook to question the moral and ethical validity of this practice in society, of eating flesh.

Penny and Ravi said, “many of those who have adopted a vegetarian diet have done so because of the ethical argument, either by reading about or personally experiencing what goes on daily at any one of the thousands of slaughter houses world-wide which includes Sri Lanka as well.”

“These ghastly places,” said Penny, while little known to most meat eaters process enormous numbers of animals each year. In the U.S. alone believe it or not, 66,000 animals are killed for meat every hour.

Penny said that animal rights activists protests about bull fighting in Spain or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada, while continuing to eat chickens that have spent their lives crammed in cages, or veal from calves that have been deprived of their mothers.... “is like denouncing aparthied in South Africa while asking their white neighbours not to sell their houses to the blacks.”

When the time came for the American Indians to surrender their land to the white man, the great Indian Chief Seattle spoke on behalf of his people. He could have asked for many things for himself and his people but had only one request. “I will make only one condition. The white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers. For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to man” - prophetic words indeed.

Today even over here children and even old people are given broiler chicken as if it were the very nectar of life. The literature that Penny gave stated that a broiler reaches 1.9 kilos in 42 days. They are fed chemicals and antibiotics and are kept in low light, to encourage both feeding and minimal movement. Broilers are raised in sheds containing as many as 50,000 birds and so the air is full of dust and the stench of ammonia which is a component part of chicken manure.

So chickens get ‘dropsy assises’ a form of heart disease common among broilers. With accelerated growth the heart becomes heavily congested and if one opens up the swollen abdomen one can also note the thick pus-like liquid that oozes out.

Thus outwardly healthy birds die without warning, and we humans feast on broiler chicken as if it were ambrosia from heaven itself.

Then take much of the world’s massive hunger problems which could be solved by the reduction or elimination of meat eating. Livestock pastures which could otherwise be used to grow food which could feed humans, now feed animals slaughtered for their meat.

This year twenty million people world-wide will die as a result of malnutrition. One child dies every 2.3 seconds.

In America alone one hundred million people could be adequately fed using the land freed if Americans reduce their meat intake.

It has also been proved that those who eat flesh are far more likely to get cancer than those on a vegetarian diet. The risk of contracting breast cancer is 3.8 times greater for women who eat meat daily, compared to those who eat a vegetarian diet.

The risk of fatal prostate cancer is 3.6 times greater for men who consume meat, eggs and chicken compared with those who eat cheese and milk.

Moreover meat eaters ingest excessive amounts of cholesterol making them naturally and dangerously susceptible to heart attacks.

Apart from accepting that all life is sacred and there is a subtle sense of guilt, and that, religions particularly Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism uphold the sanctity of life, one finds that humans are prone to sickness and shortening of one’s life span due to eating flesh.

Even fish which often swallow contaminated water and eat polluted cornucopia from factories and the like also produce sickness in man.

Penny and Ravi Jayewardene are all set to start a home of their own for animals as a beginning, where strays and the like can find a home and then affiliate it with an international body like the Voice of Animals.

These views may not or perhaps will not be popular with those who are great consumers at barbecues of roasts and meats. But it is a thought-provoking subject to consider.

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