In India there are the cow vigilantes who kill you for eating killing cows for meat and there are protests against this culture in the form of beef parties... in France now many schools are being made to put Pork back on the meal menu... in the name of secular France. Why should we give up our cuisine just to pander to Jew and Muslim concerns, these people feel. Some years ago Pork and wine parties were held in France, at times close to Muslim dominated areas to make a point about being French. In Saudi Arabia of course no one can eat Pork (i guess).
Denmark recently decided that Kosher and Halal are less humane ways to kill animals for meat and effectively banned it. It is not the first country in Europe to try or actually do this. So there is a tension and debate about what is the best way to kill. A man responds to this news by saying animals should not be bred in captivity and killed anyway. So he prefers to hunts his animals in the wild and then eat them. This is the romance of past days - how we used to hunt and eat non-chemical meat of wild animals who grew free and happy. There is also this great discomfort about the quality of life animals have and then what is the use of eating the meat of animal that has grown in captivity. A sad animal makes for sad meat, innit?
Some others remind us that who are we to decide more humane ways of killing when we do massive lab-testing using animals across the world. So there is a violence by man endemic to the world already - we are living in the Anthropocene, not a natural world in which humans adapt, but a man-made world where increasingly nature and animals have to adapt. Some vegetarian Hindus avoid meat for religious and non-violent ideologies, but gorge on dairy products and look down upon meat eating religions as being violent. Vegans meanwhile want to avoid any form of cruelty to animals. They tell us its not just about the killing of animals for meat. Even the dairy industry is terribly cruel to animals. So they give up both meat and dairy, a devise many strange kinds of meat and dairy substitutes that are often expensive.
The matter of street dogs is a big unsolvable. Long ago we destroyed their habitats anyway. Now, semi domesticated, they live among humans, their life dependent on human kindness. Still street dogs are wild and can bite and hurt. So is it good to feed them and take care of them? If we do that they become territorial in our colonies and bark and bite at people who come form outside - strangely mostly the working classes. Classist dogs! If we don't feed them we watch them suffer or eat garbage and get diseases or simply see them becoming ferocious. So do we neuter dogs? Maybe yes, but it continues to feel queesy. How does mankind have such power over the populations of another species, to decide if they should breed or not. But then we do that to our fellow humans too, eh? In some countries women are encouraged to breed more, in others they are restricted, all to create optimum population levels.
Recently in a zoo in Denmark a young giraffe Marius was 'executed' (yes that's the word they used). then they chopped him off and fed him to the lions publicly. He was executed because he was not genetically desirable for breeding... they have done this a few time with other animals like goats, zebra and snakes too... for the benefit of their breeding programme for future generations of animals. Marius was executed even while there were many protests and demands to send him to another zoo.
And then the same zoo killed 4 lions. 2 old because, well they were old... and their two cubs because a new male lion was on his way to the zoo to breed advantageously with two females and would anyway have killed the two pups. This now is a growing logic. Already with us humans too, in the West there is a great push to check if your unborn fetous my be carrying a disease or even you as parents may be carrying one and thus ought not to reproduce.
Wow!
We seem to be violent both when we care and when we don't! Sadly man has too much control and too much intervention in the propagation of life. This control itself is violent, however we end up using it.
