Eating Animals V: "I just don't care enough"

One commentator, Jenny, has mentioned a couple of times, the genetic modification of animals and vegetables, together with the amount of drugs and things animals are given, and pesticides etc put on veggies, which we then ingest.

I have been hesitant to blog about this, because it's mainly about us and our health, and what we are doing to our bodies. It's like making soft drink illegal. It's a good idea, but the fact is, I think, that people are willing to ingest antibiotics (something like 5X more than they do from getting sick), just by eating meat. And people are willing to eat the remnant poison on our veggies. And people are willing to eat the inevitably diseased meat, and put up with the occasional stomach bug and presumably altogether worse health. This is all for the sake of cheaper meat and veggies, and in the case of soda, taste and sugar.

In short, I think that cruelty to animals is a black and white, right or wrong, moral issue. Ingesting less healthy things than possible is a really big difficult issue (eg, soda), and one I don't know enough about.

This brings me to my topic. Yesterday I mentioned our now-not-so-new-found vegetarianism at a lunch (in a pleasant way, I promise). Someone (with a degree from Moore, if you would like to know that), said 'I know someone else who is a vegetarian because of treatment to animals, but I just can't bring myself to care enough'. I've heard this one a lot.

Now, it's not a little bit of cruelty I'm talking about here. It's systematic torture to millions of animals at any one time across the world. And it's purely for the sake of money, there are no other issues. It's sadistic. Perhaps he doesn't realise the extent of the cruelty? Or perhaps he really doesn't care about animals suffering.

I don't think this is an issue of loving animals. It's a simple matter of inflicting pain and suffering for the sake of my pallet and wallet. Pain and suffering is bad, especially if you're a part of it.

Graham has been blogging about labour practices overseas from time to time on this blog. This is an enormous issue, and we as a society have been guilty of simply not caring enough about that. I don't think a Christian would ever say 'I just don't care enough' about this issue, though in practice, we so often don't. So perhaps with this in mind, I shouldn't be surprised?

But... What am I missing here?