Meat is Meat

 

Today's MSN poll asked if the Copenhagen Zoo did a bad thing when it killed Marius the giraffe and fed him to the lions. 86% said that they believed it was a bad thing to do. I would suggest that it was not a bad thing to do, but perhaps the way in which they did it was not the brightest move given today's culture of political correctness.

Let's face it. Lions eat giraffes all the time. In fact, for a National Geographic cinematographer to get some good footage of this kind of thing is a feather in his hat. So what really is so different when the lion eats the giraffe in the zoo, where it was not torn apart at the throat, but humanely killed by the zoo staff and then cut up like a piece of beef or pork or whatever it is that they usually feed the lions. Skin the giraffe first and nobody knows that it is a giraffe that is being eaten. Red meat is red meat.

Where is the hue and cry when a cow or a pig or an old horse is butchered to feed the carnivores in the zoo. Why is killing one animal to feed another a bad thing only if the animal being killed has 'charisma' or is 'cute' or is 'beautiful'. Endangered is another thing, but Marius was surplus, having a shallow gene pool and he had to go. Should he have been sold to a big game farm where he would have been a trophy for some macho hunter with a high powered rifle and a telescopic range finder?

This smacks of hypocrisy just a wee bit. Most of us eat meat and we do not give it a second thought. Do we see the cute little red faced Angus calf suckling at his mother's hind quarters when we order a steak or veal cutlets? Would we have second thoughts if we did? We are conditioned, just we are being conditioned to protect cute species and never mind the not so cute ones, like the plain-Jane chicken from the broiler farm, or the ugly pink pig from the hog farm. For goodness sake, where do we think our breakfast sausages or bacon come from. 

Meat is meat. Get over it, you 86%!