July 30, 2019 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
How to Reconcile with Anti-Speciesism and Meat Eating
Yet (in spite of total abhorrence for
speciesism) in one of the interviews when Dawkins was asked whether he
continues to eat meat, how did you think Dawkins replied?
How can I (and you) get out of this conundrum
when I know that all the animal and plant species (one must not forget the
plants in the zeal for more closely related large animal species) around me are
my distant cousins who if we were to go long back enough we would end up reaching
a stage where we shared a common ancestor or its siblings and still not exploit
them?
Is it so that all our significant
interactions with anybody are essentially exploitative and hardly ever equally
reciprocal?
Are biological behaviors such as predation,
grazing, parasitism, deception in mating and Batesian mimicry not examples of
exploitative behavior?
Is it not natural for mega corporations,
powerful companies and big builders to exploit abundant human resources if they
are in plenty, weak and in need?
It seems that the strongest interaction
between populations are those that enhance the fitness of individuals of one
population (such as the predator, parasite, meat industry etc) while decreasing
fitness of individuals in another population (the prey, host, poultry and
cattle etc).
One must not make the mistake of seeing
only predation as exploitative but also include among it herbivores and
parasites just as transactions between mating partners and between parents and
off springs are essentially exploitative.
In short, biological exploitation is all
around us and no species or individual can hold his neck up and occupy a moral
high ground.
Perhaps this can justify Dawkins’ reply to
the question of meat eating.
Dawkins reply on the conundrum of being a
omnivore and anti-speciesist was as follows and it once again takes us back to
the story of the American Civil War, the story of Trans Atlantic Slavery and
the Southern booming cotton economy.
“It’s a little bit like the position which
many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery.
Where lots of people felt morally uneasy
about slavery but went along with it because the whole economy of the South
depended upon Slavery.”
Compare and contrast these words with those
of Claude Bernard nearly a century before those of Brigid Brophy the animal
activist of England whose writing started the Oxford Group:
“The physiologist is no ordinary man.
He is a learned man, a man possessed and
absorbed by a scientific idea.
He does not hear the animals’ cries of
pain.
He is blind to the blood that flows.
He sees nothing but his idea, and organisms
which conceal from him the secrets that he is resolved to discover.”
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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