Scooping up everything out of the ocean and turning it into fishmeal for "farmed" salmon and other industrial scale meat production is just one of the ways we are destroying the oceans.

Of course the problem with these sorts of innovations is they rarely replace environmentally destructive practices. When more salmon feed is produced we simply get more salmon farms, when more chicken feed is produced we get more industrial chicken production.

I don't think eating animals is in itself unethical. Humans have been eating animals for a very long time. Eating animals is in our genes.

As a kid most of the meat we ate was fish we caught or actual farm and ranch animals, not animals raised in factories. My dad didn't hunt but he has friends who do which is good for occasional venison, etc. I've eaten pigs and chickens and cows I've seen alive. Some pig I fed and talked to ended up in the freezer. Which is why I'm now a vegetarian most days.

When I do eat meat I know where it comes from. My mom goes so far as to thank the spirit of the animal on the dinner plate, especially the Thanksgiving turkey. (One more reason many Christian religions have shunned her...) My mom and dad also hosted a couple of vegan Thanksgiving dinners when I was a kid which my ranching and dairy family older relatives were not too keen about. So they'd compensate by serving extra dead meat when Thanksgiving was held at their homes. We'd get turkey, pork, venison, trout, beef and salmon! My mom had lots of animal spirits to thank, but mostly she did it silently.

So I wonder... if I made a meatloaf out of fly larvae could I connect to some sort of individual insect animal spirit? Mostly flies annoy me, but I was watching a little Hoverfly this morning and it seemed a little spirit was in there.



Maybe this is the sort of thing you must generalize to a God or a Great Spirit. I'll give my most non-heretical Christian friends and relatives that, that their Thank you God is a generalized "thank You to the turkey spirits You created too."

Strict vegans may disagree, but I have trouble with plant spirits too. I'm trained as a biologist. Plant's are like animals that can't run away. They might easily be much more sophisticated than insects. Therefore if you are the sort of person who thanks animal spirits, then you ought to be thanking plant spirits too...

Complications, complications....