Locus of control

So yesterday I had this conversation with Jakob, my eldest, about going vegan, going vegetarian, or just eating fewer animals.

We had this conversation as I prepped a meal of lamb chops I had marinated over 24 hours in a mash of olive oil, grated fennel, garlic, cumin, coriander, paprika, and crushed pink salt.

Somewhere in this conversation about eating fewer animals, one we revisit often enough since that first time I tried to get him to watch a PETA video back when he was 13, he lets out this sigh of exasperation, a sign of helplessness and says something along the lines of, “Well, what does it matter? How could I, just one person, giving up meat, actually change the status quo?”

Erm…

I was like, “Dude, every single choice we make, counts”

If you had a 100 people in a room that all ate meat. If 5 of those people decided to go vegan, there would be only 95 people in that room still eating animals. So unless those 95 suddenly began eating more animals than before, technically, you should end up with less animals being killed.

If you ate meat only 1 meal a day and gave up eating animal products the other two meals of the day, that means, quite simply, that you are eating less animals or animal products.

Less chickens got crapped on in battery farms because you didn’t eat eggs for breakfast. Less cows needed that extra milking because you skipped cheese. Less baby pigs got ripped away from their mums coz you skipped that suckling pig with rice dish.

It may not seem that way, when you think about it, but if you look at our oceans and see how much plastic is in them, you might think twice about buying that bottle of water you don’t really need.

The same way that they drum on about “Every vote counts”, every one of our actions do matter.

If I ate less cows, ate less pigs, ate less chickens, ate less sheep…it may not seem like much for me, one person, to make a difference, but if you look at it over the course of an entire year, then two years, then a dozen years, that brings you to the realization that a lot of animals didn’t have to die so I could have that chunk of flesh to chew on.

Not drinking from an aluminum can, regardless of whether you recycle, ensures just one less aluminum can to dump out there in landfill.

Over the summer I had grand plans to go plastic free for a month. We were in France, somewhere near the Pyrenees, the midi-Pyrenees. I thought, fuck, this is country, we should be able to do it no problem! Eh, let me tell you, it was pretty difficult, so much so that after a week, we gave up. Even hitting up a local farmers stand meant walking away with a tiny bags of veggies or fruit. Sure, I tried to shove them in boxes instead, but it was not easy.

Even milk, milk was in either tetra packs (which is what we opted for) or plastic jugs. Kids juices, chocolate, even fruit sometimes came in plastic packaging (think cherries, strawberries, nectarines).

How we consume, it spells out our future.

I do what I can to recycle, but then I see in Hong Kong that they have it like this “Plastic, Cans, Paper” and if you are concerned enough, you can find certain designated bins that recycle glass too, but they aren’t everywhere. But the thing is, in Japan, recycling a plastic drink bottle involves separating the wrapper from the bottle, and the cap, then the wrapper and cap go into a different plastic recycle than the bottle itself. Here in Hong Kong we just throw all of it into one bin.

How does that work?

Do they have some dude at the recycling plant that separates the cap, wrapper and such, by hand? Or, as people say rather woefully, there is no recycling plant, its all a load of bullshit to allow us to think we are doing something but they just collect all three separated bags of trash and stuff it all in landfill, not recycling, ever.

I have no answer for this. But for every piece of meat bought at the store or even at the butcher counter, you get a plastic tray and cellophane wrap.

Heck, some veggies also come this way, plastic wrapped bananas, plastic packaged oranges, apples, cucumbers, broccoli…

But then…and this is the thing I got chatting with my husband about.

You know how vegans are all, “No harm to animals” and they won’t even wear leather?

Well, think about this though, you buy a good (and I am not meaning cheap and replaceable) pair of leather shoes. You spend decent money on it, you know it will last, you intend on wearing them for at least 5 years, and you end up wearing them that long, if not longer.

Now, you tell me of a pair of synthetic material shoes you have bought, saving animals or not, that lasted you that long. And when they fell apart after one season or one rainstorm, where do you think they end up? Landfill!

And Crocs are not shoes, so lets not even talk about that assault on our senses! Rubber shoes, whatever, they still come from rubber plantations, likely some of these plantations razed forest in order to be planted and killed countless pest animals in order to become lucrative.

If some animal eater is going to eat cows and then we are using the hide to make shoes, I have no real issue with wearing the shoes. If you want to eat a crocodile, I see no problem with making a handbag of it. The problem with crocodile farms is, and this is just me thinking out loud, is I wonder, seriously, do people eat those? I have seen some horrible videos of them killing crocs. Sure those creatures are vicious as fuck, but they deserve better, right? But is crocodile farming the “sustainable” alternative to folks heading out there and killing wild crocodiles that may be endangered?

I am stumped.

There is all this talk of vegans turned hunters.

Yes, you read that right, fucking vegan guy becomes a hunter.

I heard part of the interview on a Joe Rogan podcast and was like, “Hmmm”

Hunting.

I don’t think its for me. I am sure I can respect someone hunting an elk, killing it, skinning and gutting it and filleting it, then storing that shit in their fridge and eating elk for months on end. I can respect that.

But even the book I began reading about this guy who did this, I think it was called “Meat Eater” something something about the life of an American hunter. I saw all the photos in the middle of the book and its this author with his brothers and they have something like 40 dead ducks in front of them as they pose with their rifles in hand.

Seriously? How much fucking duck are you going to eat, asshole?

Even if each of them took 10 ducks, that is a lot of duck on top of the game fishing and the deer and rabbits and possums or squirrels they kill. How much meat do you need to eat? Go pick some berries and forage for nuts, man!

I mean. The vegan guy and his argument about vitamin B12 and how maybe he wasn’t as healthy as a vegan…Joe Rogan asked the right questions, dude ain’t afraid to toke and he ain’t afraid to say shit like “Well, what the fuck were you eating, and were you eating right?”

I bought a big bottle of B complex vitamins in this grand plan for me transitioning to being vegan and well, if B12 is all that is holding me back from being vegan, well, what the hell, right? If I can get it from a bottle, and if I can kill less animals, and if it means I am also living a healthier life by going more plant based, why the hell not, right?

If you’re concerned about nutrition, talk to a nutritionist. That you didn’t eat healthy on a vegetarian diet means just that, you didn’t eat a healthy vegetarian diet. It doesn’t mean that being vegetarian is a bad choice.

Killing an animal, for sport, that is fucked up, no matter how you look at it. Every hunter, including that vegan dude who became a hunter, talks about the kill and they all talk about this in words that send a shiver down my spine, like “What a beautiful and majestic creature it is” like a big male deer or an elk.

Yep, I think that, like “Great, what a beautiful majestic creature, all I want to do is put a bullet through it, a clean kill, and eat its flesh!” Gnawwwwgnawgnaw…

I really fucking hope I don’t become one of those insufferable vegans if I make the leap. I fucking sound like one right now. I don’t mean to, but I tell you, these thoughts about animals, they do the rounds in my head from time to time. And while I tried to lose weight, cut down carbs, eat more “protein”, it became an “eat animals” fest, daily, meal after meal, and it just got exhausting.

Apart from the fact that eating animals is expensive if you are eating animals that are safe for regular consumption, this means organic, grassfed, free range, etc. Eating organic vegetables ain’t cheap either but they are a damn sight cheaper than animals.

I’m the kind of person who always knew, even from when I was a kid, that my grandmother having a pet canary was a bad thing. Sure, Obachan always loved Pichan, but that bird, the small yellow guy, he was in a cage or he’d fly about in that tiny apartment, shit on her shoulder and nibble on seeds when she gave him some. That ain’t a life. Zoos used to make me cry when I was a kid. Lone elephant surrounded by a moat, a big chain on his chunky ankle. No, man. I could never watch a dolphin show at Ocean Park, it seemed like the most fucked up thing to make a dolphin do. Even dogs and teaching them tricks like roll over, give me a paw, don’t eat this cookie I am shoving on your nose, all of those things fuck me right off!

Am I weird?

It was always something that bothered me when I was a kid. People would tell me how much they loved their dogs and I saw how those dogs were there for these people to feel whole. Dogs…pedigree dogs, the breeders, the whole mess of dog breeding and dog selling. It all upsets me. Sure there are dog rescue lots, but they exist because someone bought a dog and abandoned it!

Of course, then I think, man, I grew up with a dog. Yes, that dog was a mutt and yes I was in boarding school 9 months of the year, but I remember having a dog until she got hit by a truck when I was 11. My dog was an outside dog though, she had her buddies and would roam around in her very own “wolfpack”. Everytime she was on heat my Mum would have to lock her in the garage lest we woke to the morning glory of two dogs fucking on the front lawn, and more of the same throughout the day.

Part of me wonders about giving my kids this same chance to experience bonding with an animal, a “pet”…but then I think, nope. I live in an apartment, I toy with the idea of it, but this ain’t the place for a dog. Indoors until we let him out, restless till we walk him, pooping on a sidewalk and me having to sign up for a subscription to a newspaper.

I don’t know what the solution is but like the meat eater conundrum and this “What difference would it make?” I say, if I don’t get a dog, that is one less dog that needs to be bred for me. I’d rather fund programs for vets to neuter stray dogs and cats so that those poor animals aren’t out there siring many more little critters.

A while back we heard this almighty ruckus. It was the sound of dogs in a fight and it was 2am in the morning when my husband and I looked out the bedroom window to the source of the noise by the pool below and there were 5 or 6 dogs fighting over what looked like a small dog. I mean fighting!

They were pulling at this critter from all angles and there was all this snarling and howling.

My husband ran downstairs to the pool area with the nearest weapon he could find, a broom, he was still in his drawstring pants, but what he found down there when he chased those dogs away was a cat.

A tabby.

That poor thing was a mangled mess, but it was still alive.

We called the SPCA and then they told us to call the agriculture and fisheries department, someone was here within the hour and they carted the poor cat away.

A day later we see that the neighbors have put a “Lost and offering reward” sign up in the building about a cat that looks like a tabby and I am like, wtf?

And so I tell their helper, coz I don’t know the neighbors, that dude, I saw this shit go down and I am sure that must have been their cat. And the helper is like, “Nah, their cat was chipped” and I am like, “eh, what if that chip is sitting in the gut of one of those fucking stray dogs, eh?”

*SMH*

Dumbasses. You hear about this shit happening and you choose to believe your cat is just lost but still alive somewhere out there vs hearing a more likely truth like “Your cat got ripped to shreds by a pack of stray dogs”.

This is Hong Kong, we live in a very chill district of it, but stray dogs are out there. Or they were. I don’t see any anymore, which only means that the AFCD likely rounded up the strays and put them down. I have even seen wild boar around here, with piglets, and that was just a few months ago. Maybe those little critters are a bit more protected because they don’t roam the streets in packs.

My mothers dog, in our hometown in India, that dog recently got eaten by a leopard or a panther.

They stopped the hunting of wild animals and then this.

More cases of elephants trampling crop, more cases of tiger sightings and then of course, stories like the very real killing of my mothers dear dog on a night when there was a power outage and the big cats prowled into and hunted in the darkened gardens of a sleepy mountain town.

Animals.

So here I am, on the cusp of vegetarianism, quite the same as when I was on the cusp of atheism, its an odd place.

I used to go to church a lot until I was 18, more out of compulsion and guilt than actual faith in God. Then I made it out into the world and I dabbled in magic (and no, not the card tricks and abracadabra), the occult, and then I kinda shimmied back into spirituality and the possibility of being buddhist and agnostic before I just said fuck it all and came out as an atheist.

You see the thing that does my head in about religion, well, my intro to it was through the Catholic Church, is how somehow sinning is all forgivable. You can do something fucked up and then just pray for forgiveness and you will be given grace.

Recently I read a quote right out the horses ass, Justin Bieber. I think he said something like, “If it weren’t for God, I would be a terrible person”

Ha!

Did you get that?

Dude would be a terrible person if it weren’t for God! He is adored like a God by so many young people, heck, even I am not ashamed to admit I frikken love this idiots new album, its so damned catchy! But this tool just preaches about how everybody makes mistakes and its ok, because no one is perfect and God forgives us all as long as we repent.

The whole concept of confession, forgiveness on a divine level, it doesn’t sit well with me.

You know I went to watch that movie about the child molesting priests in Boston the other day, what was the movie called? Spotlight! That was it. Spotlight.

If you haven’t seen it, you should.

Its enough to put into perspective everything I have come to understand about faith, people having faith, people abusing faith, people having their faith questioned or put in jeopardy.

How do you continue to belong to a system that protects abuse of such a catastrophic level, even to this day!

My go to line in one of my favorite movies of all time, Clerks, one I love to quote at various junctures in peoples lives and when I get asked for advise is:

“You gotto shit or get off the pot!”

Either believe in the whole fucking thing or admit its a load of bullshit.

When I asked one of my favorite priests, a Jesuit, my professor and my friend, “Father, what was it that made you become a priest? Did you hear the calling from God? Did God choose you?”

You know what he said?

“I was in my last year of Engineering College, I had been boozing heavily, I was flunking my exams and I knew I would have to face my father at the end of it all and explain to him how I hadn’t passed, how I was a failure…and then I was with my friends, drunk, driving back from some party and I remember really wishing the car, with all four of us in it, would run head first into a tree and that we would all die. It was at that moment that I realized that the path I was on was not the one for me. The next day I went and signed myself up to join the seminary and the rest as they say, is history”

Like what?

The guy was nearly 70, had been a catholic priest pretty much all his life. He spoke several languages, had spent almost 30 years of his service in Japan. He was a scholar in Hinduism with an encyclopedic knowledge of everything to do with this polytheistic religion that he had great reverence and affinity to!

We would have discussions about divorce and even he would say to me, “How can I, in this day and age, this world we live in, when I see a young Filipino woman who has been transplanted to Tokyo after marrying a Japanese man without fully knowing what she was getting into…how could I explain away her loneliness and abandonment when she comes to this country and learns about this culture? How can I in good conscience tell her that the Catholic Church does not look at divorce as an option when she comes to me with bruises and tears over spousal abuse? How can I tell her to stay when I know she should leave?”

He is, for all I know, a wonderful old guy. And well, I never really looked at him as a Catholic in the way I see some people trying to emulate being Catholic. He was a good man in a role that required much of him, but more than anything, I am guessing he got into the fold so he could get free education and just keep learning until the day he died! If I was a priest, I’d be a Jesuit, that shit looks like it would be pretty cool.

But then I would be worried I would get found out to be a fraud, that people would know I believed that it didn’t matter what path you took to “God” as long as you were a good person and were kind to your fellow earthlings.

A lot of what religion is, a lot of what religion does…and a lot of the evidence we see daily on how it can be something rather excluding…meh, its not for me.

Some Rabbi, a hassid in NY somewhere, who got 60 days in prison for molesting 4 boys.

60 days.

That was all he got.

Dude should have been strung up by his testicles in front of the synagogue but instead he was sent to some sort of sex offenders class to learn some sensitivity! This is the world we live in.

I can see where my son gets this feeling of “Whats the point? What difference would I make if I change what I eat, what I wear, what I consume?”

And I say, every one of us counts.

I wouldn’t trust a fucking Rabbi, Priest or Guru to watch my kids. I don’t look at someones religiosity as being a shroud of morality they get to be cloaked in.

Whenever I hear someone say shit like, “I would never cheat you, I am a good Christian” I think, eh, red flag warning, run for the hills!

Doesn’t even have to be Christians, you hear this in Muslim company too, this whole “Mashallah, Inshallah” speak. Like boy, I hope I make shedloads of money this year, God willing. Boy, your son is so handsome, Praise God!

Where is the praise God and God willing when someone loses a kid to cancer or your wife gets hit by a drunk driver?

Its just a screwy world. Like my helper saying she is praying her son will find his way and I ask her, do your prayers get answered and she said many times they do, and I think, well, if you are praying for shit that quite obviously could happen, such as someone getting over an illness, then how the hell is that not mere probability? What about all the times your prayers went unanswered? Is that God ignoring you? Or just plain probability that events meant to happen simply went the way they did, regardless of how hard you prayed.

To pray or not to pray.

God or no God.

Dog or no Dog.

To eat animals or not.

Recycle or consume.

They are all just choices, but each of those choices actually do have far reaching consequences for others.

We are earthlings. We are not from some other planet, we don’t have any other planet to retreat to if we fuck this one up. So as a thinking atheist, an earthling with kids, its important I think about these things and about the earth I leave my children and my childrens children and my childrens childrens children.

I guess this whole think-out-loud is to find my moral reasoning to help me understand why I would consider going vegan.

Hmmm….getting there.

Time to order a cheese pizza to share with the kids.

I called the pizzeria and as I order one large plain ol’ pizza with cheese and nothing else (yes, yes, suffering cows for my cheese) my eldest yells out “And can you order some Buffalo wings???” and I remember how Sasha loves calamari rings…mmm…so there go two more critters.

Dinner is going to be a dose of suffering with two sides of suffering and death.

This better be worth it!