Meat is murder - I understand that - but what if it weren't murder? Would it be alright to eat it, then? The reason I was thinking of this was that I almost hit a couple of wild turkeys while driving to work today and it occurred to me that if I had hit them it wouldn't be murder at all and their meat would be free of the stigma of cruelty that taints most meat. And I should be able to eat themwith a clear conscience. (In Wisconsin if you hit wild animals you are allowed to keep the meat for yourself, so it also would have been total legal. I suppose you can't try to hit them and you have to stay on the road, but other than that it's okay).

That example was hypothetical, but I've got a real-life one that makes my point better. A co-worker of mine - a vegetarian - hit five deer at one time on the road, then donated the venison to a food shelf. Here you have a non-meat-eater providing un-murdered meat for charity. It seems to me that in this case, eating those deer is almost virtuous.

This is fine so far, because basically I'm still talking about road-kill, tasty road-kill, but road-kill nonetheless. And most meat just isn't obtained in this way. But what if all the meat that was consumed in America came from animals that died from natural causes? Would anybody have any problems with that?

Here's how I think it would work for, say, beef. Instead of cattle farms you would have cattle communities. These 'cattle communities' would be set up so that they provided everything a cow would need to live a long fulfilling cow life. It would be a resort almost for them. They would receive the finest care available till they gently close their eyes at the end of their happy lives.

Then we eat them.

Steve Sommers is the author of Breakfast with the Antichrist. Visit his Website at http://www.breakfastwiththeantichrist.com

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