Image by Midjourney
DREAM
I'm responsible for helping some ladies exit an artistic/spiritual retreat safely. There's one gray haired lady who, before leaving, dumps out her duffel bags with cats into the terrariums of some large snakes. I am shocked and horrified at this.
Then I look at the cats. They're undernourished. They're too small, even though I know they're adults. They are dirty. They probably won't be adopted.
And I think to myself, they're part of the food chain just like other animals. If it wasn't these animals who aren't wanted or given a good life, it would be other animals we'd kill. But my gut is telling me that there is more to this situation than what I'm consciously taking into account, and that this is somehow worse than what one would ordinarily feed to a large, pet snake.
INTERPRETATION
I used to have a lot more nightmares related to vegetarianism than I do now. I think this dream could relate to my concerns about not being a vegetarian or a vegan, but I think it also highlights those times that you have a mismatch between your gut feeling and what your head is telling you. In the dream, I think I was a lot more aware of this divide between head and gut than I am when I'm awake.
In my opinion, my gut is like an emergency warning system that can put on the breaks or give me the go-ahead before my brain has had a chance to catch up. Because when I woke up, I could think of other reasons why it's worse to feed a cat to a snake. That's an animal that does have a chance at a good life in someone's home. There's probably not a future good life for a chicken or a rabbit bred for food. And we've domesticated cats and dogs to be tame and dependent on us as pets. It's a betrayal of trust to kill an animal that was promised a stable, comfortable life by our society for reasons other than offering them a kind exit from their suffering. It's a betrayal of our stewardship. It may not be a betrayal on an individual, one-on-one contract type of level, but it's a betrayal on a societal contract kind of level. It's true of chickens and cows too (that they're bred by us to be tame and dependent on us), but it's not so common to share as close a bond as the one we develop with cats and dogs.
On the other hand, shouldn't the bond we've achieved with cats and dogs tell us that we could achieve that kind of a bond with nearly any other kind of animal to some extent--especially tame, domesticated animals like chickens and cows? And even with wild animals, we might not be able to bring them into our lives on a close basis, but we can relate, emotionally, to the experiences of nearly any kind of animal.
It's just not good that we kill any animals for food. We have a lot in common with animals--similar senses, similar emotions, similar pains and joys. I'm all for lab-grown meat in the future. With some animals that are true carnivores, like snakes, we might not be able to give them nutritionally complete meals without feeding them whole animals with organ meat and skeletons and all. But humans? Humans are omnivores. Humans can probably live on plant-based diets with occasional supplementation.
So why am I not a vegetarian or a vegan? It's just too inconvenient not to eat meat. I've already got a lot to worry about with my diet as far as chronic disease goes without worrying about how to get all my nutrients in and how to cook special meals to accommodate a special meat-free diet. But I do think it's more morally correct to not kill animals for human food. And eating meat does contribute to that system.
I've heard some people decrying the use of lab meats because it's "unnatural" and will likely have toxins in it. But we don't know that. It could be perfectly safe. We'd have to run tests over time. We wouldn't know if it's toxic or not just based on the fact that it's lab grown. I do hope they succeed at mass producing safe, lab grown meats in the future and that the skeptics end up in the minority.
