“If you love birds as much as I know you do, how can you possibly eat them?” That was the question I was recently asked by a friend for whom I have great respect and whose interest in the answer I trusted to be wholly sincere. Truth be told, this is not the first time this inquiry has been made of me, sometimes in earnest and other times in sarcasm. The first time it was asked was by a colleague who was a life-long hunter from a family of life-long hunters and who worked for a hunting product manufacturing company. Even though his tone was somewhat challenging (my non-hunting ways made him a bit suspicious of me), I could sense that he was genuinely confused at what he saw as a contradiction in my activities. His hunting of wild animals was the perfect correlation (as he understood it) for his belief that those proclaiming “animal rights” (among hunters a phrase synonymous with “anti-hunting” and therefor “anti-gun”) were wrong in their beliefs; therefore as I watched birds with the same intensity as he watched the animals he stalked on hunts, my not killing them must have meant that I was against eating them as well.
I am actually quite thankful for each opportunity I have had to answer this oft repeated question, for I think it not only gives me the opportunity to increase the general knowledge of another person through my answer, it also gives me the push to consider the matter more deeply in my own mind. With each reconsideration, made from a different place and time in my life, I find more to add into the mélange of ideas that have been used to answer it.
I took up studying birds approximately a dozen years ago. While I had fished with my father and grandfather as a boy, my interactions with wildlife between these two periods in my life had been rather scant. Bird watching led to studying butterflies and moths. This in turn led to botany. Field studies in botany led to an interest in dragonflies and damsel flies. Then came a more general study of entomology. Taking up macro-photography in order to study insects more effectively, I inadvertently became aware of a little attended corner of the botanical world: bryology (mosses, lichens, and liverworts). With each new area of interest I cultivated, I added to my awareness of the “big picture,” the infinite web of inter-relationships of one creature to another and the importance of even the small, seemingly (from a human perspective at least) insignificant forms of life to the continued functioning of the ecosystems in which they live.
So what does this have to do with the question of loving and eating birds? Well, for one thing, I have come to understand that every living thing lives upon other living things. From the bacteria living in our digestive tracts to the largest Blue Whale swimming through the ocean – everything has to eat. From an evolutionary biology perspective, human teeth betray our diet. Possessing both cutting as well as grinding teeth, we have evolved to eat both plant material as well as animal flesh. However just as we should not (in my opinion) wastefully cultivate or harvest plants, so we should try to limit our cultivation and slaughter of animals to amounts that are modest as well as limit our methods to those which are as humane as possible. In fact, there are those who advocate hunting as the most humane method for the acquisition of animal flesh; the idea being that the animals live free and wild until the very moment of their death. However as I don’t hunt (I’m a lousy shot and I don’t want to painfully wound any creature rather than kill it quickly) I try to limit my purchase of agriculturally raised animals to those which are raised locally, in a free-range and organic manner. So while I am contributing to, as a Buddhist might say, the “overall suffering in the world,” I am doing it mindfully and as a result I sometimes opt for a vegetable-based meal in lieu of a meat-based one.
We are all, each one of us, part of the over-all web of life on this planet. Whether we sustain our lives by choosing to eat only plants or eat animals as well, we are also hosts to an astonishingly vast and varied collection of other forms of life within and about our own bodies. Furthermore, when we ourselves die, our bodies will in turn become nutrients for many other creatures, many of which whose existence we are not even personally aware, with whom we share the planet. It is a grand cyclical process over a billion years in the making. I don’t claim to fully understand it or its implications, but I like to at least occasionally try.
That’s how I see it – at least for now.
