I will not eat

[mellowtigger]

Here's a curious question about (or for) omnivores: what won't they eat?

I have consumed meat from the usual variety of critters that Westerners eat (pig, cow, chicken, fish, shrimp) plus a few more (frog, rattlesnake, crawfish, and various bugs accidentally caught in my mouth while bicycling). I am planning to eventually convert to a primal diet that will require much more meat than my current diet. What creatures are not to be found on my menu?

There are some animals that I will not eat unless dire circumstance might present a reason, but why are they on my list at all? I've eaten rabbit before, so I'm not wired to avoid a kind of animal just because I've been emotionally attached to one of them before. I write my list with that trans-species bill of rights in mind, the one that doesn't exist but that I repeatedly reference anyway.

I avoid creatures that I consider sentient at some level. Sentience is a kind of meta-cognition, meaning that the creature can think about its own thinking.  I believe that some kinds of suffering require sentience to experience.  I think that all mature animals experience pain aversion.  More intelligent animals can experience dread of recurring pain.  A persistent history of dread may even offer a kind of despair. I think true despair, however, is limited to sentient creatures because it requires the ability to survey large landscapes of possibility and still find no course to alleviate suffering.  Despair requires mental exploration of options for relief, and the failure to locate any.

I will not eat creatures that might be capable of despairing that they will someday serve as my food.  I currently include these creatures in my prohibition:

• coleoid cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopus, squid)
• primates (human, ape, monkey)
• cetaceans (dolphin, porpoise, whale)
• various birds that don't seem easily grouped (european magpie, african grey parrot, crow, finch)

The only item from my do-not-eat list that appears in common restaurants is the squid. I've eaten calamari (squid) before, but I will not do so any longer.  I would be willing to eat even creatures on this list if they had already died of other causes (not intended as food), and I needed the nourishment.  I expect of myself that I would not kill them, however, if I needed nourishment and their living body was the only available source.

For the record, this list began with a single animal.  At Epcot Center in Disney World many years ago, I encountered a lone cuttlefish in a circular display aquarium.  It's bland coloration and catatonic body convinced me that it despaired of ever escaping its confinement.  I think it felt the despair of a pointless existence, or at least the alien equivalent of such emotion and realization. I have slowly added to my list as I learn of the advanced reasoning abilities of other animals.

Comments

[loganbeary]

My list includes anything that looks like a bug, spider, including the crustacean family.

Also on my list are the invertebrate family.

I would also not be interested in anything in the rodent, feline, canine, or ursine families.

Nor do I think I'd be interested in any of the sea mammals, or elephants, camels, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giraffe.

I also have zero desire to eat reptiles of any kind.

And to put a end to this list, I don't look at other living creatures and have a desire to actually eat them, and I wonder if I would ever have it in me to take ones life for food.

Except for perhaps taking an egg, I could do that.

Other meat would have to be butchered for me though.

Oh, and I can't eat fish with a head on it, and prefer the scales, fins, and tail to be removed as well. :ob

[mellowtigger]

Yes, I deliberately avoided "ick" factor in this post. There are certainly more critters that would trigger a shudder rather than a hunger for me. My list would be much, much longer if I included that different kind of motivation. Battered-and-deep-fried anything, though, can't taste bad. Can it? :)

I also don't want my food (alive or dead) looking at me while I eat it. I even tend to avoid chicken wings because there are so many "parts" on them that they remind me too much of the whole, living chicken. I've never killed, cut, and prepared any animal that I've eaten. I should learn, just for self-sufficiency's and honesty's sake. I enjoy avoiding it as long as necessity fails to demand it.