the mellow tigger's musings

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.

Do you remember the Hypnotoad from Futurama? (FOX Film keeps taking down the short clips posted on YouTube (yeah, fans encouraging views of the television series has got to be bad for business), so you'll have to search for current uploads yourself.) It was a frog with large eyes that pulsated in patterns that could hypnotize his targets and bend them to his will.

Well, there is an actual Earth animal that does pretty much the same thing, stunning potential prey with hypnotic displays. And it's the cuttlefish that I was talking about earlier. Watch this clip (scroll down to episode "A Dazzling Show", fast forward 2 minutes into the movie clip), and be dazzled by Hypnotoad-of-the-Sea.