Eating Dead Babies

1491:

Edited by CJ Tointon

I think of all the billions of fellow humans scattered around this planet, and the numbers are beyond the scope of my imagination to grasp.  The human species is what I can relate to.  Each human has many things in common with me - the way we think, the way we talk and walk, the way we share the same drives.  But there's a great fundamental difference between me (and a few other people like me) and the vast, vast numbers of others. 

To be so different, to find it so disturbing to be unlike others in such an important way, that's one big worry!  It's not a feeling of superiority in any form at all.  It isn't even feeling luckier or more blessed.  It's just this yawning gulf between us-few and them.  During any one week, I doubt if I speak to more than one or two others who think and feel the same way as I do, and likely it's the very same one or two with whom I often speak.  I know there are more who feel as I do, but I don't know them or they don't feel the need to discuss their own feelings of alienation with me on any forum or place I'm likely to come across.  So, effectively, it's not difficult to feel cut off from my whole species, over one single important crime that most everyone else is taking part in - eating animals!

To use an extreme example in order to make this sort of alienation-feeling clear, I'll propose what would have to be something that should be utterly impossible to ignore.  It's the practice of engaging in sexual intercourse to produce a baby, which is fattened and then eaten, regarded as a delicacy!!  It's not beyond the bounds of possibility to produce baby flesh. The reproductive mechanism can be used to experience pleasure at one end and another pleasure at the other.  A more revolting suggestion could hardly be contemplated.

But that's more or less how it feels for me, that anyone could so use the reproductive process of a 'non-human' for the purposes of eating their offspring.  Surely it would be better to eat our own offspring than that of another species?  But that's not how the vast number of other humans think.  They eat the babies of our fellow sentients, each of whom are indisputably beautiful, sensitive and full of the same sorts of feelings I have myself.  And these unimaginably large numbers of fellow humans eat these babies - because they've always eaten them.  The seven billion inhabitants of this planet act similarly, like automatons.  None of them think twice about it.  They never consider NOT doing it.  It's as if their imaginations have been shut down over this matter of 'eating dead babies'.