I remember a time when I thought everyone who drove a truck had some kind of ego problem. That is an example of projection.
The nice thing about trucks is that if you have them, you have the possibility of being more self reliant and self sustaining. You can do more work and carry more tools, and you can pull things. You can help your friends when they are moving too. These are all good things.
But from the perspective of city living, it’s morally preferable to rent a truck from a company when you’re moving things.
I also remember finding fault with my ex in laws when I learned they planned to eat their animals. In fact, I think I wrote a short story once in which part of the character development of a problematic mother character was her willingness to eat the animal she had raised. That means that a decade ago when I wrote that, I found it self evident that to eat the animals you raise is morally problematic.
Meanwhile, eating animals you didn’t raise—something I do many times a week—does not change the reality of animals being killed; it only changes your awareness of the circumstances of their life and death. The distance between you and the animals you eat provides an opportunity for other entities to fill the gap of raising and killing the animals. Most importantly, it effectively results in an understand of meat as having dropped to the supermarket refrigerator shelves from heaven, out of any context of the actual cost of the raising of the meat and butchering of the killed animal. I mean cost to: the animal, the land, the air, the farmer, the employees involved.
To look closely at the costs won’t necessarily result in a decision not to incur those costs — there are also benefits to those same entities and environmental elements. But looking closely enables the possibility of a responsible decision as a consumer and an omnivore. The curtain that blocks the view—the supply chain that allows us to have our meat without raising and killing it too—prevents the possibility of a truly responsible decision, as it blocks the information.
This week, I saw a mother cat catch a mouse and teach her kitten to seemingly torture it to death; I saw the deadly aftermath of a rooster’s attempt to mate with a reticent hen; I saw a Venus fly trap in an indoor terrarium hold a fly in a suspended state of slow dying; and I saw my kids feeding cattle that will soon be butchered to feed their cousins.
My nieces’ and nephews’ other grandma whose farm this is retrieved the dying hen from the front porch of the farmhouse, and slaughtered and plucked it right away. My daughter said, “Wait, the rooster tried to mate with the chicken, and she didn’t want to, so he killed her?” She laughed and said “Wow! That’s a bad man!”
And in the morning the rooster was crowing at 6am like every other day, and my kids were soon hunting down the kitten and her mother.