Please eat some meat today

Wesley J. Smith reminds us today on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), that PETA, the rapid animal rights group, is still directly equating eating meat, or wearing leather shoes, with the Holocaust. Although, as he explains in detail, they issued a classic "non-apology" for the ad campaign itself, they still stand behind the thought system that resulted in these ads:

First there were the photographs. PETA juxtaposed pictures of emaciated concentration-camp inmates in their tight-packed wooden bunks with chickens kept in cages. Worse, in a truly despicable comparison (on several levels), a picture of piled bodies of Jewish Holocaust victims was presented next to a photograph of stacked dead pigs. The text of the campaign was even worse. In a section entitled "The Final Solution," PETA made this astonishing assertion:

Like the Jews murdered in concentration camps, animals are terrorized when they are housed in huge filthy warehouses and rounded up for shipment to slaughter. The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps.

For two years, PETA presented the Holocaust on Your Plate Campaign throughout the United States and much of the world.

So please, wear your leather shoes today and eat some meat. Having said that, I should say that I try to bring humanity to my meat eating. The Bible says that, with regard to the animals, God instructed man to "Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the area, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." (Genesis, 1:28.) To me, dominion means both the power to control utterly and the correspondent responsibility to treat humanely. Certainly kosher butchery was the first humane butchery on the planet -- most animals before that had been tortured to death so that their entrails could be used for religious purposes. So, to the extent I can, I always purchase humanely raised animals: free range animals that are allowed to live a good animal life during their time on earth. This means cows that graze in the sun, chickens that scratch in the dirt, and pigs that root in the mud (I don't keep kosher, obviously). I do not believe that animals are existentialists so, as long as they are living their good lives, I'm not worried that the chicken is thinking, "Sure, I may be scratching and clucking now, but tomorrow I may die at the farmer's hands." A good life, a clean death and, for me, a nice meal.