One of the great sadnesses I have in my life is my inability to stop supporting the meat industry. While I'm vegan and don't eat meat myself, for the health of my cats, I have to buy meat. I don't agree with some people's assertion that cats can eat a specially balanced vegetarian diet and be fine. They are natural carnivores, and unlike humans, have to eat meat. This is why I was excited when I heard about "shmeat" a few years ago.
Back in 2009 or so, there was a segment on the Colbert Report about PETA funding the development of lab-made "meat" that was never a part of a living creature. It's basically muscle tissue grown in a petri dish. Medical science has been working on developing lab-made tissue types for testing medicines and treatment of injuries for some time. Nobody had been thinking about people eating it, though. I love the Colbert Report, but the segment focused on how gross lab-made meat would be (as if killing an animal and cutting the flesh off its bones and eating THAT isn't gross), and makes that joke that the nickname "shmeat" comes from "shit"+ "meat".
Actually "shmeat" comes from the fact that it's created in "sheets" of tissue in the lab. While I have no interest in eating it myself, I hope that someday soon I can feed it to my cats, and other people can feed it to their cats, and people who just can't face becoming vegetarian or vegan (even though they agree with it logically) because meat is "so damn tasty" will choose shmeat instead of flesh hacked off of cow, pig, chicken, turkey, and lamb corpses. Maybe our eating habits can stop making massive contributions to global warming and general environmental degradation as well. Merry X-mas!
Saturday, November 17, 2012
The Gray Area
Sometimes, to offset our regular intake of indie, underground, queer, feminist films and films made by immigrants and people of color, my partner and I sometimes grab a movie from one of those Red Box things at the grocery store. We expect these movies to be shmaltzy or shlocky or just bad in a variety of other ways. However, I was shocked when my partner brought home The Gray, starring Liam Neeson.
In order to make it through the movie without breaking something, I had to make up a drinking game where every time a character in the movie stated something factually inaccurate about wolves, we would take a drink. I drank three glasses of wine during the movie due to this game. My partner takes bigger gulps than me, and went through two bottles of beer and two glasses of wine.
I remember that when this movie came out, there were protests by different wildlife and pro-wolf groups around the country. Not a big deal to anyone. But in the light of all the rampant wolf-killing that's happening in Wyoming, Montana, and Oregon, among other places, this country can't afford to have hatefully false bits of media like The Gray floating around for the ignorant and unintelligent to happen upon.
The film paints a picture of the North American gray wolf that is scientifically false and entirely based on fairy-tale fear. Unfortunately, there are ranchers and other anti-wolf entities across the nation that use these same untrue reasons to validate exterminating wolves, regardless of their right as a wild animal to exist, even if sometimes inconvenient to certain humans.
In the movie, wolves are said to have a "kill radius," meaning they will kill any living being found within a certain circular area of their territory. I don't even know where the filmmakers made this up from. Pulled it completely out of their asses, from what I can tell. The characterization of wolves as heartless killers who target the plane crash survivors, just for the fun of it, is patently ridiculous in the light of the fact that the only species of animal on earth that kills for fun is homo sapiens. There were many other false claims about wolves in the film, including stuff about how wolf pack hierarchy works, plus a pack of wolves with like fifty animals in it is pretty unheard of.
I would call the film hilariously incorrect if not for how many people believe that wolves are always waiting in the woods to take our children, and ranchers that think that two wolves living in their state is "overpopulation." I did laugh out loud at the final scene, when Neeson's character tapes a bunch of broken bottles to his knuckles for a final mano a lobo showdown in the wolves' "fucking den" against the alpha.
In order to make it through the movie without breaking something, I had to make up a drinking game where every time a character in the movie stated something factually inaccurate about wolves, we would take a drink. I drank three glasses of wine during the movie due to this game. My partner takes bigger gulps than me, and went through two bottles of beer and two glasses of wine.
I remember that when this movie came out, there were protests by different wildlife and pro-wolf groups around the country. Not a big deal to anyone. But in the light of all the rampant wolf-killing that's happening in Wyoming, Montana, and Oregon, among other places, this country can't afford to have hatefully false bits of media like The Gray floating around for the ignorant and unintelligent to happen upon.
The film paints a picture of the North American gray wolf that is scientifically false and entirely based on fairy-tale fear. Unfortunately, there are ranchers and other anti-wolf entities across the nation that use these same untrue reasons to validate exterminating wolves, regardless of their right as a wild animal to exist, even if sometimes inconvenient to certain humans.
In the movie, wolves are said to have a "kill radius," meaning they will kill any living being found within a certain circular area of their territory. I don't even know where the filmmakers made this up from. Pulled it completely out of their asses, from what I can tell. The characterization of wolves as heartless killers who target the plane crash survivors, just for the fun of it, is patently ridiculous in the light of the fact that the only species of animal on earth that kills for fun is homo sapiens. There were many other false claims about wolves in the film, including stuff about how wolf pack hierarchy works, plus a pack of wolves with like fifty animals in it is pretty unheard of.
I would call the film hilariously incorrect if not for how many people believe that wolves are always waiting in the woods to take our children, and ranchers that think that two wolves living in their state is "overpopulation." I did laugh out loud at the final scene, when Neeson's character tapes a bunch of broken bottles to his knuckles for a final mano a lobo showdown in the wolves' "fucking den" against the alpha.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Incompatible Bedfellows
Today I got tricked into signing a petition to stop a mining operation in the Colorado wilderness that ended with a weird pro-hunting blurb. I realize that some environmentalists think that siding with hunters is the only way to preserve natural lands, and that's horribly sad. Not only do I not want the wilderness destroyed by mining run-off pollution and logging, but I ALSO dislike it being destroyed by sport hunters blowing everything that moves away with automatic rifles. Hunters do absolutely nothing to preserve natural lands, often siding with extremely unnatural "animal management" policies that allow forest service and fish & wildlife agencies to kill off all the natural predators so elk or deer can reach overpopulation levels that make it "necessary" for human hunters to come kill indiscriminately. It's an ugly partnership between environmentalists and hunters (that's pretty one-sided, too - what hunters are all like "And it's good for ecology too!" when they're making weekend plans?) and I resent being accidentally convinced to sign anything that acknowledges hunters' rights to any opinion when it comes to preserving natural lands.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Atmospheric Depression
In this cold, wet, winter, it's hard for anyone not to be depressed. Add to that the fact that clinical depression stops for no season, and you have my situation. Adding even more, the state of the globe environmentally often halts any pattern of positive thinking I may start about life in general.
Can the few that are able to, willing to fight for the environment and animal rights do enough? Extinctions continue, environmental degradation constantly increases, deforestation continues almost entirely unabated, more new forms of pollution are being developed than old being eliminated, global availability of sex education and birth control is a distant dream...
Maybe I should be telling all this to my therapist.
Can the few that are able to, willing to fight for the environment and animal rights do enough? Extinctions continue, environmental degradation constantly increases, deforestation continues almost entirely unabated, more new forms of pollution are being developed than old being eliminated, global availability of sex education and birth control is a distant dream...
Maybe I should be telling all this to my therapist.
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