Very nice post from *Christopher at Bending the Rule.

I was at an Epiphany party last night and was trying to make a qualified case for vegetarianism to a couple of the attendees, without much traction I’m afraid. And it’s hard to do it without coming across as shrill or fanatical. (Though in my defense, a few of them came across as somewhat fanatical in their liturgical preferences.)

But I think *Christopher’s right that there are always ways in which we can live less violently with our animal friends. It needn’t be all or nothing. In fact, it can’t be all. Andrew Linzey has repeatedly pointed out that there’s no “pure land” on which to live. Even a strict vegan would be complicit in and benefit from a host of practices that harm animals. I think Karl Barth was wrong when he called vegetarianism a “wanton anticipation of the eschaton,” but to think that we can live in this world without adversely impacting the lives of animals would seem to fit that description.

The flipside though is the danger of complacency. The thing is, there are a lot of ways we could greatly increase the well-being of animals (especially those we raise for food, who account for the vast majority of animals we interact with) without any great sacrifice on our part. The fact that the use of animals is so widely bound up with our current civilization does make it hard of course, if only psychologically, to make certain sacrifices, but in terms of our objective needs, the sacrifice of, say, regular access to cheap meat would have to count as relatively minor.

At the end of the day this is just the challenge of the moral life in general: we have to do what we can, hoping to avoid complacency, and gently encouraging others ideally while remaining humble about our own shortcomings and without falling into fanatacism or self-righteousness.