Monocropping is Murder

The Vegan Issue of Sizism

Halictus ligatus — USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab

“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.”

Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Lakota

It is easy to murder a fly.

But that is not really murder. The term “murder” only applies to a human being. Sometimes the term is used for shock effect by vegans to describe what happens to livestock or wild animals. By that standard, PETA, the biggest vegan organization out there, murders around 2,000 dogs and cats every year at its shelter.

You’re not going to feel bad for killing a fly.

But if you shot a squirrel you might feel a bit queasy.

If you dropped a piano onto a cow, you would feel bad because that would be a bad thing to do.

And for a good reason — when we look into a cow’s eyes we can see ourselves staring back. Well, at least some of us can. How different are we, really, from any animal that lives on this planet? The physicist Riccardo Sabatini notes that, out of the 262,000 pages of our genetic code, only 500 pages are unique to…