If a cow ever got the chance...

I was reading Newsweek yesterday for some reason when I came across this little item, entitled "Hey, It's Hot In Here!" and accompanied by cute graphic:

"Who doesn't love an old-fashioned New England clambake? Except for digging the pit and building the fire and getting sand in your shorts. So when Roger Berkowitz of Boston's famed Legal Sea Foods suggested a for-one clambake courtesy of my own microwave--'no muss, no fuss'--I couldn't resist. [instructions deleted here--you evidently stick the live lobster in the microwave and nuke it for eight minutes...] The microwave provides a window on the execution. The lobsters thrash and may even tap the glass. The squeamish may want to zap--and run. Tip: Freeze the lobster for 20 minutes first. That anesthetizes the poor crustacean, reducing the thrash factor. This, in turn, cuts down on adremaline, which toughens the flesh."

OK, I have to ask: does anyone else think something is wrong with this? I mean, I know intellectually that it's no different from dropping live lobsters into boiling water and cooking them that way... but the microwave???? Something about that seems flat-out depraved to me. Didn't we learn in like second grade or whenever our parents got their first microwave that you don't stick live animals in there? That it's even bad, symbolically, to nuke your WWF action figures? If you microwave your kitten, you get two or three years in juvie and mentioned on numerous perverted websites, but evidently if you microwave your lobster you get an approving column in Newsweek...

I think this just shows how fuzzy the prevailing "logic" is when it comes to animals and their rights. The more cute and fluffy you are, the better you're treated... It's just like when South Korea was about to host the Olympics and everyone was really worried because there was a thriving black-market trade in dog meat, and people were saying (with this barely disguised racist undertone) how badly it reflected on the country and how Western nations would never do that. No, instead of dogs we eat pigs (which are just as smart, but many times less affectionate toward humans, and ugly as hell when they stop being piglets).

If I ate meat at all, I would totally eat dog. I like dogs--if I had a backyard, I would probably have one--but I don't see any moral difference between eating a dog and eating a pig. Or a lobster, for that matter. Can you really say that an animal's life is less important to it than yours is to you? That they don't fight to keep it? I can't say that, and apparently neither can the Newsweek guy (that's why he advocates walking away while you're subjecting your lobster to ungodly doses of radiation).

My consolation is that in two hundred years or so, little columns like this are going to be looked back upon as evidence of how barbaric the early twenty-first century was. We are going to have textured vegetable protein for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and (lest you think I'm just being a vegan fascist), it is going to taste GOOD. I mean, they already make most of McDonalds' flavorings for Big Macs and fries in a factory in New Jersey... I just hope some other things will have changed by then, too.

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