You're an animal and that's okay

I’m off to get a guide dog. Barring some sort of catastrophe, I’ll have a new partner in magic and adventure by the time the next full moon rolls around. It’s been two long years of waiting and even after I was given a date, this opportunity was almost yanked away. But that’s another story. I’m going to focus on thinking positively about this one for now.

Both my potential animal sidekick and some of my recent reading homework for my MFA program have brought our own animal nature into sharp focus. In recent years, I made an implicit assumption that society and modern science have progressed to the point that everyone simply accepts that we humans are also animals. Various writers do state this obvious fact from time to time. And people mostly nod along.

Yet when confronted with evidence of our animal nature in daily life, many of us become distinctly uncomfortable. Whenever the topic of eating meat comes up in conversation, for instance—which is irritatingly often for me because of my medical ketogenic diet—the unwelcome elephant in the room is the fact that we too are animals.

During these conversations, those who eat animal meat generally don’t want to acknowledge that we are also animals, that eating meat means eating formerly alive creatures a lot like ourselves. At the same time. many enthusiastic carnivores don’t want to see or touch raw meat, Most certainly don’t want to butcher it or deal with the actual process of taking the life of an animal they’re going to consume. They have much less problem ripping up plants or even cutting down trees. Somehow that type of killing is more palatable. We’re animals after all, not plants.

Image of a smiling girl hugging a roaring lion - image via pixabay

Those who don’t eat meat, on the other hand, often want to talk at length about the gruesome details of butchering and preparing meat. They nurse convoluted diatribes on how somewhere in our species’ distant past, our pre-human ancestors were purely vegetarian. Vegetarians and vegans are, in my experience, more likely to admit that we are animals, but they’ll argue that we are a special, vegetarian type of ape. Or at least we were supposed to be, harking back to a mythical golden age of innocence in the Garden of Eden they envision in Paleolithic Africa.

On the other hand, what most vegetarians don’t want to talk about is the 30,000 years since a lot of humans left Africa and what they realistically ate and how changes in diet affected our evolution, how those peoples who ate a lot of meat grew strong and lived healthier lives, while those who ate grain-based diets were mainly forced to do so through authoritarian social structures and the greed of their rulers. And they suffered stunted growth and malnutrition as a result.

Neither the omnivores nor the vegetarians seem very comfortable with the basic facts of our situation. We are animals. We must eat something that was previously alive, like all animals.

Vegetarians have many justifications about how animals are higher forms of life than plants and thus we are more guilty if we consume them. They are more likely to accept animals as our kindred, but they still want to draw a line between higher/more worthy and lower/less worthy lifeforms.

Omnivores often draw this line right around humans, and some of them tighten it around only some humans. If animals are less important, then we are free to kill and eat them, the standard carnivore logic goes.

From a Pagan, animist perspective, however, both of these views are self-deluding. The vegetarians are correct that animals are our kin. But their arbitrary line between animals and plants with its assumption of categories of more worthy and less worthy doesn’t stand up to scientific or spiritual reflection.

There are plants that consume meat. There are plants that move. There are animals that don’t move or barely do. There are animals that show no signs of consciousness or thinking. There are plants that cooperate in complex networks of communication. Plants react as if they feel pain.

A generation or two ago, it was assumed that animals did not feel emotional pain. And yet the emotional distress of grieving or isolated animals is so clear to see, if you spend much time with them. I believe that if people pay more attention to plants, we will see that they feel even more than just physical pain as well. The bottom line is that there is no hard line. No “us and them.” No way to escape the uncomfortable fact that we must eat formerly living beings to survive and those beings don’t want to die and may well experience pain as they die, all so that we might live.

That’s the rub, of course. We not only have to accept that animals are our kin and that animals may suffer for us to eat them, as vegetarians do. We must also accept that there is no virtuous, get-out-of-guilt-free card. Plants may be more silent in their pain and dying, but they still experience both. A tree surely has as much value as a fish or a chicken in any large spiritual scheme of things.

And yet, this discomfort with the necessity of death so that we may live, provokes a lot of blaming and shaming of those who eat meat. Take for example, how common it is for omnivores to be asked to accommodate vegetarians or vegans at a social event by keeping some of the foods free of animal products. And yet, even with a diet that is medically prescribed, I am more likely to be admonished about eating meat than accommodated, if I ask that some of the foods be ketogenic and thus mostly meat-based without any type of sugar or starch.

I’ve made vegetarian and vegan food for my friends and family on many occasions and will happily continue to do so, even if I have to make separate food for myself. I know many other omnivores who do this or who even adopt vegetarianism for that particular meal out of convenience. But never, not once, have I seen or heard of a vegetarian or vegan accommodating someone with a ketogenic diet who cannot eat much plant-based food by making meat available. It’s much more likely that the person with the ketogenic diet will bring their own food and even so, negative comments may be made about animal products being present.

This surprises me in progressive and Pagan spaces not only because it is discriminatory toward people with medical conditions that require a ketogenic or other meat-based diet, but also because I am prone to naive assumptions about progressives being open to science and objective realities, like the fact that we are animals. It’s even more confusing in Pagan spaces, because the sharp differentiation between animals and plants runs counter to our animist roots.

And yet, I can easily see why many Pagans have become vegetarian or vegan. For many it is a spiritual oath or commitment, like my oath to wear a head covering. For many it is ecologically based. Industrial meat production as currently practiced is one of our least sustainable food systems, though by far not the only problematic one. But at the same time, our traditions are clear that not everyone has the same spiritual requirements and we too are animals. In the end, it is not immoral to obtain what our animal bodies need to survive.

One of my assigned books in my MFA program is The Vegetarian by Kang Han, a Korean novel about a woman who suddenly becomes Vegan—not just Vegetarian actually—because of disturbing dreams about animal slaughter. Her family isn’t very supportive and she seems to intentionally cause scenes with her husband’s colleagues to highlight her refusal to eat meat. She eventually ends up in a mental hospital for anorexia as she stops eating anything at all and becomes obsessed with turning into a plant and living on sunlight and air.

The whole novel reeks of the refusal to accept that we are animals, right down to the explicit demand that the woman be accepted as a plant in the end. Given the sympathetic portrayal of the woman and the unpleasant portrayals of those who criticize her, it seems like the author supports vegetarianism and wants to distance human beings from animals. But in the end, the book makes a horrifying case against veganism as a kind of slippery slope to anorexia in a way that I doubt most western vegans would appreciate.

I’m not sure of the author’s intentions with that book, but I am starting to believe that like so many other taboos--the shunning of sex, the belief that pleasure is sinful and so on—this modern squeamishness about our animal bodies will inevitably, when taken to extremes, lead to disfunction, oppression and even mental disturbance.

Because I have a ketogenic diet, I’m often accused on Facebook of being anti-vegetarian or anti-vegan. I’m not against vegetarianism or veganism in the slightest. In fact, I wish both could be more widespread without severe health consequences because of the current sustainability crisis in our food systems. I support those who choose to take on these diets, whether they have health benefits or complications. As long as it is the individual’s choice, they should be supported in it.

The thing is that I ask that those who choose otherwise, especially those who must eat meat or even a ketogenic diet for health reasons, not be harassed, excluded from social events, made to feel disgusting or otherwise shunned. It is only on that point that I have disagreed with vegans and vegetarians online. We are animals and due to our evolution we are genetically omnivores. Many of us cannot adapt to a plant-based diet without serious health risks, primarily diabetes which does and will kill prematurely and rob what life one has left of energy and health.

I encourage young, healthy people who can to eat a mainly plant-based diet with low grain and sugar content in hopes that they may be able to avoid the necessity of a ketogenic diet as they age. We don’t know our individual susceptibility or adaptability, which is all the more reason to be careful. I can’t know if I would have been able to avoid my current restriction to a ketogenic diet if I had cut out grains and sugar earlier, but it is likely, given current research.

So, certainly, encourage healthy vegetarian diets with caveats about grains and sugar. But don’t shame those who can’t because it isn’t negotiable. We do not choose to be animals or to have genes from climates where our ancestors subsisted almost entirely on meat and fat. We all try to adapt to modern society as best we can.

And the bottom line is that I am an animal. My body needs nourishment that it can process safely. You are an animal. Your body is an animal body too, and that is okay. Even if your animal body needs meat to survive. And even if it doesn’t, but it needs plants to survive.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer quotes from Native American wisdom, “We are the ones who give thanks.” We cannot keep ourselves from taking life to live. If we refused, we would take life too—our own. As ethics are based in nature, eating plants or meat cannot be unethical. What animist ethics requires is gratitude and acknowledgement. It is not that you must not eat this or that. It is that you ought to give thanks and be mindful of the life given for you, rather than hiding from the truth under mountains of excuses and attempts to make yourself more pure than others.

We give thanks for all living beings that give us life. Together with all of our animal kindred, we are part of the cycle and we are humble before it.