3. The Misanthropic Defense
Somwhat ironically, I had become vegetarian because I cared about the individuality of animals, yet the token environmentalist in me was really just concerned about species—hence the irony in my desire to be a vegetarian hunter. In high school, I tried to rationalize myself out of animal activism. It wasn’t the individual that mattered, but the ecosystem. Thinking about individuals was narrow-minded. The big picture was what was important. These sentiments, however, I do not believe came out of some (ir)rational void; they had emerged from a very particular social milieu. These feelings of detachment from other individuals and the care I felt toward them never existed within the first year or so of going vegetarian.
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Somwhat ironically, I had become vegetarian because I cared about the individuality of animals, yet the token environmentalist in me was really just concerned about species—hence the irony in my desire to be a vegetarian hunter. In high school, I tried to rationalize myself out of animal activism. It wasn’t the individual that mattered, but the ecosystem. Thinking about individuals was narrow-minded. The big picture was what was important. These sentiments, however, I do not believe came out of some (ir)rational void; they had emerged from a very particular social milieu. These feelings of detachment from other individuals and the care I felt toward them never existed within the first year or so of going vegetarian.
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