In which I think people are being a bit irrational.

So, a pudgy British comedian calls out this chick trophy hunter on social media and, like anything that ever gets traction these days, for no apparent reason it absolutely explodes all over the place.

In the last couple of days I’ve seen dozens and dozens of comments on Facebook alone, literally all of them aghast and negative and offended. And written by meat-eaters. Because trophy hunting is the absolute worst, obviously, but eating meat and eggs and wearing leather is totally different.

Well, no. The distinction is imaginary. Some broad with the budget to do so goes abroad and hunts an exotic animal and everybody reviles her. Meanwhile, that same everybody is blithely buying and eating meat. “But we don’t eat that much meat,” they cry, “and it’s usually organic and humanely raised,” or “We actually know our butcher socially, and those animals have wonderful lives!” or {insert any other generic “but my contribution to this atrocity is miniscule!” denial here}.

To which I say: WHATEVER, NERDS. They have wonderful lives up until someone kills them, usually in the first quarter of their natural lifespan. That giraffe was organic and humanely raised too, and, like all organic and humanely raised meat, it’s fucking dead. What real difference does it make that it was killed by a hunter rather than a butcher? Is the giraffe somehow more dead because its killer posed with its corpse and gloated? Would your own death be so much better if someone promised not to waste your meat? To tan your skin for raiment and eat all your organs and render your fat for candles?

You won’t care either way. You’ll be dead. The subtleties of various degrees of wastefulness and respect are for the living. And we, the living, are being big fat irrational babies about this dead giraffe.

Listen, we’re horrifically wasteful. We don’t use all of the animals we kill by a long shot. Leather is made from animals killed just for their skins (their meat is discarded) and the skins of meat animals are thrown away. While the offal market is growing, it’s still very small because most of us refuse to eat liver, heart, brain, or anything “gross.” Some animal parts do go into pet food or are rendered for other uses, but those piles of what looks like dirt in the fields around packing plants are leftover, unused animal parts — parts for which there is no market. We are wasteful, choosy, entitled motherfuckers, and that waste means more animal death than is strictly necessary.

I’d say those differences are irrelevant. Regardless of endangerment of species or habitat, of poaching versus legal killing, the end outcome of both scenarios is identical: some human being killed an animal, because that human being believed that s/he had every right to do so. Hunter or butcher, you kill because you believe it’s your right, that you’re entitled to, and that your desire — to hunt for sport or to kill for meat — in every way outweighs the life of that animal. The rest of the circumstances are just details.

We kill 150 billion animals a year. And yet the death of a giraffe is more important than 150 billion other lives, somehow, because it’s endangered? At least it didn’t starve to death, or spend its entire existence in a cage or on a concrete floor, what what?

Outsourcing the whole killing and butchering thing does not mean you don’t believe that it’s your right to kill animals. Setting rules about what, when, and where an animal can be killed does not mean you don’t believe that it’s your right to kill animals. It just means you’re making (mostly irrational, in my opinion) judgements about the fact that you believe that it’s your right to kill animals. As long as it had a good life first! As long as it doesn’t suffer! As long as it’s a common cow and not an exotic giraffe! As long as nobody enjoys it! As long as we’re all suitably ashamed in respect to our Puritan backgrounds!

Yes, eating lesser amounts of meat and making an effort to get it from a local butcher is better than being a disgusting glutton who eats multiple kinds of meat at every meal, but it doesn’t excuse people from the responsibility of their choices: if you eat meat, any kind of meat, ever, it’s because you believe that it’s your right as a human being to kill animals to appease your desires. Period. [And I say ‘desires’ because you can survive without meat. You don’t have to have it (even though it appears to be quite good for you, and is probably the best diet for humans).]

After that it’s just gradations of denial, like that old joke, “Well now that we’ve established you’re a whore, we’re just haggling for price.” You either think killing animals is okay, or you don’t. If you think it’s okay, and you’re offended by some random hunter who kills a few dozen animals during her career but you ignore the BILLIONS OF ANIMAL DEATHS going on every year in truly horrific situations, well, you’re really bad at math.

We kill 23 million chickens PER DAY. We kill 13 thousand pigs EVERY DAY. And 6.6 million cows. EVERY FUCKING DAY. And most of us, if not nearly all of us, say “Well, we really don’t eat that much meat…” But for every pound of humanely raised, hand-killed, organic meat you buy, you and your family also eat at least the equivalent weight of factory farmed meat. You probably don’t even notice; you run out of time before dinner and stop to grab sandwiches sometimes, your kid demands McNuggets one afternoon and you give in and grab yourself a burger at the same time, you eat dinner at the annual company buffet and it’s steak which is a treat because you really never have steak and it’s just this once…

Somebody is eating that meat, and it’s you. Therefore, you are cool with killing animals. Therefore, all your reasons for being aghast at that hunter are bullshit. Because if the animal’s quality of life really mattered, you wouldn’t eat meat. Because if the emotional state of the killer really mattered, you wouldn’t eat meat. Because if guilt really mattered, you wouldn’t eat meat.

Maybe, if all this troubles you, you should consider adding a non-trivial amount of offal to your diet. Liver, tongue, brain. If you’re going to eat a certain amount of meat every year anyway, consider swapping hamburger for sweetbread. It would ultimately cause fewer animals to be killed.

On the other hand, that shit is gross. So maybe just own up.

Rather than feeling guilty and indignant and lashing out at some random hunter, I think we should all accept what we do and make a mild effort to make our consumption less cruel. We should ignore the hunters entirely: they’re most assuredly not the problem. Seriously, those are probably the best deaths, if death even matters in the first place. Which it doesn’t, or we wouldn’t eat meat. Everything dies, after all. Might as well cause that death to be when the flesh is still tender!

Full disclosure: I eat eggs, and sometimes fish, and I have been known to wear leather. Which means that, even though I haven’t eaten meat or poultry in (at least) 25 years, I am still directly responsible for who knows how many animal deaths. And I see zero difference between this safari hunter and the slaughter of an organic, humanely raised goat, done by hand and with mindfulness and respect: the death in either case happened because and when a person decided it would, because people believe it is their right to kill animals.

People kill animals because they want to. Period. It’s exactly the same amount of death, whether the carcass is utilized down to the hooves or if it’s stuffed and mounted and the entrails thrown away. It’s exactly the same amount of death whether it’s an exotic or a domestic. It’s exactly the same amount of death whether the animal was a dairy cow at the end of her milking years or her useless calf. It’s exactly the same amount of death whether the whole carcass is utilized or if all but one bloody steak is discarded. There are only two kinds of death for animals: one that comes in its own time, and one that is caused by the decision of an outside agency.

In conclusion, if you wear leather, eat any meat at all ever, or even buy commercial eggs, you’re being embarrassingly foolish in your response to this ridiculous giraffe-killing woman. She’s seriously no worse than you are, and at least she killed the animals herself. And I’m not sure that enjoying it is worse than being ashamed of it; at least some happiness was had in the process.

I’m incapable of considering safari hunting a decent hobby. Killing for the thrill strikes me as disturbing and, yes, wasteful (but that’s mostly due to conditioning, and not because there’s any fundamental difference in the quality of the death). But I’m not foolish enough to think I have any right whatsoever to be offended and aghast that someone has such a hobby, while absolving myself of the horror that is ritualized, industrialized factory farmed meat. “I wouldn’t do that sort of thing myself!” is a totally reasonable response, but “Oh my God, that woman is a monster and we share NONE of her qualities or world-views!” is, if we’re honest, completely and thoughtlessly disingenuous.