“Pleeeeze! Save the babies!”

If they get any chicks, you can name them all Jesus Christ.

Okay, I “get” the idea of abstaining from animal products. It’s really a sort of modern-day quest for spiritual purity — an attempt to abstract oneself from the Way of All Flesh.

But a person’s principles would be less susceptible to mockery from us unwashed savages if said person also possessed any sort of grasp of basic biological principles.

This applies to Republican Presidents and Presidential candidates who deny the organizing principle of all biological science as well as vegans who believe in virgin chicken birth, so I’m an equal-opportunity savage.

Good luck with the chooks. We are closing on our farm in a couple of weeks; I hope to have chicks in shortly thereafter. It’s hard enough to hold off on gardening because of the move. We get a significant portion of our food from it, and not planting feels like courting starvation. I’ve covered the beds at our current house with black plastic to smother weeds and to look tidy for buyers. I have to stifle the urge to show up at the new place with a rototiller while the sellers gape at me from their mound of cardboard boxes.

“Awkward” is being kind. They truly do not understand — and argued to the contrary — that without a rooster, eggs cannot become chickens.

>Vegans don’t eat animal-derived products, period

This is why “veganism” often seems a tad cult-y to me, instead of being a lifestyle choice derived from thinking things through on your own.

Does “animal-derived” include the composted manure organic farmers would use in a sustainable and eco-friendly system of agriculture? So you’re not going to choose non-animal foods from organic farms because they rotate chickens through their fields for pest control and soil enrichment (such as in the pioneering sustainability work of Polyface Farm in Virginia?) Or do vegans insist on the use of earth-damaging fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides on their food even though that contributes to global warming and the possible end to the eco-systems a lot of animals (including us) need to survive?

Why if you’re making a logical choice “for the animals” would you say “no” to humanely produced eggs from pet hens and say “yes” to pet food sourced in industrialized factory farms? (As my neighbors do.)

Not to use too much animal-derived product here, but accepting a set of eating rules as “the only way” instead of figuring out where you can exist philosophically and ethically within the big framework we’re all trying to exist is (to borrow from Penn&Teller) bullshit.

Count me out of any lifestyle choice I have to follow in lockstep because it’s defined by someone else.

But as we’ve said here many, many times, we at the Pet Connection aren’t very comfortable with black-and-white, with-us-or-agin’-us dogma from any side. The world is shades of gray to me, and we all do best we can. For me, personally, that means choosing as humane and sustainable a diet as I can, for me and for all my animals. That’s getting increasingly lower on the food chain for me, but the cats and dogs here will always be eating meat.