Blog #3

The section of The Green Halo, "The Lure of Perfection," dealt a lot with humanity's inherent guilt over eating other animals. Kohak states that there are three responses to this guilt: to refuse to feel guilty, to try to be perfect to escape guilt, or to just do the best with what you're given. Personally, I had trouble understanding how trying to achieve perfection would alleviate guilt under any circumstance. I guess Kohak meant it more as doing the absolute "right" thing to make yourself feel less guilty, but I felt like "perfection" wasn't a very good term for what he was trying to convey because "perfection" is so subjective.

One thing Kohak said in the section that really stood out to me was how one of the main reasons people choose not to become vegetarians or not to protest cruelty in animal experiments is that they think what they do doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. This stood out to me because it's how I sometimes feel when I think about the idea of vegetarianism. Kohak presents the argument that even one less person eating meet reduces suffering, but to me, that reduction is so small it's almost inconsequential. Unless a vast amount of people get together and decide to become vegetarians, I don't think anything about the meat industry or factory farming will change.

While reading, I did find myself agreeing with a lot of what Kohak was saying. I wholeheartedly agree that in a perfect world animals would all be treated with dignity and respect, and people would subsist on fruits, vegetables, and other plants. I wish we could achieve this world, but the more I read, the more unrealistic I think it sounds. Maybe I'm cynical, but I don't think it's possible for people to all give up eating meat. I'm not sure if I could do it even after reading what I have of The Green Halo. However, I don't think it's too much to ask for us to be more considerate towards animals, especially when it comes to factory farms.

The one problem I have had so far with the book is that it seems very accusatory in that the tone suggests that we are all sinners for eating meat and not storming animal testing sites to demand that the experiments stop. Which, I don't know, maybe we are. It sometimes makes me uncomfortable when Kohak uses terminology like "eating the carcasses of our kin," which I'm sure is the whole point. Clearly Kohak is right that we like to ignore the problems in order to make ourselves feel better; I know I'd rather not read about it because it makes me feel bad. I feel that this revelation means I'm making progress in how I think. I hope that as the class progresses, I can learn more about this and, hopefully, make better decisions about what I eat and where my food comes from.