This is an important preface to the essay (June, 2010). A passionate reader read this blog, god love him, and didn’t realize that I was being as sarcastic as I can possibly be, and thought I was an insane bastard. I may be an insane bastard, but for those who don’t know me, I am travelling in this essay as far wide on the charts of sarcasm as my sarcastic mind (and I am very sarcastic) can go.
Again…
It’s now July 2010 and I have to do a second disclaimer. I am being utterly sarcastic. I’m being ironic. Maybe my vegetarianism is clashing with my humour. Damn.
I don’t like writing this way, but I’m pissed off. Let’s get one thing straight: Paul Watson, “President” of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (nice name, by the way—not!) and lover of sea-urchins, whales and conservation etc—or put another way, human-hater—is crazy.
He’s a menace to things civilized. Just like those suffragettes, or civil rights marchers—like they weren’t armed? Right. Or those people fighting for the 8-hour-work-day. Or worse, he’s like—and these guys really get my goat: abolitionists. Remember them? “We’re against slavery!” Well, hotshots, we’ve still got slave labour, slave trafficking and all kinds of stuff, so where are you now? I suppose there are people fighting to end that too. Geezuz.
But Cap’n Paul Watson?
This prick is Gandhi on crack—and everyone knows what drugs do.
And you can see why he’s this way, too. Ask any true blooded neo-liberal or even a mealy-mouthed liberal (they’re from the same genus—they meant to say genius, but they mispelled it), and they’ll tell you: “Canada’s an inch from Communism,” and that’s where candy-ass Watson was “raised”—if you can call being “raised” by a Canadian, raised.
Canadians don’t “raise” children any more than factory farm animals “feel pain.” And Watson’s not even a real Canadian, anyway. I bet he would have been all up in arms about the Japanese internment, too. Anti-Canadian!
He needs to rein it in, man. You hear me, Watson? Stop chewing on your organic lettuce leaves and take note. The planet is fine. Write it down. By the way, where do you think ink comes from? Hypocrite.
And you think you’re so tough, don’t you? Well, how many Iraqi citizens have you killed, huh? And how many nuclear warheads have you created, huh? How many torturing dictators have you helped out? Have you ever been a corporation that acts neutral and then profits from slave wages and environmental degradation in another country? You don’t have the guts or the civility! Have you ever armed a genocidal government to protect your oil, diamonds, cobalt, slave trade or any other resource interests? I think “no, no, no, no, no!” would answer all of those questions, you uncivilized organic turnip!
You don’t even have a job, per se.
Let’s get into the environment then: How many small farmers and family farms have you put out of business by shouting for free trade while simultaneously subsidizing agribusiness multinationals with trillions of tax-payer dollars until the smaller farms are crushed? Oh, I forgot…you probably think food should be grown by people who care about food. What next? Breast-feeding in public?
How many wars have you fought for business reasons and claimed it’s for humanitarian reasons? I see a big fat zero, Paulie. Ass-kisser. And yet you quote The Art of War as some sort of cryptic motto: “Deception is the foundation of strategy.”
Deception? You’re a joke. A rookie. An ultra-maroon, a gulla-bull, a too-lousy Letrec. Get a mentor. I’ve got a few names for you—men of civility, who believe in stock portfolios, and getting minorities to fight their battles in foreign lands, you boat-ramming schmuck.
I’ll &%$#ing Farley Mowat you.
WATSON, IN HIS OWN WORDS
Oh, and for those who don’t know much about Mr Watson, here are some of the demented thoughts in his crazy head—incidentally, all from one brief “declaration” of how his “Society” isn’t an animal rights group and yet, mysteriously, they eat vegan meals and try to stop the slaughterings of animals:
The meat industry is one of the most destructive ecological industries on the planet. The raising and slaughtering of pigs, cows, sheep, turkeys and chickens not only utilizes vast areas of land and vast quantities of water, but it is a greater contributor to greenhouse gas emissions than the automobile industry.
[Note to Paulie: You can't "slaughter" something that doesn't feel anything. Okay? Factory farm animals don’t feel anything! And by the way, Henry Ford—who was a big fan of Hitler and vice-versa—got some of the inspiration for his assembly line production techniques from seeing factory-farm type slaughter-houses. So why don’t you just say you hate progress?]
The seafood industry is literally plundering the ocean of life and some fifty percent of fish [like you counted] caught from the oceans is fed to cows, pigs, sheep, chickens etc in the form of fish meal. It also takes about fifty fish caught from the sea to raise one farm-raised salmon.
[Now you're against farming, too? Nice. And by the way, it might take fifty fish to to raise one farm-raised salmon, but it only takes one writer to say that you're not only an idiot, you probably think that Tobacco Multinational giants like Phillip Morris or accused drug-smugglers RJ Reynolds or napalm and defoliant producing multinational seed-thief giants like Monsanto—whose main legal goals are by definition profit and monopoly at great human cost—probably aren’t the best institutions to utterly control the world food supply. Yeah. Figured as much.]
We have turned the domestic cow into the largest marine predator on the planet [probably an exaggeration—and by the way, cows live in factory farms, not oceans]. The hundreds of millions of cows grazing the land and farting methane consume more tonnage of fish than all the world’s sharks, dolphins and seals combined. Domestic housecats consume more fish, especially tuna, than all the world’s seals.
[Even if you're right, I don't agree. Anyway, did you ever think that maybe cows like fish? And by the way, there are, like, tons of fish left.
And here’s where Watson waxes philosophical—like our own consumption behaviours matter! And even if they do, it’s well known that suffering decreases if we describe ourselves as caring.]
So why is it that all the world’s large environmental and conservation groups are not campaigning against the meat industry? Why did Al Gore’s film Inconvenient Truth not mention the inconvenient truth that the slaughter industry creates more greenhouse gases than the automobile industry?
[Earth to Paul: Like Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger, Al Gore won the Nobel Prize, so he didn't forget anything, so shut up. And Al fought bravely during the election debacle in Florida, which prevented Bush from getting into power and the bankrupting of a great country and the endless war that...well...anyway...shut up.]
The Greenpeace ships serve meat and fish to their crews everyday.
[The animals are already dead, Paul. Think about it. And how do you know the Green in Greenpeace doesn’t mean money just as much as it means environment? You don’t. You don’t, Paul, you don’t.]
The World Wildlife Fund does not say a word about the threat that meat eating poses for the survival of wildlife, the habitat destroyed, the wild competitors for land eliminated, or the predators destroyed to save their precious livestock.
[Maybe they haven't seen the facts. And even if it's horrendously hypocritical and utterly undermines their mandate, you can't prove it. And not being rude is called manners, Paul—which is often equated with civilization. As is meat-eating. It’s called celebrating life, Paul, with family—not dwelling on the torture it took to produce that love.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that Britain was able to colonize most of the world through plunder, murder, racism and skill, while simultaneously being known as Beefeaters?
You probably do. Well it’s not a coincidence. It takes energy to colonize a country. Meat is energy.
Anyway, why do you equate meat eating with suffering?
And if Greenpeace, or the World Wildlife Fund, or the Sierra Club, or those big NGOs working to stop malnutrition in Africa, or Anti-Global Warming campaigners, or pet-lovers or whomever else, all eat all kinds of meat from tortured animals, and don’t worry about it, let alone say, “Enough!”, I would imagine your “theories” are probably wrong.
Just a thought, Paul, just a thought.
And by the way, a lot of people don’t like you. They don’t think like you, either. They might think that poisoning crops or bombing buildings and hospitals and houses and food supplies that children, parents and grandparents are dependent on or living inside is just what happens in life sometimes—and necessary even. They also might know it’s good for profits and getting rid of superfluous people and so on. But they also know that ramming another ship so it can’t slaughter whales is barbaric, not to mention inhumane and immature. Ships hurt too, you know.]
When I was a Sierra Club director [well, listen to the big shot] for three years, everyone looked amused when I brought up the issue of vegetarianism.
At each of our Board meeting dinners, the Directors were served meat [because they’re directors, Paul, trying to do their job, and if you don’t serve meat, the wealthy don’t come to the banquets and make donations] and only after much prodding and complaining did the couple of vegetarian directors manage to get a vegetarian option.
[By the way, the fact of you not getting your way—or not making people give a damn that massive environmental devastation and cruelty resulting from our eating habits is relevant—should show you there’s a difference between Director and CEO. You were a director, Paul. And the CEO is not obliged—even in an environmental organization—to equate meat eating with environmental waste, or suffering, or torture.
Not only that, it’s not like trillions of animals are tortured every year. It’s in the tens or maybe hundreds of billions of animals, Paul. And only millions of dogs and cats—and that’s mostly done by foreigners and scientists. And they’re not pet dogs. They’re dogs nobody wanted. Obviously. Otherwise we wouldn’t let it happen.
Not only that, Organic Boy, why would you want to stop billions of brutally treated animals raised for slaughter from producing waste, when waste is totally natural, even if it goes into the water? You want them to suffer and not produce waste? That’s just cruel.
Go back to elementary school and take Logic 101.
And finally, just because you think that pets and the animals we eat have a lot in common doesn’t mean it’s true. The most free country on earth was built on the premise that people who own the plantation feel a helluva lot more than those who work on the plantation. Oh, I forgot, you’d be an “abolitionist”, too. Not only that, when Germany realised that Germans feel a whole lot more than Jews, Germany was at the height of civilized culture and art, thank you very much. And cruelty doesn’t always result from the belief that other beings (or humans) feel less. Well, yeah, so far it does—but it doesn’t have to!
So don’t start equating pets with the animals we eat, okay? Or food with the environment.
How our food is produced and the environment in general have nothing to do with each other.]
At our meeting in Montana we were served buffalo and antelope, lobsters in Boston, crabs in Charleston, steak in Albuquerque etc. But what else can we expect from a “conservation” group that endorses trophy hunting.
[Hey, Paul, just a hint: trophies are made of metal—or plastic, which is environmentally unfriendly.]
As far as I know and I may be wrong, but my organization, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is the only conservation organization in the world that endorses and practices vegetarianism. My ships do not serve meat or fish ever, nor do we serve dairy products. We’ve had a strictly vegan menu for years and no one has died of scurvy or malnutrition.
Yeah, not yet.
The price we pay for this is to be accused by other conservation organizations of being “animal rights.” Like it’s a bad word. They say it with the same disdain that Americans used to utter the word communist in the Fifties.
[Why are you so goddamn pro-Communist?
I actually can’t take any more of your anti-profit, anti-progress, anti-suffering, anti-factory-farm tirade—not from a guy who doesn’t even really have a job.
I’ll finish with a little more of his propaganda, and then that’s it—and my final line will really see what he’s made of.]
…that one 16 ounce cut of prime rib is equal to a thousand gallons of fresh water [how could the water be fresh if they're shitting in it?], a few acres of grass, a few fish, a quarter acre of corn etc. What’s the point of taking a shorter shower to conserve water as Greenpeace is preaching if you can sit down and consume a 1000 gallons of water at a single meal?
[It's called being clean, Paul. And I doubt it's a thousand gallons. And even if it is, it’s not being poured out right in front of the person eating, nor are animals screaming, brutalized, or traumatized right at the table, nor do I see farmers forced from their land by subsidized free market multinational food-haters right outside the restaurant window, nor do I see fertile land in front of me turning into a desert, so it’s not the same.]
And that single cut of meat would have cost as much in vegetable resources equivalent to what could be fed to an entire African village for a week.
[UNICEF eats beef and rib or whatever at their big galas too, so there’s no way your last point is true, either, thank you. And you’re not Einstein. Gandhi on crack! Gandhi on crack!]
The problem is that we choose to see our contradictions when it is convenient for us to see them and when it is not we simply go into a state of suspended disbelief and we eat that steak anyway because, hey we like the taste of rotting flesh in the evening.
[Thank you, Aristotle. And you ram private property with private property! That’s a hypocritical contradiction. You probably would have done the same to slave ships, too, wouldn’t you? Admit it, wouldn’t you?
And don’t start suggesting animals are private property unto themselves. It’s natural to slaughter whales. It’s not natural to ram the ship that’s doing the slaughtering—and I thought you would have believed in “natural.”]
The bottom line is that to be a conservationist and an environmentalist, you must practice and promote vegetarianism or better yet veganism.
It is the lifestyle that leaves the shallowest ecological footprint, uses fewer resources and produces less greenhouse gas emissions, it’s healthier and it means you’re not a hypocrite.
[Speaking of shallow...
And for the last time, the rich eat really good meat because it’s a sign of being really rich—and the middle class like to feel that too. And the lower classes can get by with hamburgers and hot dogs—whatever they’re made of.
It’s this simple: No meat, no banquet. No banquet, no rich. No rich, no donations. No donations, no…well, no banquet. And then how would people even know that animals suffer and the environment is in trouble? Gandhi on crack, Gandhi on crack!]
In fact, a vegan driving a hummer would be contributing less greenhouse gas carbon emissions than a meat eater riding a bicycle.
[You can't prove any of this, And so you're pro-hummer? Is that what you're saying? Hypocrite.
And for the last time, animals don't suffer per se. Individually, maybe, but not if you torture and slaughter tens of billons, which was clearly explained by Joseph Stalin.
So you are an animal rights group lover, Paul. You are. You are—and yet you claim not to be. Ha ha!
And by the way, your last little note:
May be freely distributed, reproduced and published with permission of the writer.
I don’t need or want your permission. Come and get me: If you want to ram my house with your boat, go ahead.
Signed,
A concerned citizen.
And for those who know me, sisters and brothers, lots of love—and may all beings, including yourself, even the cruel ones, feel a little more loved.
PS See Sharkwater.
PPS Love more.