Nigel Craig Fitzroy Longhurst's Page

I had better come clean from the start: I am not a vegan; I am not even a vegetarian (though I used to be, for fifteen years of my adult life).  But thanks to my vegan wife's daily insistence I watch this, read that, etc. re. the mistreatment of animals by humans from farm to slaughterhouse, I had to conclude there is way too much bad stuff to ignore.  But I have no time for vegan/vegetarian arguments that insist that humans are not designed/meant/evolved to eat meat: we are the hunter-gatherers supreme.  And hunting a wild animal (a deer or rabbit, say) might even allow that creature a swifter, less painful death than it would have encountered in the wild.  Tricky decisions...

So I have devoted a good deal of thinking and reading time recently, trying to working out exactly where to plant my ethical 'no-go' flag.

My main concerns are (a) animal welfare, (b), global environment, (c), dietary sufficiency and (d), socio-economic (Fairtrade, local sourcing etc).

I arrived at a 'vego-pescarian' solution (slogan: 'nothing from a slaughterhouse, nothing from a cage') . I no longer eat pigs and cows; have also given up all dairy produce - unlike lacto-vegetarians - simply because of what looks a little like hypocrisy: 'be kind to the cattle and milk them nicely' ignores the fact that for every much-loved, straw-chewing ruminant called 'Daisy', a young male calf went straight to the slaughterhouse or later, via a veal crate, to a slaughterhouse.  Even genuinely free-range, organic egg producers have a similar conundrum and  - again - it is the male problem. Males lay no eggs. So farewell and adieu... (both to the male chicks and my future dietary use of eggs).

Sheep farming poses a trickier problem: If I give up eating lamb - and I am for the time being - should I also give up wearing wool?  What about the Scots crofters, Welsh and Yorlshire hill farmers scratching a living from putting to good use land unfit for growing vegetable crops?  If slaughterhouses treat sheep living pretty natural outdoor lives unkindly, might it be better to call to account those responsible for the unkindness?  And where are the government agencies with the power to put an end to any form of cruelty?  (Another time, maybe...)

My only problems with eating fish and seafood are enviromental.  But obviously also out are sea-dwelling mammals (whales, seals, dolphins etc.) which once lived on land and have larger, sophiscated brains with 100 million years+ of evolutionary development over fish, crustaceans and intervertebrates. (Whaling and seal-clubbing are acts of almost unbelievable evil, IMO.)  But, from all I have read, I am pretty convinced that no fish - even the bigger ones - have sentience.  Responsible sourcing is important: no blue-fin tuna, sharks or swordfish; line-caught better than trawled, etc...  I don't mind anyone throwing a few locusts or earthworms into the wok, either.  As for anyone suggesting that honeybees are sentient - I would suggest: stop being silly and focus on the obvious cruelties going on.

And that's my rationale for calling myself 'vego-pescarian'.  Seafood, vegetables and fruit. No meat or dairy.  It has worked well enough for me for the last fortnight, so I'm planting my flag here, and also plan to start a vego-pescarian blog for the sharing of recipes with like-minded folk.

Thanks for listening, Nig :)