Bushfires should make us rethink our meat eating habits

The images of our animals facing death due to the bushfires has brought many of us to tears. But as we consider this, we need to remember how many we kill for consumption, writes Amber Petty.

The other day, a friend asked me if I wanted to hear a joke.

It’s a question that always makes me nervous, but I said okay.

“How do you know if someone’s a vegan?” she launched, grinning cheekily. “Because they’ll tell you,” she said, tossing her head back in self-amusement.

I laughed. Not ferociously, but at least 15 per cent more than I’d have done if there was an Englishman, an Irishman and Scotsman walking into a bar.

The joke is a little unfair (isn’t that what humour is?), but it’ certainly of the time. A decade ago, vegans weren’t being ridiculed and they weren’t making news. In fact, they weren’t really talked about at all.

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But now, they’re everywhere. And whether you’re going the whole hog (pardon the pun) as a vegan, going vegetarian, or becoming pescetarian (like me) – this tipping point is happening at a speed unimaginable a couple of decades ago.

It’s estimated that half a billion animals have been killed through the bushfires raging across Australia. Picture: AAP/Keryn Stevens

Even Baby Boomers, the hardest generation to shift ingrained beliefs from, are reportedly reducing their meat intake.

Back in 1999, I’d never heard the term ‘vegan’, but while working in the music industry, I was assigned the task of looking after Moby on his first trip to Australia. A month out, his label emailed through a long list of ‘dos and don’ts’ when it came to dealing with him; many of which left me a little anxious.

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Moby was Christian, which apparently meant he didn’t like swearing. He hated smoking so much that he didn’t want to see people doing it. He was keen to meet young women – somehow I had to find them in a pub with no smokers. And finally, he was (and still is) a “strict vegan”.

Finding a vegan restaurant in Sydney in 1999 wasn’t like finding a kale salad in 2020. There were about two of them. What I recall mostly about dining with Moby was that his food left me confused. Why, I wondered, would someone who doesn’t want to eat meat want to eat something designed to look like meat?

Finding a vegan restaurant for Moby in 1999 was no easy task. Picture: supplied

As is often the way with rock stars, that wasn’t the only contradictory thing about Moby; who as we discovered, wasn’t as t all as rigid as swearing and smoking as we had been led to believe. Especially if there were young women and fake meat around.

My first stint at being a vegetarian came as a child in the 70s, when not wanting to eat meat was because I didn’t want animals to die. Unfortunately for the creatures of the sea, my olive branch didn’t extend to their domain. So I was a pescetarian. Or so I tried to be for years until I basically got bullied out of it and began eating meat again.

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The tipping point that sent me back into the pescetarian zone in 2016 was when a friend told me about a documentary he’d watched. In it, they posed the idea that as humans, we see certain animals, like our pets, as part of the family. We accept that they have feelings, experience emotions, and we love them like we do each other. And yet we have a different relationship with the animals we choose to eat despite they too experiencing the same emotions our dogs and cats do.

Animal sanctuaries across the country are now caring for injured and orphaned animals that have lost their homes to bushfire. Picture: Eugene Hyland

The image of my Maltese Shitzu seeing a human coming for him, sensing he was going to die flashed through my head. “Stop!” I said, waving my hand and shaking my head. “I’m out.”

We’re all struggling to comprehend what’s unfolding in Australia right now in the wake of the bushfires. When I read that nearly half a billion animals had perished in conditions worse than any nightmare imaginable, the world stopped for a second. The fear that those animals would have felt before choking and burning to death is too much. I keep having to shake myself out of the image.

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As we consider this, we need to also consider the number of animals we kill for our consumption and use. Perhaps that is the new tipping point that leads to meat reduction, becoming a pescetarian, a vegetarian or a vegan.

It would be nice to think that in the worst of times, there was also some positive news for our beautiful creatures, great and small.

Originally published as Bushfires should make us rethink our meat eating habits