In the future, contact between people and animals is forbidden. Because interaction between people and animals leads to pain and suffering, eliminating contact has the highest priority. Eating animal meat-animeat-is a heinous crime and punished severely. Everyone is vegan. The Order of the Prelate teaches Noameran citizens to reject human dominion over the animal world. Christianity and other religious traditions that had empowered people to believe they could use animals for whatever purposes they chose have been disbanded. Pet ownership has also been banned. The hypocrisy that had allowed people to kill some animals for food while saving others to be loved as pets no longer exists. Welcome to the moral order of 22d century Noamera. When Will'm Ashbee violates this moral order, can a defense for his actions be found in the annals of human-animal interactions?

ANIMEAT'S END

A FUTURE HISTORY OF THE END OF ANIMAL MEATBy WILSON J. WARREN

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2012 Wilson J. Warren
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4772-7921-2

Chapter One

In all the round world of Utopia, there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house. H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905)

O God, who hast given all thy creatures for our use, give us grace that we may never abuse them, for Jesus Christ's sake, our Lord. Amen. James Plumptre, The Experienced Butcher (1816)

I often sit and think about a world full of meat. Not our meat. Meat from animals. What we, well at least those of us who dare to think about such things, call animeat.

What a world it was, both shocking and wonderful. Imagine a world, if you can, where people, those we now chide as Wasters, ate animals' flesh. Wasters ate the flesh of dead animals of all sorts, some with two legs and some with four. All those beautiful and awful yet wonderful animals. Fish, too, though Wasters saw fish as different from meat. Perhaps this had something to do with their different sources: some from the land and some from the sea. Yet both sorts provided flesh that found their way into Wasters' bellies.

How do I know this? No one has eaten animeat since before anyone alive today can remember. Many do not know that this was even a possibility since it is one of the Singerite taboos. We don't see the animals that were once eaten. Animals called cattle, pigs or hogs, chickens, turkeys, and all manner of fish. Oh, some of us see a few of them, mostly in the preserves with other exotics like elephants and giraffes. But not in the millions and millions that were once necessary to feed a world of Wasters.

So how do I know the world was once filled with Wasters who ate animeat? One hundred years ago, the Great Break destroyed nearly all electronic data and other records. The Wasters placed their faith in digistore—digital storage. As we now know, that faith was misplaced. When digistore disappeared in virtually all places across the whole world, the Great Break's chaos reinforced and exacerbated political and social changes across the globe. As new leaders assumed power, they attempted to recover and control as many of the remaining paper records as possible. Such records were generally locked away for almost no one to see again. I am one of the fortunate few who gained access to some of these remaining records left in Noamera. The records associated with the Wasters' consumption of animeat are based here, in the repository just outside Center Point. I believe I have found enough evidence to convince me that animeat was once quite common, perhaps even the dominant food for the Wasters. It was also hugely wasteful as we Singerites now know and now all, officially, believe. But it was also something that I dare say was not without redeeming features. The history of animeat consumption, its many ethical dimensions, and eventual demise, form the basis of my life's research, a book that I am tentatively calling Animeat's End.

Of course, my admission in Animeat's End that consuming animeat had redeeming features is sacrilege. I am betraying one of the sacred tenets of our world, especially here in Noamera. We do not discuss animeat because it violates every belief we have about the sacredness of sentient life, the lives of all our brothers and sisters who share our human bonds of feeling and sensory perceptions. We could no more eat animals like cattle or pigs than we could eat our fellow humans.

Those of us who know something about the Wasters know that they ate animeat. After all, they were Wasters. But I know that they ate even more animeat than anyone now alive could imagine. Was it wasteful? Yes, terribly so. But I am not telling you anything at this point that you didn't already know. The Wasters wasted all manner of things, including animals. The problem is that we do not talk about this beyond acknowledging the fact of their wastefulness and their horrible disregard of sacred sentient life. But for much of my adult life I have tried in vain to reflect upon this with an eye to understanding more about why the Wasters ate animeat. We need to move beyond our simplistic portrayals of Wasters and animeat's evilness. I believe that we need to understand that eating animeat was not a completely wasteful thing, and may have even had some useful elements.

Before I begin, two points of clarification. First, why did I say at the beginning that eating animeat was wonderful? Weren't the Wasters given this name partly because the eating of animals was so horrifically glutinous and wasteful? The wonder of it is that the variety and manner of this eating was extravagant, various, yet strangely similar and monotonous across cultures. But animeat was also nutritious and, apparently, tasty. I suppose one could easily argue, and then laugh, as our leaders do today, that eating humans might also be nutritious and tasty. True enough. But there was a value that Wasters gained in eating animals that was not without merit in terms of their nutrition, culinary variety, and enjoyment.

Aside from this, though, wasn't the killing itself a horror? We're taught that the very act of killing fellow creatures of sentience and feeling is so brutal, twisted, and frightening that it was an act that proves how fundamentally corrupted and horrible the Wasters were. But, in fact, the Wasters believed they had developed humane killing processes. Is it possible that killing of anything can be humane?

The killing and eating of animals point to the essential and wondrous contradiction at the heart of animeat. We believe that killing a living creature is wrong. Yet those who killed animals in the Wasters' era, people called butchers as well as farmers and hunters, often cared for and even loved the animals they killed. They were professionals with skills in all aspects of beasts' lives in ways that we cannot hope to understand or are likely to recreate. Those Wasters who ate the most animeat were also part of cultures that had developed what was called animal husbandry to a fine art. Eating animeat is most certainly irrational, but it involved elements of beauty and love.

Second, it is not true, as many of my colleagues believe, that pre-Break Americans, our Noameran ancestors, ate any and all animals. After all, they say, where did all these animals go? In fact, pre-Break people believed that some animals should not be eaten, though other Wasters ate them. Wasters also made pets, something akin to friends, of some animals, usually those they did not eat. Yet sometimes they ate their friends. Why? Was protection of animals only for the rich? Was animal friendship and companionship only an emotional reaction and not one based on reason and rationality? Is it possible that somehow the act of befriending and killing animals was part of the same fundamental bond that made the connection between humans and animals a peculiar but important tie for Wasters?

The reasons for these distinctions seem odd and perplexing since they rested on beliefs that have now receded and been replaced with others. How was it that...