Column | Christmas dinner dilemma – NRC

In one of my app groups, the misery is leaking through the screen. People break with family members, want to flee, disappear and never return. Everyone feels misunderstood. There are ethical vegans in that app group. These are people who think that animals have a right to their lives, free from deliberately inflicted pain and torment. The overkill of meat advertisements already brings vegans to the edge of their mental balance around Christmas and now their families are planning Christmas dinner.

Veganism is growing, so more and more families have a vegan in their stomach, a know-it-all who wants to impose his beliefs on everyone. The family probably also wants this rodent to flee, disappear and never return, but unfortunately, in Western-oriented homes, Christmas is payday for the family bond. Time for mutual understanding and rapprochement.

Most vegans were not raised vegan. As children they ate animal products. The vegan therefore knows the beliefs of the meat eater from within. He knows the taste of meat, the nostalgia, the traditional dishes, but something has made him stop. This often means having seen images of the slaughter with your own eyes. Animals in slaughterhouses are terrified, die violent deaths and are usually young. A lamb is a toddler, so is a broiler. Seeing animal suffering makes a person sad, seeing continuous animal suffering makes a person furious. That’s why vegans are humorless and mean-spirited.

Conversely, the animal eater does not know what it is like to dine as a vegan at a non-vegan table. Perhaps this paints a picture: Most people don’t eat other people, partly because we believe that people have a right to their lives, free from deliberately inflicted pain and torment. If you, as a non-cannibal, have to sit at a table where human meat is served, it will be a complicated dinner. Even when that toddler was specially bred to be eaten and was allowed to play outside every day.

Like a non-cannibal among cannibals, the vegan sits at Christmas dinner, not with unknown man-eaters, but with his own family. He sees his own mother laughing, prying a rib out of a dead toddler. Christmas is a bloody sacrificial festival for vegans, the run-up to it is an emotional minefield.

A number of vegans have become so freaked out that they have dived into the carcass bins of meat rabbit farms. Breeders deposit the calculated percentage of animals that do not reach the slaughterhouse in these bins. On Tuesday, the white, fluffy rabbit carcasses were on the doorstep of Albert Heijn and the KNVB because it is sponsored by Albert Heijn, according to the Rabbit in Need Foundation.

The solution to the Christmas dinner dilemma is not for the non-cannibal to put aside his moral objections. Moral objections outweigh customs. The solution is for the cannibals to let alive, even if only for two days, toddlers, rabbits and basically anything that has a mother.

Carolina Trujillo is a writer.

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