To Braai or not to Braai - What a stupid question....

A note I wrote in response to a discussion on Animal Rights Africa's Facebook profile regarding National Heritage Braai Day.

Hiya

I know I will probably be persecuted for the following statements, but so be it.

I come from an Afrikaans family in which the consumption of meat and meat products has always been a way of life and probably always will be. This however does not mean that my family or the members of my household are not animal lovers. On the contrary, I don't know anybody who knows more about or has more respect for Southern Africa's Fauna and Flora than my father who is an avid hunter and as such actually spends a large amount of time within the natural habitats that harbor these sentient beings.

The fact is that in South Africa today, there is more game in private ownership than game that resides in our National parks, not to mention the prolific rise in game numbers over the last 30 years, because of people like my father. People who love nature, and yes, hunting. People who have actually conserved more animals by using them as a sustainable resource than any of us vegetarians could ever hope to.

We say, it is cruel to kill another sentient being and yes I do feel the same, but the laws of our universe dictates that there can be no beauty without cruelty to remind us of the beauty, no good without bad for how would you define either and on this earth no life without death. They are opposites of a coin and if you take the one away, the other would not exist.

It is sad, because we tend to think that just because we made a personal choice to not eat any being with a face (plants also being living beings which have survival instincts like animals), or anything that comes from a being with a face that other people should automatically alter their way of living to suit our needs. Unfortunately, in most cases this will only prompt exactly the opposite response.

People are programmed to resist anything that attacks their way of doing things, so an outcry of “Oh my God – How could you promote having a Braai as a way of celebrating people’s heritage” will only be laughed off as a ludicrous statement by the “Vegan Hippies”, because for millions of people a Braai is a part of their heritage and not many things on this earth, least of all our squealing, will ever change that.
The only way it will ever change is when the individual meat eaters have the personal epiphany that each and every vegetarian or vegan on earth had, before they became such. Therefore the only way that we could ever influence people to not eat meat is by being the examples that we would like to see in the world as Gandhi once said.

I don’t mean to offend anybody but if I do, it shouldn’t really matter, seeing as the perception in the meat eating world is that vegans and vegetarians don’t care if we offend others, seeing as we perceive ourselves to be superior to people who do consume flesh, which is exactly why we are dismissed. We can’t bully people into respecting our ways; we have to earn their respect by being unflinching in our beliefs, yet allowing others to have theirs....