Asking For It

Part 4

It’s easy to say the whole world should go vegetarian or vegan, as Davey Havok does. I’ll admit, I’m painfully jealous of how much more of the world Davey has seen, but from my little corner of the globe that seems painfully short sighted. I encourage you to call me batshit crazy, but David Attenbourough taught me to believe plants are incredibly intelligent, capable of thought and feeling no less than an organism comprised of soft-shelled animal cells. For me, at least, this erases the moral argument entirely. Life is one big reorganization of carbon, we have to eat something. Only our most distant relatives, the plants, can survive on salt, water, and sunlight alone.

Hypothetically, let’s ponder for a moment what the world would be like if every human on the planet stopped eating meat. There are currently 19 billion chickens on the planet, 1.4 billion cows, and 1 billion each of sheep and pigs distributed around the globe. Their populations are currently controlled through human consumption, but that ceases in our hypothetical scenario. Continuing to house and feed these animals would be expensive and pointless, so only two options exist: kill them or set them free. Let’s ignore the killing option, because that would be hypocritical. We release these animals to the wild. Something else will step up to the plate and start eating them, but those predators can only eat so much. We are still talking about feeding billions of mouths that were being fed yesterday.

We now have upwards of 25 billion animals, including goats, camels, fowl, and rabbits competing with us for food. That’s right, we all eat the same food now. With the exception of fish and lizards, our diets mostly consist of herbivores. Are we letting go all the animals that served us, or just those we eat? Captive turkeys have been engineered to be so big they can’t breed without human aid, but the horses and the cows are going to keep getting it on, and they’re bigger than us. If a handful of deer can wreck a garden overnight, a herd of cattle are going to lay waste to a wheat field. Some scientists already feel that cow farts are a major source of greenhouse gasses. Great job, vegans; you just created the next great ecological disaster.

“Black Sails” was a marked change in AFI’s music. It is certainly still a punk album, but the songs are 2-3 times longer, and production is kicked up ten steps from then earlier releases. Havok begins to flex his lyrical muscles on this album, both with his pen and his throat. Everything I simultaneously love and hate about AFI began here.

Concluded tomorrow