A misanthrope pretending to be a humanitarian...

...is like a cannibal on a healthy diet, who only eats vegetarians.

We are currently in the middle of National Vegetarian Week in Poland. Oh, joy. Sometimes they can act a bit like little Hitlers - vegetarian fascists.

Although only 1.5 percent of Poles don’t eat meat at all, the few fundamentalist grass-eaters that are here have some tasty tactics to force their obsession on the rest of us. Polish Radio reports:

’Come and buy our mouth-watering dachshund veal! Cheap shoulder of cocker spaniel. Dog paws and heads. Only two zloty a kilogram.” – a butcher wearing a white blood stained coat shouted at a makeshift stand in the centre of Warsaw.

He was wielding an enormous axe, chopping what looked like animal parts, but in reality were soy cutlets covered in mashed beetroot[!!!]. But some passers-by actually believed it was real meat. “This is absurd. It shows how ignorant many people are if they assumed it was real meat”, says Cezary Wyszynski, a vegetarian since 1996, from the Viva Foundation, championing animal rights.

Note the contempt that animal lovers have for their fellow man: 'ignorant'! Now who would that be, then?

Iwona Kossowska from the Empatia or Empathy Association explains why the organizers decided to shock people.

“We want to show the people of Poland that it’s sad to divide animals into those that are loved and those that are eaten. We ask – why? Is there a real difference between a dog whom we love and a pig that we eat?’

Er...

Each year 470 million animals are slaughtered in Poland. More than one million a day. Almost one thousand every single second. No one seems sympathetic to those animals. They are completely unnoticed and forgotten. They are proudly eaten every day. Sold in supermarkets. No one cares for them. So, we want to recall that not only dogs and cats deserve attention and care. Pigs, cows, calves, chickens, fish, rabbits, goats, sheep are living creatures that feel the same as do cute and loving dogs.”

Note ‘sold in supermarkets…’ – another current obsession that some ‘liberals' share with their conservative nationalist counterparts in Poland. Both would like to go back to the good old days (and still the sad experience for the many car less poor today) when a mother had to drag her kids from shop to shop each day, paying for over priced food from miserable, unhelpful shop keepers.

Of course, in some countries people do eat dogs. And the reason why people don’t eat dogs in Poland and the rest of Europe is that dogs were used for work – they controlled the sheep that were kept for wool or eaten.

What’s sadder than animals kept in bad conditions – and there are many – is humans that become obsessed with animals, above any concern for humans. These are misanthropes dressed up as humanitarians.

And there are many of those, too. Too many.

The vegetarian is another example of our modern day obsession with our bodies. Food is not seen as something that we in the West have lots of, to be relished and enjoyed for its own sake. For the grass-eaters and tree huggers food says something about ourselves – it’s become a pseudo morality.

The militant vegetarian is someone who is a product of an age with little else to believe in, so the body and what is put in it becomes, literally, a ‘way of life’.

But what a sad, ultimately meaningless, way of life.

And anyway - vegetarians eat...(sniff) beetroots! Don't they have rights, too?