I ate shrimp today. From Captain D’s. It was really delicious.

If you know me, you’re probably shocked (shocked!) right now; what, with me being Mr. Vegetarian Guy and all.

Well, it’s a bit more complex than that. I did not decide to cease eating meat/wearing leather/etc. because of an emotional inability to cope with the killing of one of my Friends, the Animals. [ed: consider inserting here a clip of me running naked through the fields, frolicking with Mr. Pig and Ms. Cow.]

I’m not what most would think of as an “animal lover” — I’m neither a dog person nor a cat person.

I’m very interested in biology, though. And philosophy of mind.

It was these things that made me become a vegetarian. After rejecting the idea that what makes me special as a human being is some mystical non-physical soulstuff that non-human animals have somehow not been blessed with, I was left with a perspective on the world that most easily sees nature and life as a continuity.

I’m a city boy who wouldn’t (now) feel comfortable killing an intelligent animal like a pig so that I could enjoy her meat for breakfast. I can’t be consistent and pay someone else to do it for me.

So, I chose to live in a vegetarian way; also, I eat very little dairy or eggs. Unlike many vegans, though, I’ve never had a problem with eating honey. You’ve got to draw a line somewhere, and most animal rights folks have no problem with the senseless murder of bacteria. Presumably because they’re sufficiently unintelligent and “unvaluable” that they are not worth our concern. Killing them causes more perceived benefit to us than the perceived (by us and them!) harm it causes to them.

I don’t know of any evidence of a valuable mental capability (I don’t just mean intelligence, I mean emotion and ability to feel pain and terror and happiness, etc.) in insects to justify considerable concern over anything but perhaps wanton abuse of them.

All arthropods seem to have about this same mental capacity — they, as Descartes wrongly believed was true of all animals, are essentially machines without conscious thought.

Thus, the most guilt-causing part of my meal was the tartar sauce.

(I think I’ll print this out and keep it in my wallet to hand to inquisitive people rather than trying to explain my eating habits to them.)