ざわし

University debate: "There is no such thing as a vegan animal." Vegan: "Of course there is. Cows, sheep, deer, elephants, gorillas. Most of the animal kingdom eats plants and does perfectly well." Anthropologist: "Name one that would turn meat down." Vegan: "A cow." Anthropologist: "Cows eat the afterbirth. Deer eat songbird chicks out of the nest. Hippos have been filmed eating other hippos. Nobody told them." Vegan: "Those are exceptions." Anthropologist: "Sheep eat the heads off ground-nesting birds and keep walking. Horses eat baby chicks. Give a squirrel a nest of eggs and watch what it does with the nest." Vegan: "Gorillas, then. Almost entirely plants." Anthropologist: "Plus about 25 grams of insects a day, which is a plateful of ants, and they'll pull apart a termite mound with real enthusiasm. There is no true vegan. There is only an animal with limited access to meat." Vegan: "It's a dietary category, not a moral one." Anthropologist: "Then let's do the moral one. A cow drinks from a trough. Count what's living in it." Vegan: "Insects don't count." Anthropologist: "Says the only species on earth that has ever thought about it. Every blade of grass she eats comes with aphids, beetles, snails and larvae, and she chews the lot without a flicker. Her rumen is a vat of bacteria she kills by the trillion to extract the protein. The 'plant-based' cow is a bioreactor that eats its own staff." Vegan: "So what? Animals can't choose." Anthropologist: "That's my motion. Nothing alive has ever been vegan. Not the cow, not the gorilla, not the butterfly drinking from a carcass. The idea has never once appeared in nature, and you've built a philosophy on it being the natural state." Vegan: "Humans can choose." Anthropologist: "You can. And every choice you've made had a tablet in it. Four billion years of life on earth and the first vegan appeared in 1944 with a vitamin deficiency and a leaflet." Moderator: "Time." Vegan: "Deer eat birds?" Anthropologist: "Look up the footage. Bring a cushion."