“I didn’t climb to the top of the food chain to eat lettuce.”
It’s a line you’ve probably heard—or even said—before. But pause for a moment. What exactly was this climb? When, exactly, did you scale this mythical “food chain”?
You didn’t. None of us did.
From the day you were born, the nearest grocery store, not the wilderness, supplied your food—neatly wrapped, sanitized, and slaughtered long before you arrived. You didn’t track a gazelle across the savannah, or carve a spear beside Homo erectus two million years ago. You didn’t stalk prey through a forest, risk starvation, or face teeth and claws. Your “hunt” requires a cart, a credit card, and a refrigerator.
Let’s be honest: eating animals today demands no courage, no ingenuity, and certainly no survival skill. It requires only convenience, habit, and denial.
If you were dropped—unarmed—into the Amazon, the Sahara, or the Adirondacks, which wild animal could you kill with your bare hands? The gorilla? The shark? The bear? The tiger? None of them. And if your only claim to dominance rests on your ability to build a weapon to compensate for what nature denied you—speed, strength, fangs, or claws—then your “superiority” is merely mechanical, not moral.
The idea that humans sit atop a food chain is not biology—it’s propaganda. It’s a story we tell ourselves to feel justified in exploiting those who cannot fight back. The lion eats the gazelle because he must; you eat the cow because you can. The difference is everything.
We’ve mistaken power for purpose. We invented weapons and cages, and then rewrote the narrative to make conquest look like destiny. But technological advantage is not a moral right—it’s a moral test. To believe that having the power to kill grants the right to do so is to embrace the logic of every tyrant who’s ever lived.
Our so-called “food chain” is a hierarchy built on weapons, not wisdom. The gun and the factory farm replaced the tooth and claw—not evolution, but escalation. There was no climb, only a shortcut. And with that shortcut came an illusion: that cruelty disguised as cuisine somehow reflects human progress rather than human regression.
If we are truly the most intelligent species, then our intelligence should be measured not by how efficiently we dominate, but by how consciously we choose restraint. The question is not whether we can kill—it’s whether, at this point in history, we still need to, or even should.
The truth is simple. We never climbed the food chain. We built it. And now it’s time to dismantle it.
Kirschner's Korner 
Bravo!
right!
Thank you for speaking out! You are not alone!! Vegans are changing the world! Not only is eating animals cruel but it is destroying the planet with its mass prollution and water wasting. We would not be in a global warming crisis if it wasn’t for the meat and dairy industries.. This is wrong!
Love this!
Isnt it funny how people think that vegans only eat lettuce?? So much variety of food that meat eaters never bother to try. I agree vegan food is much tastier !!
Excellent Post!!! I think most of us vegans get a little tired of people who find it easier to throw out ignorant crap than to educate themselves on the truth.
I love this one……and the food looks scrumptious!
Spot on! Hooray for rational compassion!
Must have skipped that whole agriculture thing happening 15,000 years ago. Took some brain power to do that. Guess he stopped evolving
Great article. We are sharing a link to this post on our facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/TheAnimalSpirits
I had a similar conversation the other day.
..I didn’t fight me way to the top of the food chain to eat bloody grass..
Actually you didn’t, you were just born, unless you were created in a lab.
..fuck off dickhead..
Dickhead? Really, wow. Thanks for thinking of me.
A question for my education: It seems like so much of the protein requirement comes from soy. I’ve been reading very bad things about soy because it is almost completely GMO & controlled by Monsanto. I also read that fermented soy is the safe way to go. What can you tell me? Thanks.
Thank you for your question Sydney. I hope you find this information helpful.
http://pcrm.org/health/health-topics/soy-and-your-health
Hi Sydney. In addition to Andrew’s excellent link … it’s usually easy to find non-GMO soy products. Most of the GMO soy is used for animal agriculture feedcrops. Here is another useful link that hopefully will allay your fears: http://www.vegetarian.org.uk/factsheets/safetyofsoyafactsheet.pdf (Note that the intensely-studied Okinawan elders, possibly the healthiest, longest-lived people on the planet, got 12% of their calories from soy. But I think it’s great to mix it up. Legumes have plenty of protein, as do a surprisingly wide variety of vegetables.)
Hi Sydney, have you read The China Study yet? It is a must read, it is the most comprehensive nutritional study ever conducted on humans. It has concluded along with many other related studies that we need far less protein than “promoted” especially from the meat and dairy industries. Or you could watch “Forks Over Knives” also, this helps explain alot. But in a nutshell, we can easily get more than enough protein from our vegetables, grains and pulses,without ever eating soy, it’s not an issue., it’s a myth 🙂
The “need” for so much protein is also overrated, and based upon pseudo science, i.e., a lab study conducted on juvenile rats (who have 100x the protein requirement of an adult human) and then generalized onto the human population. This was done in the early 1930s and then revisited in the 1970s. Junk science abounds, and it’s harder to show people the truth when they’ve been misinformed from the start.
Humans don’t need that much protein at all, a mere few ounces a day is more than enough, actually, and there’s plenty of non-GMO sources available. Legumes and nuts are wonderful.
Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, a Harvard Neuro Scientist, gave a youtube talk on meat and Alzheimers. Dr. Neal Barnard also has done research for his new book on brain foods on the topic of preventing this disease and most others. Seems herbivores do NOT get the brain disease. Since we DO have a choice, and many thankfully so many are going vegan, the future generations that will thrive healthfully, will be herbivores. The carnivore humans will die off as each generation that eats dead food ridden with cholesterol , chemicals and residues from the many poisons fed to “farmed” animals, gets sicker ad weaker.
Yes, the “morlock” gene could be finally expelled from the human genepool. What a wonderful thing that will be!
Fabulous ! – shared
Thanks! Liked this one a lot. And the food does look yummy! 🙂 Bookmarked.
I will eat meat, without guilt, when it a matter of LIFE or DEATH.
Our ancestors ate what they could get to survive. I am not in that position now so there is no excuse to enslave, torture and murder animals when I can survive and thrive on alternatives.
I happen to love tofu and for that matter, I love lettuce too.
Eating meat, especially factory farmed meat, leads people to hold animal life in callous disregard and it isn’t a huge step for them to regard each other as disposable commodities undeserving of compassion.
We are not ‘top of the food chain’, bacteria is and we are still evolving, so maybe it’s time we out-grew barbarity and a hunger for still-bleeding flesh.
One cannot eat without killing, it is impossible, any adult knows this. I completely agree that inhumane killing and factory farming is abhorrent and should be outlawed, however to refuse to eat humanely killed meat on purely moral grounds is simply hypocrisy, plants are alive and you kill them to eat them, pests are fatally eradicated from your crops, the fields your crops are grown in are created by clearing forested areas, destroying ecosystems, damaging the water tables and salinising the soil….if you are fine with this death because tree’s, ecosystems and ‘pests’ don’t have a face, then you have decided that only beings that are similar to humans are worthy of a humane death. Death is part of the cycle of life and in perfect harmony with nature, it is the way that death is delivered that is important.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts David. It is true that we all have some negative impact on the environment and animals; however, you can significantly reduce your impact if you stop eating animals and their byproducts. Natural death is part of the cycle of life; a premature death for human consumption, greed, and exploitation is not. While you can compare the death of spinach to the confinement, abuse, and slaughter of a pig, I don’t think many people will find it a convincing argument.
Please consider reading this informative article by Bruce Friedrich.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-friedrich/resolved-eating-animals-i_b_671322.html
Try Reading “The Vegetarian Myth” by Lierre Keith – this is a well researched and infomative book that I feel every vegetarian should read, if you chose a certain lifestyle, you should know what impact your choice has on your body and the world we live in..
I do think David is making a valid point, I was a vegetarian for 9 years , now I eat fish and chicken along with plants and was raise in a family that raised animals and plants to eat.I believe that vegan’s are taking it to a different extreme.Don’t assume people that eat meat don’t care about the treatment of animals, it’s not always the case. Also nature is not a man made experience, so in the natural order animals are food,so let’s be more aware of how we live and treat all of mother earth’s living things and eat with respect as my ancestors did. Aho Vanessa
No matter how animals are raised there is no such thing as humane slaughter. I have read the majority of animals are fully conscious when dismembered, how do you feel about this? When you eat meat, you contribute to this cruelty. Read the article at http://tinyurl.com/theydiepiecebypiece
Yes, death is a part of life.
On that note, you’re conveniently ignoring the part about “let nature take its course” with regard to humans, however.
There are too many of us, and we are consuming based upon “want,” not upon need. Millions and millions of vegetarians in southern India aren’t wrong about excluding animals from their diet.
Animal consumption is a product of social prestige, power, and ultimately, conspicuous consumption. In earlier eras of human history, the people in MOST societies ate little or no meat as it was considered a sign of wealth, and therefore out of reach for most people. Only the wealthy could afford to consume it – not the average folk. Meat was reserved as a sign of dominance and used for “feasting” during festivals – special occasions. And that’s been anthropologically documented.
The occurrence of daily flesh consumption is extremely rare and very limited to societies such as the Inuit of Alaska, for example, who have historically very notoriously short life spans, too. That’s not merely because of the climactic conditions, either.
The truth is that humans aren’t that different from our closest primate counsins, the Chimpanzee. And, when a troupe of rival chimps OR another species of primates turns up uninvited in a troupe’s space (“territory”), the males band together and hunt down the offender and commit murder by capturing the intruder or a young or weak member of a rival troupe (because that’s what they are able to catch). Then, they kill that member in front of his/her troupe and eat the body – in front of them. It’s a shock and awe campaign, designed to scare the other primates. In other words, they do this not because it’s nutritionally necessary, but because it’s a very nasty scare tactic. Chimps don’t catch and eat other animals (except ants and termites) – just other primates and only for this purpose. This, too, was documented by Goodall and de Waal.
By contrast, Gorillas will not resort to this. They resolve their conflicts by merely fighting. They, too eat some insects, but are herbivores otherwise.
Human behaviour in killing in eating other animals isn’t about “need,” it’s about dominance and conspicuous consumption and it’s why we MUST cook these animals to even consume them, let alone do it safely. It’s why those who eat flesh have shorter lifespans and die of many more diseases, too: BSE, diabetes, coronary complications, obesity, gout, arthritis, cystic fibrosis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s and the list goes on.
With no fangs, no claws, no speed and no strength we evolved a brain and were not designed to eat each other for flags and stone gods.
Awesome…
i hate this. Meat is the way to go. who cares about animals
Those who think, feel, reason, and understand that everything we do to them, is done to us. Eating corpses is just way uncool. If I put a hunk of cat food, meat, outside, maggots! Vegetables just rot. Meat is rotting flesh that has been sprayed, doused,processed and comes from sick animals who’d be dead sooner were they not filled with drugs. It’s a sick and dying industry. LEARN SOMETHING NEW!
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