I’ve complained here before about two things:  one, the cognitive dissonance of society that allows people to casually eat some animals while treating others as beloved family members; and two, the liberal lefty take that being a vegan might be a good idea, some day, for other people, but certainly not for me.

Well, both of those notions rear their ugly heads in this Slate article about the practice of Koreans eating dogs (as well as its follow-up here).  At least Saletan acknowledges the arbitrariness of the distinction between companion animals and food animals, which is a nice surprise, but instead of taking the next logical step, and thinking about changing his own lifestyle to avoid these kinds of hypocritical inconsistencies, he simply suggests that people ought to go ahead and eat dogs, too, and not worry so much about it.  And he finishes off with the always annoying hyperbole that maybe one day, in the future, people other than himself will recognize the barbarism of eating any animal and the world will be a better place for it.  It is excruciatingly annoying to me when people, especially on the left, recognize the cruelty and suffering inherent in their lifestyle, but choose to do nothing about it, and instead speak dreamily about some mythical future time when other people will be more enlightened.  Yes, let’s leave it up to those other people in the future and not do anything about it ourselves today because I don’t want any windmills in my backyard.

And speaking of being a vegan, this project sounds like it might be worth a donation or two.  Maybe they’ll make an internet star out of one of you!  But more importantly, perhaps you can help show people that there is nothing radical or difficult about being a vegan.  Because it seems to me that the people who need the most convincing are actually much closer to us already than we might think.  In fact, I’d like to start my own internet campaign something along the lines of: “Help a liberal go vegan today.”