You Dress Up For Farmageddon

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is this sanctimonious piece of smugfuckery.

You probably thought that Melanie Phillips wrote the most aggravating newspaper article recently, and, yeah, she did. But Jenna Woginrich's article, which was brought to my attention when Michael Legge got angry about it on his blog, is the one that has sparked genuine human emotion in me.

Woginrich stopped being vegetarian because she loves animals. "Don't you mean started being a vegetarian?" I hear you ask. Nope. "Don't you mean because she hates animals?" You continue. Nope. She loves animals so much, that not only did she start eating them again, but she farms them herself.

Her logic is basically that she loves animals, so to solve the problem of their being mistreated, she ethically farms her own. My response to this is, if you love animals, don't kill and eat them.

I get irrationally angry when I hear this fashionable, middle-class claim that battery farming is an infringement of the rights of animals, so people should only buy free range products. If you are going to give animals rights, give them the right to life. Otherwise whats the point? I know it is better for animals to be farmed uncaged, of course it is, but either way they're going to get eaten.

In a way I have more time for people who say animals have no rights at all. At least they're consistent. Unlike this claim that animals should have some rights, but not the biggie. It's as if the likes of Woginrich don't actually care about animals at all. I'm not saying they just do the free range thing because its The Guardian-friendly and generally groovy, without any genuine concern for animals at all. Oh wait, yes I am, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Woginrich's article is also infuriating because it contains bizarre phrases that make no fucking sense, such as:

For me, it took a return to carnivory to live out the ideals of vegetarianism. Food is a complicated religion.

Let's consider that for a second. I'll ignore the phrase "Food is a complicated religion" because it seems that's what she did as she wrote it. She claims that she returned to carnivory in order to fulfil "the ideals of vegetarianism." Now I'm no expert, I'm fairly new to vegetarianism, but I think, I think, the ideals of vegetarianism involve not eating meat. And, again I may be wrong, but I think carnivory involves eating meat. So she eats meat in order to live the life of not eating meat.

...

This sense of smug self-satisfaction that oozes out of Woginrich's article is sickening. She, like all the rich, middle-class people who sanctimoniously advocate free range produce as a great kindness to animals, looks down her nose at the people who can't afford free range and organic food, and also at vegetarians, the people who unlike her, genuinely give a shit about animals.

Woginrich has confused the notion of caring about animals with the notion of being a big cunt. She runs her own farm, and I think it takes a certain kind of person to personally kill an animal. Most meat eaters would probably feel uneasy about actually killing an animal themselves, and anyone who actually cares about animals in the slightest would never kill an animal, unless they were a vet or the animal was clearly suffering. To actually personally kill an animal to eat it takes someone with no care for animals.

A lot of the people who buy free range products probably don't even know what it means, they just heard something about it on Farming Today on Radio 4 and their friends Peter and Leslie are always talking about it and he works for The Observer and she's a landscape architect and they're coming round for dinner on Saturday and they always bring organic fennel and some hyacinths and their daughter Fiona didn't manage to get into Oxford so they had her spayed and their son Simon is going out with a black girl which is wonderful because it's such an insight into another culture because she's from somewhere in Africa called "Luton" and they saw a hilarious cartoon in the G2 about free range farming that made absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever.

Except Jenna Woginrich isn't middle class, or rich, or posh. She makes this clear by the article's headline: My beef isn't with beef... See what she's done there is, she's played on the double meaning of the word beef. It's very clever, as well as showing that she's colloquial and cool. Because as well as being a type of meat, beef means grievance. Did you know that? Beef. Grievance. You know, from about 2001. Beef. It's a pun. She's not posh, she knows the other meaning of the word beef. She's clearly at the forefront of underground youth culture. In the late 1990s. Beef.

Did Linda McCartney die for this? Does this justify Heather Mills ever being on our TV screens? No, nothing justifies that. So I'll leave you with the (slightly altered) words of the great philosopher Peter Singer: "All animals are equal. Except Jenna Woginrich. She's just a cunt."

The title of this blog is a clever (yes, it really is) wordplay on the song You Dress Up For Armageddon by The Hives, and I'll leave you with that song. Enjoy!