Here's a photo from an animal rights protest meant to "compare eating meat with cannibalism."

Much as I admire such ingenuity, I disagree with the assertion that meat eating is the same as cannibalism.

Because I disagree with the premise that eating animals is the same as eating humans, no amount of what purports to be demonstrative evidence can convince me otherwise, no matter how cleverly it is put together. I have plenty of meat eating friends as well as vegetarian friends, but I don't know a single meat eater who would be persuaded by this. As a matter of fact, most of the vegetarians I know are that way for health reasons, and wouldn't agree with the argument made here.

For years I ate an almost exclusively vegetarian diet for health reasons, and I used to get in more arguments with vegans than with meat eaters, because the former are often lifestyle-intolerant, while the latter almost never care what other people eat. I don't think it is anyone's business what other people eat, and I dislike those who make it their business. I'm as tolerant as meat eaters as I am of vegans, though. But in my experience, a lot of vegans are about as interested in being tolerated as were the Puritans who left very tolerant Leyden, Holland in 1620. When I would tell vegan activists that I was a vegetarian for "health reasons" but had no more moral problem with meat-eating than I did with veganism I might just as well have told them I was a salivating carnivore who wanted a steak.

If there's one thing that pisses off an intolerant person, it's tolerance for others, and the only thing worse than that is if they get the inkling that they are being merely tolerated. Intolerant people hate being tolerated.

They love finding religious and historical justifications, like the apparently false slogan, "Jesus was a vegetarian!

(That's about as relevant as asking, "What would Hitler eat?")

Any readers who think my tolerance is out of control should prepare themselves.

Unlike Hitler, I tolerate smokers as well as non smokers!

I assure everyone that this will never become a NO SMOKING blog, and I would fight tooth and nail -- to my last GASP -- to prevent such restrictions from ever being imposed on the blogosphere.

And yes there are neo-Ghandian ways to promote tolerance -- even of those things you don't do. If you are a vegan who believes in tolerance for carnivores, I suggest every time you are in a restaurant with other vegans that you ask about meat (veal always seems to get a rise), and pretend you are about to order it. If you don't smoke, but want to promote tolerance for those who do, then by all means carry around a pack of cigarettes. (These are still available for sale in many stores, and while prices are always going up, a single pack can be managed.) The next time you see a menacing sign, or zero-tolerance-for-smoking folks idling about, slowly and deliberately remove the cigarette pack from your pocket! Then tap it repeatedly into the palm of your other hand to build suspense. If that doesn't work, remove a single cigarette. Then tap that, and so on. Tap tap tap! Eventually, someone will react.

"But I wasn't going to smoke it!"

"Honest! I was only playing!"

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds may not have intended it, but his recent post made me think of repackaging (or relabeling) the human flesh pictured above as food for bears. Well, if flesh eating is cannibalism, then serving packaged humans to bears as food is no different than what goes on every day at McDonalds or Wendy's!

UPDATE: If any readers decide to buy a pack of cigarettes, please don't get hurt.