The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

The Nature of Intelligence / 37
around chickens that they have a huge range of feelings. What does it
feel like to sit for days on several eggs, attending carefully to them, turning
them regularly to keep them warm? And unhesitatingly risking life
and limb to fiercely protect the little chicks from predators after they’re
born? Perhaps we humans cannot feel what the chicken feels, or we
have lost the ability to respect or empathize with her, but that does not
mean that the universal intelligence, the infinite creative presence, does
not know and appreciate and enjoy and love the chicken and her life.
She exists as we humans exist, with a unique intelligence that guides and
fulfills her on multiple levels and allows her to fulfill her place in the
larger order. Like ours, her intelligence includes awareness, emotions,
yearnings, and a central nervous system with pain receptors.
Destroying Intelligence and Purpose
When we forcefully remove a chicken, fish, pig, cow, or any animal
from her natural life in order to confine and manipulate her for food,
we systematically thwart and frustrate her innate intelligence. The universal
intelligence within her can no longer operate freely and contribute
to and enrich the many levels of larger wholes that she serves. This is a
massive and tragic assault against the core of her being and destroys her
purpose. When we confine animals for food, destroying their family and
community connections, obliterating their connection with the earth
and with their habitats, and thwarting their intelligent drives, we commit
extreme violence against not only these creatures, but against the
whole interconnected system of intelligence that supports them and that
they serve. In committing such violence, we damage our own intelligence
as well. We could not even carry out such plans and operations
without having already forfeited much of our true intelligence and
sense of purpose. How could it ever be our purpose to rob another living
being of his or her purpose?
As inheritors of a herding tradition, we naturally try to rationalize
this, saying that the animals we raise for food never would have existed
without our herding and factory farm operations, and that they therefore
do not exist for their purposes, but for our purposes. As the saying
goes, if God didn’t want us to eat animals, He wouldn’t have made them