28 APRIL 2001, Page 27

Meat is good

From Mr Andrew Macdonald Sir; Matthew Parris's arguments for eating less meat (Another voice, 21 April) are as timid as they are flawed.

One of the issues he neglected to look at was that modem Western society has become woefully detached from the realities of nature, and that in great part the recent growth of vegetarianism is a by-product of this dislocation. The harsh reality is, has been and always will be, that death sustains life.

The central moral question is — and we must all resolve it for ourselves — do animals have rights? If you believe so, then of course the right to life is uppermost and eating an animal in moral terms amounts to that most barbaric of things, cannibalism. However, many of us have concluded that animals are not part of the moral community. In brief, they have, as far as we can tell, no sense of right and wrong. However we, of course, owe them duties of care in accordance with the nature of our relationship with them.

So, having thought this through, I am no more morally anguished by seeing the footand-mouth pyres than by catching sight of a lamb chop being burnt under my oven's grill. It is the immense sense of waste and sheer misery of these relatively isolated rural people that overwhelm me.

Andrew Macdonald

London W14