Sir Paul McCartney has been vegetarian for 34 years
He speaks about his being a vegetarian:
One day we were having Sunday lunch - we were still meat-eaters, just building a home with the kids and that - and Linda was a really good meat cook.
We were eating roast lamb for Sunday lunch and it was the lambing season and there were all these beautiful little lambs gamboling around.
Then we just looked at the lamb on our plate and looked at them outside again and thought "we're eating one of those little things that is gaily running around outside". It just struck us, and we said "Wait a minute maybe we don't want to do this".
And that was it, that was the big turning point and we said we'd give up meat
You see these signs in America saying "real meat for real people" but I think that's just funny.
I notice those sort of campaigns and I notice it implies that people like us are wimps - which I pretty much know I'm not. I remember James Garner did a series of commercials saying "real men eat real meat", doing the "rabbit food" joke. And a while after that campaign ended he had a heart attack. But to give him the benefit of the doubt, I'm sure he didn't know what he was doing.
I don't think people realise that when they're eating meat they don't want to think that this animal you're eating has had its throat slit, or that it's died in pain that it's been hung upside down and bled. When people start talking about that at meal-times you say, "oh come on, leave it out
".
You want your chicken pre-packed and clean; women do not want to stuff their hands up into a chicken and pull out the giblets. People try to hide the fact that they are actually eating something that had a face and a heart, something that had a soul.
In most of the books you read it holds that animals don't have souls - that's something I don't agree with. I think it's so pompous of mankind to pronounce that. What? Has somebody got inside an animal's head and found out?
You see my point is that we've won the race on earth. Humans have won. There's no other animal, no species, is ever going to give us a problem. No race of spiders could ever take us over. We could zap 'em we've got the gear. There's no elephants ever going to rule us, we've got guns for them - we've got atomic bombs for God's sake. Any time we want to lose a species, we are the winners we can do it.
But we're not noble in our success - and I think this is going to be the interesting new phase. That's what we've got to look forward to: a nobility in success.
It's not "be a good loser, son", it's "be a good winner now".
I look forward to the time when we can suddenly think, "hey, we can relax a bit, we don't have to keep hating these things".
People say fish don't have feelings. Come on! The human race really is the most pompous thing going; it's funny, it's amusing. It's definitely not serious - it's too wild to be serious.
It's very convenient, I think, to hide it all away. We want our meat clean, we want it pre-packed, no giblets, from the supermarket and all that. We want clean meat - but unfortunately there's no such thing...
But I have faith things will change.
