Its been some time since my last blog The excuses are many and varied, not least of which was my move to Brussels to take up my next contract. I’ll have to blog my experience of that. But anyway, I thought I’d dispell my latest life moment this time….I’ve given up eating meat !!!! Well mostly, it’s difficult, cause I do like a bit of beef, so to speak. Still eating fish (poor fish, what ever did they do to deserve that). And I’ve not become a vegan, vegetarian or whatever. No, for some time I’ve had the suspicion that, to put it bluntly, the meat trade, slaughter houses, the whole caboodle, were a bunch of outright conscience-less butchering bastards. I used to work behind a slaughter house many years ago, so I got to see “things” from time to time, and not so long ago I watched a TV progam about the trade, this particular one culminating in watching a cow being garroted, and I’m sure about this, while still alive hanging up by its back legs. So based on these experiences, I’ve decided that I’m no longer willing to support this kind of treatment, it just disgusts me. I like meat, I’ve no problem in principle of eating meat, its just that I feel if we’re going to breed animals for food, the absolute very least we could do would be to give them a decent life while they’re alive, and at the end do the very best we can do to make their deaths as quick, painless and stress free as possible. Sadly this doesn’t seem to be the case, even sadder is the fact that it can be done. A TV program I watched many years ago featured a women from Canada with some kind of mental disability (the focus of the TV program) but which also left her with a talent for designing “systems”, one of which was a system for herding cattle into a slaughter house that left the animals completely unstressed, right up to the point that they were humanely killed – and entirely before the butchering started I might add. Anyway, I’ve now developed a renewed appreciation for fish and other non meat dishes, which isn’t too bad, I find you need a lot more imagination when meat isn’t on the diet.