The Heave-Ho to Meatless Dodger Dogs

I apologize to vegetarians, but I have given up my decision to join their ranks, at least for the duration of the baseball season.

I was moved to recant by a story in Steve Harvey’s “Only in L.A.” column about a letter from Harold Fleischman, Encino attorney, to Peter O’Malley, president of the Dodgers, urging O’Malley to see that the concessions at Dodger Stadium serve low-cholesterol foods (such as meatless hot dogs, salads, yogurt and mineral water) as well as the traditional beef hot dogs and beer.

As moved as I am by the arguments of the animal protectionists, who ask us to give up meat on health and humane grounds, the prospect of watching a baseball game without indulging in a hot dog (with lots of relish and mustard) is too depressing to consider. Vegetables and yogurt at a baseball game? It’s un-American.

Meanwhile, I continue to receive passionate arguments from readers on both sides of the question.

Robert H. Stickel of San Diego scorns the animal lovers. “There even are nitwits who want to confer constitutional rights on animals now,” he says. “I just heard an advertisement on the radio for our San Diego Wild Animal Park in which the offspring of gorillas were referred to as ‘a boy and a girl’!

“In your column today,” he goes on, “you wrote of our coming down out of the trees. Well, maybe we did come down out of the trees; but if we are not created in God’s image, how come we are the only creatures to advance to the point where we can really take care of ourselves and master our environment?”

Master our environment? We seem to be destroying it.

Janice Nelson of Arcadia tightens the screw by suggesting that plants have feelings too. Nelson recalls reading that plants can be conscious, feel and express emotion, and suffer pain. She describes an experiment in which a woman who had a terrible fear of flying took a favorite plant with her on a plane ride from California to Boston. Scientists attached sensitive electrodes to the plant. “At the precise moments of its master’s takeoff and landing, the plant exhibited reactions which the scientists equated to panic and fainting.”

Nelson says she loves animals, but she warns vegetarians: “They should know that when the scythe falls on a stalk of wheat, it feels pain.”

Susan Fetta says she became a vegetarian the day she drove past that ghastly feed lot on Interstate 5 near the Harris Ranch, where thousands of cows await slaughter in crowded, treeless pens. Yes, I drove past that pen once and didn’t eat a hamburger for two days.

Steve Victor of Hollywood notes that vegetarians have been populous throughout history, and that today there are a growing number of “vegans”--those who not only eat no animal products (including dairy or eggs) but also do not use leather, wool, down or silk.

Bee Simpson of South Pasadena argues that “if Americans reduced their intake of meat, more grain would be released to feed directly the world’s hungry, health would increase and more importantly one’s spiritual well-being would be greatly enhanced.”

Randall Hinshaw, professor of economics emeritus, Claremont Graduate School, recalls that the late Sir Roy Harrod, an eminent Oxford economist, once told him that he hated cruelty to animals, but he was not a vegetarian. “On Kantian grounds, he argued that if the human race were suddenly to decide to abstain from meat-eating, millions of animals--which otherwise would have had a contented existence, blissfully unaware of their ultimate fate--would die slowly and miserably of starvation, because there would no longer be a commercial incentive to feed them!”

Bruce Lowry agrees: “I say hooray to man,” he exults, “the predator who, alone among the carnivores, assures his prey of humane treatment . . . a lazy life with abundant supplies of food . . . a quick and relatively easy death, and an opportunity to serve a higher life form. It is a far better deal than most human beings get.”

I’ll try to remember, the next time I go to Dodger Stadium, that the cow in my hot dog is getting a far better deal than most human beings get.

And I’ll remember that baseball is a game that could only have been invented by a higher life form--in God’s image.