Mr. Nice Guy Falls From His Pedestal

My admitting that I could not be a vegetarian because I can not give up eating hot dogs at baseball games has brought me more abuse than my revelation that God’s name is Random Chance.

N. Coulter of Venice calls my column “the subtle height of distaste,” and says I am no longer “Mr. Nice Guy.”

“I hope you live long enough,” writes Judith Lautner of San Luis Obispo, “to think again about your statements on eating hot dogs and beer at baseball games.”

Karen Yin of Rosemead argues that “speciesism is as indefensible as sexism or racism.” She says that “animals may not have a right to vote, to enter restaurants, or to go to the theater, but they certainly have the right not to be mass-produced as a commodity, not to be tortured in laboratories, not to be killed in the name of sport.”

“The excuses for exploiting animals never cease to amaze me,” writes Mary Delaney of Laguna Niguel. “Yes, I used to love hot dogs, but the decision to make a small sacrifice in order to boycott animal factories was much more fulfilling than a Dodger Dog.”

I have received many copies of magazine and newspaper articles describing the awful conditions in which food animals are kept and slaughtered. James Garner’s euphoric TV ads for beef give no hint of these horrors.

Rick Dunkerly of Whittier sends me a publication of the Christian Animal Rescue Enterprise that lists various biblical references to the sanctity of animals. It quotes Genesis that animals have the same “breath of life” as man. Nevertheless, the Bible also reports that when the prodigal son returned, they barbecued the fatted calf.

Eva Baron of Irvine writes that “the true test of a good and decent human being is whether we care for the rest of God’s creation--not just ourselves and other humans.”

Mary Frank Epstein of the Vegetarian Society of Southern California sends me a list of appalling statements culled from “Diet for a New America,” by John Robbins. Among them: Risk of death from heart attack by average American man, 50%; risk of death from heart attack by average vegetarian man, 15%; “hamburgers are ground-up cows who’ve had their throats slit by machetes or their brains bashed in by sledgehammers.”

In a recent issue of Newsweek, Meg Greenfield, a columnist whose work is usually soundly thought out and forcefully written, skated out on the treacherous ice of the vegetarian issue and came up with the strange compromise that, being a carnivore, she could not condemn the slaughter of food animals, and being a human being, she could not condemn the use of animals in medical research; but she came out strongly against the torture of animals in the search for a better perfume. Bravo.

Donald G. Way sends me a column by the incomparable Mike Royko of Chicago. Royko notes that in April the San Diego Padres became the first baseball team in the history of our national sport to sell sushi to the fans.

In a couple of hundred years, Royko said, when this once-great nation falls into its decline, that event will be pinpointed as the beginning of the end.

Royko traced this ignominy back to the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. “It was inevitable,” he says. “Years ago, I told my friend Slats Grobnik: ‘This is a bad thing for the country. Some day they will be selling sushi in ball parks.’ ”

Now a true vegetarian will not eat sushi, any more than he will eat hot dogs, but it seems to me that many people who pride themselves on not eating red meat or fowl have no compunction about devouring the lowly fish, which preceded us on this planet by several million years.

Paul M. Thiele thanks me for introducing him to the word vegans , meaning people who do not use leather, wool, down or silk, besides not eating animals.

He says, “That must explain the bumper stickers I’ve seen around town lately saying, ‘Save the worms.’ ”

That’s his cynicism, not mine. I believe that if we are to grant all species the right to life, we must spare worms as well as cows, beetles as well as lambs, and pneumococci as well as chickens.

The trouble is, nothing tastes quite as good as a Dodger Dog, with mustard.