: Re: How to balance respecting diversity and avoiding tokenism at the same time My project has an environmental theme. My characters eat meals, and because of the setting, this includes meat and

@Welton431

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I think it is tokenism, by virtue of the fact that tokenism is indeed your stated intent! In fact you may weaken the tokenism by saying the character is also fastidious; most of us consider a high degree of fastidiousness a flaw or symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder, because most such fastidiousness costs time and effort that is essentially wasted and could have been spent doing something more productive.

You can also explicate their motives. For a workable point of view, I offer myself: I am not a vegetarian, in fact I am an enthusiastic carnivore, but I am quite concerned about the environment and our destruction of it. I do not feel guilty about being a carnivore, I consider it natural; nearly all top predators are. If anything, I think man is not the worst of them, we don't eat our meat alive and on the hoof, and at least in most countries "harvest" them quickly and with little pain compared to the typical deaths of equivalent meat animals in the wild (by predation, starvation, disease or accident).

I am for preserving a livable planet with forests and rivers and an atmosphere that isn't going to give me or any wildlife cancer or chronic lung or skin impairment, that isn't 175F at the equator, that doesn't require us to live in boxes with constant A/C and air filtering and piped in water. I don't want 99% of wildlife to go extinct.

Although, if I had the power I would certainly mandate a more humane treatment of food animals and how they are slaughtered; I have no moral qualms whatsoever about raising our current crop of common food animals for meat. I do believe animals have emotions, but I do not believe cows, chickens, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, goats or fish, are capable of anticipating death or imagining their future; death takes no hopes and dreams from them. They can certainly feel fear, but as Temple Grandin showed in revolutionizing the cattle industry, there is no need for them to feel it while being slaughtered: They will follow their instincts right into the necessary position and die so fast their brain did not have a millisecond to feel any pain.

I can be an environmentalist that believes in preserving nature and nature's beauties for their own sake, not just for survival but the enjoyment of future generations, and that can include wild animals galore; I am upset about the loss of so many species. I don't have to be a vegetarian to do that, and neither do your fictional characters.

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