Sometimes people neglect to imitate me, and I get confused. It's hard to be a Cult Leader.

For a while there, a couple years back, I had a carnivorous rule of thumb: don't eat anything with a brain larger than your thumbnail.

The Thumbnail Rule never really won a lot of support, despite what I saw as sound reasoning based on prejudice toward sentience. Balancing my level of sympathy with my love for meat, April the Happy Lamb would win, and Blinky the Friendly Hen would lose. Simple enough.

Many months ago Raven and I and a couple were at Dim Sum, and if you know the first thing about Dim Sum you're familiar with the endless parade of strangely concocted former critters wrapped up in banana leaves and, well, that weird pearlescent goopy stuff that I'm guessing is made from rice. Seeing this, and being a Cult Leader type and all, I pontificated -- just a little bit -- on my Thumbnail / Brain Doctrine.

Raven, a former rancher, countered that it's better to kill the largest animal possible, thereby yielding the most meat per death.

Sue declared that she would eat only critters that were not cute when alive. Kittens == no.

Daniel announced his preference for the more tasty animals.

It doesn't take much to extrapolate these four philosophies to a global scale. Whatever one person leaves out of their menu is just going to get opted in by somebody else. The end result is that everything is safe from some of us, but nothing is safe from all of us. Give us time, and we humans will vacuum up whatever meat is within our reach.

This is an example of what's classically described as 'the Tragedy of the Commons.' Quoting Wikipedia: "a situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently, and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen."

I've seen some good stuff over the course of my lifetime... we got a world-wide whaling ban, that was good. There was the Kyoto Protocol, sort of, and the upcoming Copenhagen Summit may fix up the red bits in  --> this linked map.

But all in all, we're flunking. As a species. Our interests are too divergent and our challenges are too numerous. We've got population expansion, resource depletion and habitat destruction. Governments are being more proactive than they were decades ago, but meanwhile there are a lot more of us, and we're living more extravagantly. Trouble, you bet.

If only I could be the Cult Leader for the whole world, I could fix it up real nice. But that's not likely. It will end badly for us and in some future era, giant squids or some other more promising critter will have taken over the planet. Maybe the new species will make the same mistakes, and my distant descendants will wind up being chopped up into little appetizers and carted around from table to table at the giant squid version of Dim Sum. Some slimy cephalopod will pick one out of a kelp leaf and say 'it's cute, but I don't feel too bad about eating it, because it's got a brain smaller than my tentacle.'

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