To arms, citizens, to arms!

I will confess that I do, on occasion, make jokes with some of my more Libertarian leaning friends about rounding up all the conservatives and liberals and sending them off to reeducation camps once President Barr is sworn into office. All humor aside, though, I’m opposed to internment for anyone. Stories like this, however, make it awfully tempting to start rounding up some vegans and putting them on trains heading west.

Parents of ill vegan girl may face police

A 12-YEAR-OLD girl in Scotland brought up by her parents on a strict vegan diet has been admitted to hospital with a degenerative bone condition said to have left her with the spine of an 80-year-old woman.

The girl, who has been fed on a strict meat and dairy-free diet from birth, is said to have a severe form of rickets and to have suffered a number of fractured bones.

Even given my natural distaste for the subject, I tend to adopt a “live and let live” attitude toward vegans, providing they are independent adults. As I see it, it simply means less competition for the available supply of Kansas City ribeyes for yours truly. What you do with your own body is your business. But when this philosophy is taken to extremes and applied to children who may have no choice and not know any better (particularly during their formative years when nutrition is so critical) the stakes go up. How people can continue this madness when we keep hearing about case after case after case of vegans literally starving their children to death is a mystery to me.

And don’t even get me started on the complete loons who try to force a vegan diet on their dogs and cats! (I need to start typing more quickly at this point so I can finish this column before my head explodes, so please forgive any typos.) You might be able to dance around some of the realities of omnivore living when it comes to your own body, but your helpless canine and feline wards are carnivores, like it or not. The odd bit of grass they may chew on to relieve indigestion on occasion does nothing to change the fact that, in the wild, they live on a diet of other animals.

Personal liberty and freedom are wonderful things, and a cornerstone of our society. You can go out and join a plants’ rights movement if you really feel so inclined. But when you start imposing these rules on vulnerable children and helpless animals, you have crossed a line which society should not accept.

To arms, citizens! Herd those vegans into the internment camps before it’s too late!