Cannibalism in My Mind

I recently read a Harry Potter fanfiction called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.  In this fic, Harry believes that any being with self-awareness has a right to life, and when he learns about being a Parselmouth, he realizes that talking snakes, as sentient beings, are, ethically speaking, equal to humans.  He quickly makes the leap of logic that if snakes are sentient then other animals may be, too, and that eating them is wrong.

Much like other fictional characters have an angel and a demon guiding them from their perches on their shoulders, Harry has the Hogwars Founders speaking to him.  At breakfast the morning after learning about being a Parselmouth, Harry discussed the moral implications of eating potentially sentient food with his internal voices.  I'll include a portion here:

Good! said Slytherin. I'm glad you see now that the most moral thing to do is to sacrifice the lives of sentient beings for your own convenience, to feed your dreadful appetites, for the sick pleasure of ripping them apart with your teeth -What? Harry thought indignantly. Which side are you on here?His inner Slytherin's mental voice was grim. You too will someday embrace the doctrine... that the end justifies the meats. This was followed by some mental snickering.Ever since Harry had started worrying that plants might also be sentient, his non-Ravenclaw components had been having trouble taking his moral caution seriously. Hufflepuff was shouting Cannibalism! every time Harry tried to think about any food item whatsoever, and Gryffindor would visualize it screaming while he ate it, even if it was, say, a sandwich -Cannibalism!AIIIEEEE DON'T EAT ME -Ignore the screams, eat it anyway!

Harry's dilemma of overidentifying with his food reminded me of The Edible Woman and also of my own issues with eating certain foods.

In my dad's family, each person is assigned an animal upon being born (or marrying in).  From early childhood, my cousins and I have all been taught that we are the animals assigned to us.  When we would see ducks as we walked through the park, my parents would say "look, kids, there's Uncle Al!"  When we'd go to the zoo, we wouldn't say we wanted to see the bears or the tigers, we'd say we wanted to see Neil or Jimmy.

This extreme connection extends, for me, beyond the living animals into those same animals as they sit, swimming in sauce, on my plate.  Several of my family members are edible: I'm a sheep, my uncle is a duck, my sister is a rabbit, one cousin is a deer and another a frog… I cannot eat these meats, because much like Harry with his sandwich, it seems too much like cannibalism for my tastes.  Granted, they are not all the most common foods to find on a menu, but when they do, I steer well clear of them.  I do not know what I would do if the next member of the family were to be a pig or a cow.