Vegetarians should go like lambs to the slaughter

I could never be a vegetarian for one simple reason: I care too much about animals.

Gambolling lambs: how cruel to cut them down in their prime, just so we can eat them Photo: ALAMY

Radio 4 has a regular programme called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars, in which guests confess to never having had some supposedly universal experience. I’ll tell you mine: I’ve never eaten turkey at Christmas.

It’s not that I’m vegetarian. My parents, however, are – as is my wife. So we always have nut roast. And very nice nut roast it is, too. But it does not persuade me to join my family in forsaking meat. I could never be a vegetarian, for one simple reason: I care too much about animals.

It’s perfectly logical. Think of it like this. At Waitrose you see a succulent shoulder of lamb. As a vegetarian, you grimace and stride off towards the mung beans, ablaze with righteousness.

But wait. If you don’t buy and eat that shoulder of lamb, what becomes of it? Perhaps it goes unsold and uneaten. In which case – and this is a truth so upsetting I can hardly bear to type it – a darling little lamb has been slaughtered, cut down in its fleecy, gambolling prime, for no reason. What a senseless waste. First this poor creature was unwanted in life, now it is unwanted in death. And all because you, a callous vegetarian, have shunned it.

If you really cared about that lamb, you’d have had the decency to buy, slow-roast and eat it, in order to give its death some meaning. But no. Instead you gave the shoulder the cold shoulder. I hope you’re proud.