It may have come off a little insulting because I was trying to insult them. I'm not interested in holding a constructive lecture on the harmful effects of TCM. I'm interested in venting off some of my frustration on an internet message board. If I thought for a moment this were a venue for any kind of constructive change or impact, I wouldn't have phrased it the way I did.
Soooo...I shouldn't have copy-pasted that and used it as excerpt for my lecture this afternoon, to a large group of Chinese TCM believers? Whoops.
That said, the western world had and still has plenty of similar things. Bear penis was an aphrodisiac all the same, and I assume it wasn't great for the bear population, either. Medicine by way of extracting active ingredients from plants and animals has sbeen used around the world for at least 100,000 years in various forms, and even today, most "new" medicines invented are based off of some rare ingredient found in some weird plant we never knew actually had a useful property.
Let's be clear - I'm not saying it's a good idea to go and shoot a panda because putting their black hairs in your pudding will make your penis grow an inch*. On the other hand, we hunted several types of whales to near-extinction for cod liver oil and such - while the Japanese
should probably leave th whales alone, it's hypocritical to say it isn't actually mostly our fault. If the Japanese were the only ones pulling whale out of the ocean, the whale population wouldn't be endangered at all. We're forcing
them to stop their traditions before they're ready for it, because
we went on with our traditions and ideas for far too long.
If you want people to stop killing Yellow-striped hummingbirds for their kidneys, find out what's in those feathers, make it artificially, and convince all of them to buy yellow-striped-hummingbird-kidney pills in the Body Shop.
Cultural conflict aside, cruelty to animals is wrong and should be minimalized as much as possible. If you're going to eat a cow, feel ree to grind their livers or whatever into pills if you want. If you're going to kill an animal
just for a little bit of it, you're probably not doing it right. This is also my philosophy when it comes to fur or leather (cow leather or rabbit fur aren't a big issue for me since the rest of thee animals are used, while mink for example isn't properly edible and the carcasses are burnt - that's wasteful and sad).
*It doesn't work, unfortunately
