A typical fast food commercial ridiculing vegetarians.

Back in my days of hypocrisy and rationalization when I worked on several different major fast food accounts, advertising people periodically presented commercials to the client that ridiculed vegetarians.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe they thought that was a good way of getting on the good side of the client who, presumably, despised everyone who rejected their products, doubly so if they rejected them for moral reasons.  A typical TV script would be about a meeting of the vegetarian society, whose members were usually dressed up like stock characters from a sixties love-in.  They'd sit in a circle and the fast food spokesman would enter the room, carrying a basket overflowing with alfalfa sprouts and say something like, "Greetings, my folk singing, far out and famished vegetarian brothers and sisters."  The vegetarians' eyes would light up and they'd make room for the spokesman in their circle.  Little would they know, hidden under the forest of alfalfa sprouts was a load of burgers, enough for everyone.  "Tune in, turn on, chow down," the spokesman would say, which really made no sense because very few people in the current fast food demographic would catch the Timothy Leary reference.  The initially horrified vegetarians couldn't resist the smell.  They'd become instant converts, ripping the wrappers off and chowing down like a bunch of drunken frat brothers.  They'd want more.  "The drive-thru lane is still open," a Joan Baez look-alike would say and they'd all pile into a VW van.  One of them would rip the "Don't eat animals, love them" bumper sticker off the back while another replaced it with a styrofoam antenna ball from the fast food restaurant.  "Cool," one of them would say, "It's not recyclable."  Usually a spot like this would be good for a few guffaws and the client would move on to other spots, but every so often one of them would get produced.

Tolstoy and Da Vinci thought we'd all be vegetarians by now

Tolstoy, one of the most clear-eyed observers of humanity ever, once wrote that mankind is

"passing more and more from carnivorous habits to vegetable food, and is also deliberately following the same path in a movement which shows evident strength, and which is growing larger and larger -- viz. vegetarianism.  That movement has during the last ten years advanced more and more rapidly.  More and more books and periodicals on this subject appear every year; one meets more and more people who have given up meat..."

Da Vinci also predicted a moral progression.

"The time will come when men such as I shall look upon the murder of animals as they know look upon the murder of men."

Two of the great geniuses of history both believed, over time, the moral evolution of man would eventually lead to the renunciation of slaughtering animals for human consumption and pleasure.  But it hasn't gotten any better for animals since Tolstoy and Da Vinci recorded their hopes.  Today, people still unthinkingly, sometimes eagerly, inflict unimaginable pain on living creatures just so they can enjoy a tasty meal, a bathroom drawer full of personal hygiene products or, in the case of hunting, an amusing pastime.  What led Tolstoy and Da Vinci to think things would improve for animals?  Maybe they were so horrified by their contemporaries' mistreatment of animals that their only recourse was to imagine a slow but inevitable moral progression.  Or maybe they were deluded by the awareness of their own genius.  They knew they were far ahead of their time artistically, intellectually and, it stood to reason, morally, too.  The truth about the evil of killing animals was self-evident to them, and they assumed it would one day be just as self-evident to all of mankind.  Unfortunately, it hasn't worked out that way.