Several vegetarians I know got in a tizzy last month because of Moby. No, he didn’t drop the militant-vegetarianism mike with his liner notes to Animal Rights. He’s still out there, harping PETA half-truths at people and trying to be America’s answer to Morrissey.

Moby’s recent Huffington Post piece “Save the Humans” gave the veggies a perfect opportunity to feel superior to the rest of us, thinking that they have nothing to do with the climate-change catastrophe currently unfolding, purely because of their choice of protein. Somehow our impending sixth mass-extinction event is entirely the fault of meat-eaters, at least the way the man born Richard Melville Hall tells it.

Admittedly, his numbers are staggering. Humans, apparently, kill about 56 billion animals every year for the purpose of eating them. It takes 15 pounds of grain and thousands of gallons of water to make one pound of beef, and the animals literally produce a shit-ton of carbon dioxide, methane, and waste, which are destroying the environment. And Moby does have a valid point about overconsumption. If you’ve ever been to the shopping-mall food court in Greasy, Oklahoma, you know that people eat too much meat. Not to mention everything else.

Moby’s argument, however, leaves no room for sustainable meat, the kind produced by ranchers who practise biodynamic farming and ethical harvesting. He draws no distinction between free-range meat produced by an ethically minded independent business and the shit-covered, hormone/steroid-injected, antibiotic-laced, tortured-for-a-lifetime factory-farm meat you find at major grocers and fast-food chains. Reading Moby’s article, you’re left with the impression that you’re either with the vegetarians or with the terrorists.

In his conclusion, fully embracing the messianic martyr complex he’s been building around himself ever since Eminem threatened to give him a pounding, this asshole actually has the gall to compare halting animal agriculture to the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements. Except that what Moby is proposing is to eradicate a way of life for many, if not most, people on Earth. He wants those who are different to assimilate to his notion of normal, regardless of their histories, ethics, cultures, or long-standing addiction to Slim Jims.

Moby leaves no room for people like 2014 Polaris-prize winner Tanya Tagaq, whose family lives a sustainable life closely intertwined with an ecosystem that gives them no viable vegetarian option. He just wants everyone to eat nothing but grain, ignoring the fact that grain might not be so easy to come by on the tundra, and that sustainable farmers can and do raise grass-fed, foraging animals in harmony with their environment. He seems to think that if we can just erase hundreds of generations of French, southern, and Inuit culinary history, global famine will end, climate change will reverse, and all disease will go away.

If Free Waterfall Jr. can teach a lion to eat tofu, we can all learn to share and live happily ever after.

Moby’s condescending attitude shits the bed so severely that it negates his modest gains. He starts his piece by stating, “We like our animal products. Well, you like your animal products. I’ve been a vegan for 28 years, so to be honest I don’t even remember what they taste like.”

It’s like having someone who’s been celibate for the past 28 years tell you that everyone should be celibate because he can’t remember what sex feels like. This is especially rich coming from a guy who lives in Los Angeles, one of the least sustainable cities in the world, which has its genetically modified vegetables trucked in from hundreds of miles away. Climate change isn’t happening because of corrupt governments that enforce profits over ethics and unlimited growth over sustainability; it’s because you want to eat a cheeseburger!

Well, to paraphrase Tagaq, fuck Moby, and fuck his narrowly focused, off-base opinion piece.

Keep that shit in your liner notes.

I’ll end by quoting Jeffrey Jones in Ravenous: “You have to kill to live!”