Where do babies come from?

I stopped eating meat a couple of years ago. I ate fish occasionally until I saw an episode of How It's Made. They were making fish. At the factory they had a bowl of fish eggs and a man took a male fish out of the water and squeezed it so that it's sperm came out. Then he took his gloved hand and mixed the egg and sperm up in a bowl. It seemed like a cold way to make children. Mumma cows too, I learned, weren't being fertilized the good old fashioned birds and bees way. A farmer man was doing all the work with some bull sperm that he'd taken. I'm asked all the time why I'm a vegetarian. One reason is because I prefer not to eat what hasn't had the chance to live a real sort of life.

Trees make cones. Spruce cones are beautiful. The ones with a nice fade go from cream to purple. Pine cones are silver and gold. Usually, these cones fall when the time is right, and they land on the forest floor. They crack open, under the sun's heat, and their seeds fall out on the ground. Sometimes this all works out and they grow into big healthy trees. But we cut down big healthy trees. A few machines taking down a few at a time. Some days we don't recognize where we are when we leave the block because in the morning we were surrounded by trees, and after 8 hours we're in an enormous field.

We collect these cones and sell them. Then they make baby trees with the seeds in a nursery somewhere. They grow into tiny little infants there and at the ripe age of two we plant them. It seems as though we aren't satisfied enough having our own sex, but that we must do it for the animals and plants too. The song that goes "Anything you can do I can do better; I can do anything better than you" just got stuck in my head.