Does anyone besides me wonder at the terminology of "vegetarian vampire" when referring to vampires who don't drink human blood? It isn't as though they are suddenly going on a regimen of broccoli and carrots with a fruit salad chaser. They are still drinking blood, just not the blood of humans. They are now drinking the blood of animals they kill in order to obtain the requisite blood (and I don't quite see the Cullens doing the whole Little Vampire cosying up to the cow thing).
So it is okay to kill animals instead of humans if one is a vampire, and doing so is a sign of the retention of humanity? But it is not okay to kill and eat animals if one is a still-living human (which presumes that vampires are not still-living humans)? And if one is a vampire the term vegetarian means animal eater, while for a human it means not-an-animal eater? Are you catching the problem here? Why the lexical drift? Why is it viewed as necessary? Does the necessity have to do with the drift of vampire from the horror genre to the romance genre? We don't have sex with our food, so we want vampires who no longer "see" us as food which thereby enables us to have sex with them?
I have no answers. I just know that the terminology irritates me. Vampires are not in a symbiotic relationship with the still-living blood donors. They are parasitic. They live off our blood. They return nothing, supply nothing, of value to the life of their blood donor. And isn't vegetarianism the attempt of humans to break the food chain parasitic relationship with the animals they share the planet with?
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