Dinosaurs are awesome. Who doesn’t love dinosaurs? Even Creationists are now incorporating them into their theories, and those guys hate everything! You can’t not love a dinosaur. It’s impossible to be apathetic about an Apatosaurus.

I do not, however, like this t-shirt. Why? Well, first of all, it feels like the makers of the shirt are using a dinosaur as a celebrity endorsement. Since you can’t help but love a dinosaur, the t-shirt seems to be aligning the awesomeness of dinosaurs with vegetarianism – essentially, “Sauropods were vegetarians, and so am I!”

But being a vegetarian is a choice. Being an herbivore is not. There is a big difference. A vegetarian chooses not to eat meat for ethical reasons. An herbivore does not eat meat because their teeth and stomach are not designed for it. And, in fact, they do eat the bugs that are on the leaves they’re eating, so even if you remove the aspect of choice from vegetarianism, they’re still not vegetarians.

A label of “herbivore” on the t-shirt would not have earned this shirt a place on the site. In fact, I would probably have bought it and worn it proudly (bonus points if there were a matching “carnivore” one).

I will not let dinosaurs be used for propaganda. I didn’t stand for it back when Eisenhower adopted the slogan “Velociraptors Like Ike!” and I won’t stand for it now.

This shirt, however, is a poignant statement about our collective memory. How quickly do we forget about a tragic event that occurred only 65 million years ago.

Forever 21 Dino Vegetarian Tee – $14.90
Busted Tees Never Forget Tee – $22