Veganise Me

As a vegetarian I get asked many questions and statements… here are a few common ones and the answer to them.

1. Why are you a vegetarian?
   Because as any human being I do not need meat to survive and I disagree with making an animal be treated like a product and then be murdered just because it tastes good.
2. What if the animal died by accident, would you eat it?
   No, the thought of eating a carcass disgusts me no matter how it died. Of course, if someone puts a gun in my head and tells me to choose between eating an animal that died accidentally and one that was murdered I would choose the one that died accidentally – but by choice I still wouldn’t eat it – I don’t NEED it and that’s the point.
3. But other animals eat meat too, you can’t make a lion into a vegetarian.
   For starters, we’re not lions. Lions don’t have a conscience nor a choice, they have large sharp teeth, they eat meat raw, from an early age they display hunting instincts; put a human baby next to a rabbit and check if it kills and eats it like a lion cub would. If you force feed lions with a diet of potatoes and vegetables they won’t be able to eat it nor will they live very long because they were made to be carnivores. Lions also defecate in front of each other and kill the cubs that were not fathered by them – should you do that too?

4. But these animals we eat are bread for it!
   How does that make it any better? Shall we start breeding slaves? Shall we start breeding dogs to use their fur to make teddy bears? Or breed humans to experiment on them. Breeding something for a purpose doesn’t make it right. These animals, whether they are bread for it or not, have feelings and deserve respect.
   Plus, salt-water fish are not bread for it, and as a result human’s over-fishing is causing HUGE imbalances in the ocean’s ecosystem.
5. They are just animals! They can’t think, they don’t care!
   Animals can feel the same amount of pain and fear that we can – they don’t want to suffer, they don’t want to die. Would it be right to kill a human with the mental capacity of a chicken? They DO exist, yet we spend millions with treatments to keep them alive and killing them would be considered murder and would put you in jail. This is called “specism” which a form of “racism”. The fact is that we are ALL animals, but we place higher morals and ethical values on our own species than on others – we somehow consider ourselves more worthy of being alive and being prevented from suffering SIMPLY because we are different species when in fact there is absolutely no reason for us not to apply the same morals to every animal other than the inconvenience it causes us from not being able to “taste” meat.
   It sounds absurd that we do it, but we do.
6. Didn’t humans evolve a larger brain exactly because they started eating meat?
   If that was true then one could ask why other carnivores are not even smarter than us. Plus, even if this statement was true it doesn’t mean that because of it we should remain with same habits we had 10 or 20 thousand years ago. We used to kill each other regularly, we used to live in caves, sacrifice babies in the name of gods, we used to die at the age of 35. I take pride in having evolved beyond that stage into a man who has compassion for all sentient creatures.
7. If you were stranded in an island and you needed to kill an animal to survive, would you do it?
   Yes, I would if it was absolutely necessary – being in that situation I would be removed from an environment in which I have a choice and would be put in one where in order to survive I would NEED to kill another animal to survive. That doesn’t happen on your day-to-day life – you always have a choice. Even if you’re at a friend’s house and they made a roast dinner, you wouldn’t DIE if you didn’t eat that day and you could always have the potatoes and I’m sure they would have other ingredients in their fridges to quickly make something different for you.
8. But then what do you eat?
   Of course your choices are limited because of the fact that most restaurants serve 90% of food with carcasses as an ingredient. But that is a small inconvenience to have to endure for stopping an animal from being unnecessarily killed to satisfy your palate. There are LOADS of options anyway, there are fake meats available, pasta, lasagne, omelette, potatoes, beans, vegetables, organic cheese, free range eggs… really, once you get used to it you don’t even miss meat at all.
9. Why do you not like to eat food that was near meat or touched meat?
   The best way I can explain it is by giving an example. Say you go to some village in China and they eat human featuses there – so you go to this restaurant and they have all these roasted human featuses on a tray and then some vegetables on another. Would you eat the vegetables?
   The thought of a carcass of an innocent animal being near my food disgusts me as much as that roasted featus would disgust you.
   Most vegetarians don’t feel that way and indeed by eating the vegetables only I am still not supporting the meat industry – so this is more of a “yuk” reason than a rational one.
10. What difference does it make? Everyone eats meat, so animals are still dying!
    What difference does it make to recycle, to save energy, to save water, to take public transport instead of driving a car, to not wear fur, to not buy from a company that uses child labour… by boycotting a practice you are doing your share and that’s all you can do really. If 100% of people ate meat in the UK there’d be an extra 50 million animals being killed every year to meet that demand – but about 8% of the people in the UK are vegetarians, and on average each vegetarian saves 100 animals from slaughter per year. It all adds up. Then one day there’ll be a tipping point – when 60-70% of the population turns vegetarian, the remaining ones will not have an option any more and then everyone will have to be vegetarians. Similar to when slavery was abolished – suddenly most people disagreed with it and the government forbade it – some people still wanted their slaves, but they could no longer legally have them. Now most people agree that slavery is a bad thing. Times change and with time are values are changing for the better.

    The biggest point is – we don’t need meat to live – and by becoming a vegetarian you are doing your part to slowly stop this horrible practice from going on.