Think in terms of sheer scale. *Billions* of animals killed yearly.

Read “Slaughterhouse” by Gail Eisnitz to start with. It’s full of interviews with Slaughterhouse workers.

Please read a couple of books on the subject.

Thanks for commenting on my blog…

http://www.tinyurl.com/earthlingsdoc

Watch this in it’s entirety and tell me if your views at all change.

It seems that you have a beautified view of how animals are kept and slaughtered… it’s not swift, it’s not painless, and even if it was it doesn’t make it right to breed and kill them simply to tickle your sense of taste.

Another point:

Farming is responsible for 18% of the carbon emissions in the world. Transport including airplanes is responsible for 13%.

Farming causes deforestation and if the space used for it and if the food given to cattle was given to people, it could feed the whole human population 6 times over.

Over-fishing is the only way to sustain the demand of 7 billion humans and it has completely imbalanced the oceans. Millions of animals died for lack of food and millions more died by accident being caught on the nets.
It is said that the oceans will have no more fish in about 50 years if current trends continue.

Being a vegetarian is not only about compassion, it’s about being aware of the environment we live in and already destroy just for being a species that is unnaturally dominant.
Being a vegetarian is about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes – about thinking of the greater consequences of your actions and the impact that they have in the world.

If 100% of the world became vegetarians there would be food for everyone, forests could be replanted, carbon emissions would go down by 18%, ocean life would be balanced, we’d reduce your chances of cancer by 50% to 70% (proven statistics), and we would stop billions of animals living miserable lives and getting cruelly murdered every year.

Being a vegetarian you’re boycotting an industry of evil that only brings pleasure to you but brings misery to everything else.

Anyway, watch the documentary – it’s all real – it’s the holocaust happening on a daily basis behind closed doors and few give a damn about it.

Slaughter is a pretty swift process, and were it not for slaughter, animals would live to old age and die slowly and painfully from natural causes. Some breeds simply wouldn’t exist as they would no longer have a “purpose.” I don’t like either of those options.

I almost wish, myself, that _I_ had a finite lifespan and rather than living into a decrepit old age I could be swiftly taken from this world before it all goes completely downhill and I lose my marbles! Bit of a miserable thought, I know, but old age really doesn’t appeal to me.

At the end of the day I do agree with you but there are two things that concern me:

Firstly – from personal experience, the vegetarians I know do NOT seem as healthy as the rest of us. We don’t know the entire chemical composition of meat. To say we can live a perfectly healthy life without eating meat seems like a bold claim, given we also don’t have a complete understanding of our own anatomy

Secondly, we only live once, and life to me is about pleasure and exploring new things. Food is part of that. Vegetarianism is a HUGE limiting factor when enjoying and exploring new food. I believe that animal life is simply not as important as human life, and of course that’s a selfish point of view. It would be unacceptable selfish if the animals in question led a horrible life and suffered a horrible death, but on the most part they don’t. The rules for keeping and transporting animals give them a better quality of life than we get on the London Underground!

I do feel like a fraud, really, for making these two points, as I can’t substantiate them and I’m sure you have a better idea of the issues than me. Just wanted to give you my opinion as you’ve so eloquently expressed your own.