Biggest Negative Reason to be a Vegetarian – Love for Animals!!

The biggest negative reason to be a vegetarian in my opinion is the one given by the majority of Vegetarians – Animals are my friends and I don’t eat my friends. This refrain can be expressed in many other ways such as:

1. I do not eat animals because of ethical reasons.
2. It is cruel to kill animals for food.
3. Animals bleed, feel pain and scream when they are killed and I don’t like it.
4. All animal food comes from “Animal Factory Farms” where they are kept in horrible condition and I protest that.
5. “It’s a wonderful thing to be able to finish a delicious meal, knowing that no beings have suffered [to make it],” as Erik Marcus, author of Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating (McBooks, 1998) would say it.

Well I know that I am risking my vegetarian credentials when I say that I do not agree with these arguments.

I also know that when I say that we kill anyways, when we consume plant based diet or use clothes made of products derived from plants, my vegetarian friends will roll their eyes and say, “oh no, not again.”

But, my position is that we humans take life when ever we eat – we kill plants when we eat them and a lot of others kill animals when they eat meat.

As a matter of fact, every living being takes life when food is consumed. In Hindu scriptures it is said, “Life lives on Life” (Jeeva Jeevo Jeevati or Jeevo Jeevasya Jevanam). Even plants which have the ability to produce food for themselves from carbon dioxide and sunlight (through photosynthesis) depend on life (dead organic material) to survive – that is from where they get their nutrition. There would be no organic farming without organisms – such as dead leaves, insects and worms found in soil, earthworms etc.

My position on this matter is clear and unambiguous –

1. All living beings live on / off other living beings.
2. Even plants are no exception.

If the vegetarians want to win the debate of ethical eating then one baggage that they need to throw off is high moral stand that killing animals for food is wrong because of cruelty. By that logic as I said, killing plants too is tantamount to cruelty. In a debate or in an adversarial position, you need to concede certain ground or concessions and the one concession that we need to give here is the acknowledgement that we vegetarians too kill for food. Every body does – all birds, fish, animals, humans. Even Gods kill.

And killing for food is not bad. Because it is the way nature is. That is the rule written by nature – a rule that you, I or GOD cannot break. You can live only by consuming another living being.

Now to take the debate further, I am going to make a stand on the following issues one by one:

1. Killing plants is not different than killing animals.
2. Animals are my friends and I do not eat my friends.
3. We should not kill animals because they feel pain.

There are many more objections by vegetarians who do not eat meat for ethical reasons. I’ll keep adding all of those objections here and take them up one by one as I keep coming across them.

I invite you to this debate and hope to have a very lively conversation with you all.

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