Just Thinking

Before I can adequately deal with the question of why I am a vegetarian, I first need to express my views about how people generally have such practices and where they come from.

For the majority of people, their religion, eating habits, belief systems and many habits are developed while very young. They are not based on thinking about things but on what your parents did and perhaps other important people in your life such as teachers and friends. Of course we all like to think that our views are rational, sensible and ... well just plain right! But the truth is that they were installed in our little developing minds before we had (if we ever have) learned to think at all.

Funnily enough, it is these views and habits which have never been subject to any questioning or thinking that are defended with the utmost force if they are attacked. That is because they cannot be rationally defended as they were never rationally conceived. They are simply habits born of doing the same thing every day because, well, that was what we just did. Of course our parents did the same, and we end up having to blame poor old Adam and Eve again for all our faults.

Sometimes, when still young, we meet someone who does something differently and so have two examples to choose from in how we behave. We can try them out for size. This can shock the poor parents when children try out new words, new music or want a tattoo. The odd time children pick up a good habit from somewhere or see a fault in their parents through coming across a better example. Then the child may decide that they want to do something another way.

Each person has a different type of mind, and some are much more likely to look at things in a questioning way so that they want to consider whether there is a better way of doing things. Society generally doesn't approve of this, seeing such people as radicals, stirrers and malcontents. Only after a couple of generations when something has been accepted as a better way are these people seen as innovators.

As I mentioned, we all like to think of ourselves as not being herd animals, and in this regard I too am one of the herd.

When it came to eating habits I ate what my Mother served up (except for a few things that I didn't like) as did the rest of the family. My parents in turn got their eating habits from the previous generation. I had really only thought a little about eating meat until I had a holiday job at the meat works when I was at University. The job involved tying lamb carcass front legs to their necks with a string, so that they didn't stick out a long way. It was disconcerting at first because the bodies were still quite warm, but without heads, feet, skin or innards. After some days it became easy to do without thinking. It put me off the idea of killing animals but not enough to stop me actually eating meat. Perhaps if I had worked on the bobby calf line it would have been different, as even without skin, head or innards, they still twitched something awful. I think that might have done the job.

Sometimes in the next 30 years I thought about it, but never became a vegetarian. Then I did a 10-day Vipassana Meditation course and after that things began to change. At the course we were fed vegetarian food. We also agreed not to kill during the course, not even insects. But when we went home these conditions no longer applied.

I began to try vegetarian food most meals, although still had a slight hankering for bacon. Then one day we went to a local restaurant that served a chicken and macadamia nut salad with terayaki sauce, and I ordered it as I had always enjoyed it in the past. I enjoyed it again, until I had eaten about one third of the chicken, then I chewed one piece and no longer wanted to eat it any more. I took it out of my mouth and ate the rest of the meal apart from the meat. I was a vegetarian.

Ultimately it was not a rational act, although the rational mind likes to go along for the ride. The feeling that it is not good to kill other creatures is a part of it. How would you or I like to be eaten? How would we like to be killed? How would we like to be hooked up on a meat works line with no skin or guts and our head and hands and feet tossed into some big buckets?

I don't buy the argument that humans have souls and animals do not. I don't even know what people mean by a soul - it is just words to me. But whatever, when I look into an animal's eyes, I see that there is just as much someone at home as there is in a human's eyes. Our cat understands the words I say and whether I am being nice or nasty to her as well as any person, and reacts in a way that lets me know what she thinks about it.

"George, George, George and George" by cynnersf & "Buds" by ovisdallii

"Love" by robertmiller & "Dolfinarium-3366" by rvo

There are plenty of photos of animals on the Internet that move any person with any heart to say that the animals are expressing love or tenderness, anger or jealousy, hate or rage of frustration. Only a person who wants to eat meat without thinking about the truth of what they do would pretend otherwise.

"Baby Ringtail lemur" & Orangutans by supertigger

Nutritionally we do not need to eat meat. We do need protein in our diet, but can easily get enough from vegetables. Many studies have shown that this is not a problem. We do not need to eat meat to get protein, because if that were true, then cows would not be made of so much protein when they eat only grass. Some people argue that it is alright for cows because they have seven stomachs, but humans do not. Well, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom are Chimpanzees and Gorillas. You couldn't call an adult gorilla a weedy looking vegetarian. But it is a vegetarian and obviously has very strong muscles. Chimpanzees are not strict vegetarians, eating small animals occasionally.

Meat eating in large quantities is a relatively modern thing. Although the rich probably ate more meat in the past, there were very few of them. Medical reports show that meat eating is not healthy for humans. It causes problems in the intestines, including increased incidence of cancer.

Many Christians think that the bible says that man was given the right to eat animals, but I think that they misinterpret the meaning of having dominion over animals. There is excellent evidence that Christ was a vegetarian. Most scholars agree that he was a member of a sect called the Essenes, and both Greek and Roman reports of the Essenes say that they were strict vegetarians, eating only raw food.

The Buddha also taught that people should not kill, neither other people nor animals. Although he was not a vegetarian by modern definition, he did instruct all his followers to never eat meat if they thought that an animal might have been killed to feed them. It was only acceptable to eat left overs where it was known that no deliberate killing was done to support their lives. This was a matter of not wasting food.

Generally speaking, vegetarians are not pushy people, but they often feel the pain that others choose to cause the killing of so many creatures to feed humans. Could you kill the creatures that you eat? How would you feel if you saw all the carcasses of all the creatures that you have eaten in your life in one big heap? What a burden of guilt we must share.