Sunday 14 August 2011

My daughter's reasons for staying veggie!

Why Am I A Vegetarian?
In all my 16 years of life I have always been a vegetarian. My parents brought me up in a healthy vegetarian lifestyle that I have always appreciated, however I feel I should consider my own personal reasons for being a vegetarian. For now that I am growing up, I know that I am following a meat free diet because I want to and not because that’s how my parents raised me.
When I consider other peoples reasons for leading a carnivorous life, the most plausible explanation I have found is the claim that eating meat is natural. It’s the natural flow of the food chain. However, I find that there is something very unnatural about the meat industry, and when you buy food containing meat you are directly fuelling that industry. Everyday animals are injected with hormones, fed special diets to fatten them up to abnormal proportions and locked up in cruelly small and disgusting cages. How is this natural? Surely it’s more natural to feel compassion and empathy for our fellow living creatures, because after all, what’s more natural than to feel love and care for the innocent and vulnerable. At the hands of our ruthless machinery and intensive farms, a human child would be just a vulnerable as an animal.
Why is an animal’s pain and enslavement any different to humans? People are truly naive enough to believe that we are more important than any other species and can therefore do what we like with animals. We can use them as a tool, whether this is for a taste and sustenance or a source of entertainment. Just because we speak a different language, live in a different society and are more technologically advanced does not make us all powerful or any more important. In the same way that a mentally handicapped human wouldn’t be considered of lower worth than a healthy human being, I don’t feel a cow’s life should be considered less than a human life, just because we may have a different IQ or way of thinking. All animals are still living, feeling and loving creatures. A mother sheep feels emotionally attached for her lamb, as a human mother would feel for her baby. Animals scream too.
Some people refer back to our carnivorous ancestors who hunted animals for sustenance when explaining why they eat meat. They say eating meat is a tradition; it’s in our genes and as I’ve motioned before, part of the food chain. However I find this argument flawed. Years ago, our ancestors would have found it understandable for humans to kill each other from squabbles over land or religion. As we, as a race, have grown and developed, our animalistic habits of the past have diminished. No longer is it acceptable for a person to kill another because of religion, so why do we still murder animals for the pleasure of a taste? Meat is no longer necessary for a healthy lifestyle. There are now so many foods available to provide people with all the correct nutrition to be intelligent and strong, without the use of meat. Also, if the land used for intensive farming all over the world were used to grow crops, millions more starving people in Africa and Asia could be fed. The statistics are shocking. More methane is produced by cows used for the meat industry than all of the worlds transport put together!
People who merely say that they eat meat because it tastes good are clearly ruled by their gluttonous, selfish and hedonistic whims. Where does emotion and responsibility come into that flimsy argument?
Many other people who follow a carnivorous diet refuse to listen to points put across by vegetarians and documentaries revealing the horrors of the meat industry and intensive farming. These people choose to bury their heads in the sand because they know they could be moved and inspired by the reality of murder. These people often choose not to investigate what part of an animal’s corpse their consuming as the truth would probably revolt them. I find this irresponsible and weak. Isn’t this similar to walking down a street, seeing a homeless man being kicked and punched by a group of more powerful people, and turning away. Turning a blind eye. You refuse to look too closely as you’re unprepared to put the effort in to help and in the end the street will be a better looking, easier place to be without the homeless people anyway. You benefit in an obscure way so you might as well not investigate too closely to avoid a sense of guilt that would surely occur if you were fully aware of the pain and suffering that is necessary. This brings me back to my previous argument, why is a defenceless animal’s pain any less important than a defenceless human’s pain?
For me, being a vegetarian is all about knowing that my conscience is clear. I am strong and healthy and obtain all the necessary nutrition I need to be, yet I am not fuelling the corrupt meat industry and I am not paying a middle man to slaughter innocent creatures in a cruel, surgical and detached manner. I live in the beautiful Devon countryside and I know I can walk by fields of cows and sheep and look them in the eye and enjoy their presence. I can do this wholeheartedly and without any guilt because I know that there is no way their bodies will ever be lying on my dinner plate.