Vegetarians! A Social-Justice Issue

I’ve been asked on many occasions why I’m a vegetarian, or at present why I used to be such a strict vegetarian and am today a modified vegetarian.

When I first got to college I had the chance to eat what I wanted and to have more control over my life than I ever felt before! Many people decide to stay up late, go to parties, date multiple people at once, smoke and do many things they may never have considered let alone been able to do because of parental and familial control over their lives while they were living at home.
One of the things I most looked forward to upon entering college was to be able to eat what I wanted-or more specifically to not eat what I’d been forced to eat at home.

I had thought for several years before that eating meat might be wrong, or unethical based on a social justice issue. The thought that most specials of animals that are raised can feel physical pain, and some in fact convey emotion as well, and to eat them didn’t seem right to me. In addition, most animals that are killed are not raised in any humane way; they are also not killed in any humane way. No thought is given to how it affects the animal. No thought is given as to the precedence that is widely played out everyday across this nation.

This is primarily meant as a social justice argument and I do not expect people to change their eating habits simply because of a blog article. However; I would hope that anyone who reads this will seriously consider what their eating habits are and why they eat what they eat. Perhaps they will consider changing their habits based on these arguments and their own conscience!
Animals have no rights, they are considered property. But even for pets there are laws in most states preventing cruelty to them. You cannot simply place your cat or dog in your microwave and heat them up to see what it will do to them. You can’t just kill them and eat them if you decide you want to have dog for dinner.

But cows, chickens, pork et al are all raised in large numbers and in poor conditions for their health-though I can hear the objection now, “why worry about their health, we’re gonna kill them and eat them!” And if this isn’t enough of a thought to make you sick, consider how they are killed. Most are slaughtered by the cruelest method possible. Cows receive a nail to their head, pork is hung up by their butt/legs and then their throats are cut to let the blood run out while they are still alive!

Now I don’t care for any of this-the poor conditions they are raised in, the way they are killed-but even more so than this I think that the raising of entire species of animals simply so they can be killed, and then eaten by us is wrong.

This amounts to genocide, but because it’s not done to humans it’s not genocide. And why is all of this done? Because we think they taste good and we want to eat meat!
I admit I grew up eating meat and I have eaten meat since I became a vegetarian in college. I wish that we were all more socially conscious of what we do to ourselves, each other and our planet. How we treat animals is an example of how we could treat the planet better. We-humans as a whole-disregard what is good for the planet and thus good for ourselves long term, by destroying forests and rain forests so that we have more land to let cattle graze. We use steroids in chickens so that they can take less time to grow and then be killed, processed and sold for us to eat.

How can we continue to do this to our planet and to ourselves?

Our continuing to eat meat seems parallel to our continued over use of oil to power our cars and our economy. I wonder whether just as the oil crisis has caused gas prices to soar and many people to sell their gas guzzling cars, and to use public transportation, car pooling and purchasing green cars for the first time in their lives that our continued consumption of meat will not at some point cause an ever increasing effect on global warming and lead us to change our dietary habits as well. So that we can save ourselves and our planet-simultaneously!

Just think about it!

Sunday, October 12, 2008