Vegitarians: Why do you oppose eating meat?

Question

Is it the eating of meat itself?

Or is it the conditions the animals bred to used as food live in?

Now a lot are saying the treatment of the animals.

I have no problem with this at all as I personally am an omnivore but figure people should eat whatever works for them.

My follow up is that if you care about your food, does it matter that plants are also living?

Not trying to inflame or attack at all but I am just curious if you care about ethics then do you care that plants might just as well suffer? Do you check to make sure no pesticides, etc?

Anastacia> I see your point but our teeth are made for eating both meat and plants..hence the sharper teeth in front and the back teeth that are for grinding. If your meat sits in your gut and rots then you are eating spoiled meat.
Meat takes longer to digest because people mostly eat muscle tissue which is tough and needs more time to be broken down..and if it rots then you ate something bad to begin with.

Shelly P> good points...as far as the starving people that is not a problem of food production but politics. We have plenty of food to feed everyone in this world but the problem is some are not getting any food. The governments restrict access, steal it, or other agents interfere with the food supply and that is what causes starvation...not lack of food...but I see your point

JOHN P> point taken but I don't think the corn and wheat wants to be killed and eaten either. Nothing wants to be eaten.

Anastacia> Wanted to ask why it is ok to eat plants and not animals? Both are living things made of living cells. Both can bleed, both respond to enviornment and stimuli.
I am not trying to be a pain in the butt here but trying to see what the difference is. If animals have souls then I would assume plants do too as they perform all the functions of living that animals do.

Rooikat> I don't think I could eat meat if I raised the animals either..I would get attached.

shoppingchk777> Short, simple, to the point..kudos; although more accurate to say eating is murder. plants are living too...you kill them to eat.

Krister> Plants+animals are both carbon based lifeforms, eat, require water, breathe, bleed, reproduce..only thing plants cannot do is move or make sounds audible to animals.
So reality says plants are living things

Or do you consider it ok to kill, chop and eat something because it does not have a face or cry out in a way you can understand.

Either way is fine but stop pissing in the wind and thinking it is rain, and I would stop insulting people when reality backs up their information..just makes YOU look stupid

Krister> Wow you are stunningly full of BS. There are plenty of animals that do not if you bother to find out what animals are, or learn any real biology.

I would have more respect for you if you were honest and said "I am a vegi-nazi"...your opinion is valueless as all you are doing is screaming like a 2 yr old.

majnun99> True and that is fine with me. I am just pointing out to the people who talk about killing to eat is wrong are in fact killing to eat...but that is the world and biology...life feeds on life.

not trying to judge at all...just trying to point out the other side of the equation

Answer 1

Well, there are many reasons.. all vegetarians are not vegetarian for the same reason.. it's usually one of the following reason, or a combination of 2 or more reasons

1: Health: The latest scientific research shows that the human body does not need nearly as much protien as most non-veg westerners consume.. Consuming too much protien causes health problems.. Also, in today's society, the animals have been pumped full of hormones, antibiotics, and other things that aren't good for us.. This causes health problems and a cancer epidemic.. While diet is not always the cause of cancer and heart problems, vegetarians are proven to have MUCH less of these things.. Also a shockingly high percentage of meat comes from sick animals, diseased animals, animals with cancer... It could be argued that it is pretty much unsafe to consume.. The animals are fed things that aren't natural (vegetarian animals are fed ground up diseased carcases, sometimes of the same species!!) This causes things like mad-cow disease..

2. Suffering: The practices of the meat industry are unspeakably inhumane.. I won't go into detail, but there's many people who will be more than happy to enlighten you into the way these animals are treated. I'm not just talking about the fact that they're killed...I'm talking about HOW they're killed, and the lives they lead before they're killed.. MANY people refuse to support an industry that causes such sufferering to defenseless animals..

3. Some people simply don't like meat! They hate the thought of it being a dead animal.. or they just don't like the taste or texture.. etc...

4. IT is considered very fashionable to be a vegetarian. Just look at the lists of celebrities who are veg. It's a case of "all the cool kids are doing it." Pathetic reason to be veg, but I'm including it because it's probably some people's only reason...

#5 The environment.. Beef is the MOST inefficient food source.. The amount of farm land needed to produce food for the gazillions of cows needed to satisfy our taste for big-macs could feed about 3 times the earth's population.. If everyone on earth went veg and we didn't need so many cows, we could reforrest almost 90% of the forest that's been cut down.. We could give every human on earth (even the starving children in africa) 2 loaves of bread with the grain that is fed to all the cows in ONE DAY.. Basically there would be no world hunger if everyone was vegetarian.. Not to mention the pollution all those cows create....

So, this is the basics.. Hope it helped!

Answer 2

I was a vegetarian for a while, but now in the days of better food labelling and information, I'm not. My whole issue is that I don't like to think that any of my money is going towards farming practices that result in the cruel treatment of animals. I will eat meat if I know that the animals have been humanely raised according to genuine free range principles and have been slaughtered humanely. If this isn't the case or the information is not available, then i will either choose the veggie option or choose a different restaurant or brand. I also try to eat organic produce wherever possible, so even my choice of vegetarina meals is often affected. My choice of milk, eggs etc is based on the same considerations.

Answer 3

I am a vegetarian for compassionate reasons and have been one for most of my life. It started thinking about these things at around 13/14 and finally put my foot down at age 16/17. That was difficult for a farm kid as meat was served in some form or another three times a day, hence the fact that most of the farmers in my district were rather large fellows. The attitude was and still is "meat is meat and man must eat". I could not face eating an animal that I had nurtured, dosed, dipped etc. to the point where it was "ripe" for the market. I still remember the sadness that I felt seeing truck loads of "my" animals leaving the farm for the abattoir. I just felt like a traitor.

Answer 4

1. I could never kill an animal for food, maybe if it was going to attack me, but then I could not eat it. Perhaps my fear of blood, cuts, slicing skin open ect.
2. Even if someone else kills it for me, I still think about where it came from and what it is, especially if it is beef and I see the blood coming out.
3. I worked on a chicken farm for a whole 3 minutes "catching" chickens. Since then I have been turned off of chicken, I can't imagine seeing a cow slaughtered, probably puke. I am opposed to the conditions I saw.
4. I have been advised by my doctor to eat a low saturated fat and low cholestrol, sodium diet (heart condition), eliminating meat from my diet has helped me do this eaiser.
These are the main reasons.

Answer 5

My main reason is for my health. Vegetarians live longer and that sounds like a good idea to me! I also have a concern about the way that animals are raised. I read the book "The Ethics of What We Eat" and I don't fancy eating meat anymore. I'm also concerned about the environmental damage caused by intensive farming practices.

Answer 6

I do not want to support the abuse in the current commercial meat industry.

The price of meat is so low it is impossible to rear these anmals with any respect.

There is no nutrition i need from meat so it seems selfish to me to rear and kill them for my tastebuds.

Especially when you see how they are treated ( I see it first hand so am not tainted by scaremongering or PETA videos )

You can read about some of the sights i've seen in 2007 by looking at my answer to this question earlier today:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=ApaGyH6nwQMhfjJnFzaarhp26xR.;_ylv=3?qid=20070923162424AABuFC6

Its great that people like "Nettlebed want to eat more ethically but there is nothing like "genuine free range principles". You just have to look at the "free range chickens" on Sainsbury's farms. They are nothing more than large outdoor cages with no natural foraiging, stressed birds that are overdensly reared. Obviously this is not Nettelbeds fault, you should be able to trust major brands, unfortunately you can't

Answer 7

Both. I don't really like most meat, so no great loss there. But most of all I object to intensive farming and the way that some less reputable abbatoirs operate.
I do eat free range eggs as a hen will produce good eggs if it is treated well but I don't eat any chicken.

Answer 8

Our teeth are not made for eating meat unlike carnivores. Meat also takes a lot of time to digest, it just rots in the gut that later gives rise to different diseases and infection.

And yes, the whole issue about animal cruelty, They are living beings like us, they have souls like us, why rear, slaughter and eat your fellow creatures?

Answer 9

Of course plants are living things; but we have to eat something to live.

The killing of animals bothers me, I can't stand to do it or watch it.

The killing of plants just doesn't bother me in the same way.

As soon as I became aware that I didn't have to eat dead animals, I stopped eating meat.

Answer 10

I'm a vegetarian and I really miss eating meat. I miss chicken and turkey most of all.

I never liked the taste of pork or beef.

The most important reason I don't eat meat because is that it makes me sick. I get the worst stomach aches, diarrhea and hormonal problems if I eat it (even the biological or grain fed animals).

I've also noticed that I get less colds and flues that most people.