What I don’t understand about vegetarianism and veganism:
I understand the view that killing animals for food seems wrong. The main arguments are that they have emotions and feelings too, and since they’re living, and are similar to us in many ways, they do not deserve this treatment. While this seems agreeable to me, look at the next point:
Plants are not excluded from this logic. Plants may seem “okay”, because they don’t have brains or visible feelings, and they don’t move. But in reality, plants are living things too. Have you seen plants like Venus fly traps? That’s an intelligent plant, regardless if it can move on its own or has eyes, it hunts for food just like other animals. And all plants need water, nutrition, and sunlight to grow, the same as all other animals. And they bleed, and they, too, bleed and die when you cut them, and kill them. So in this sense, they are no less important than any animal you may eat.
By this logic, you should not be eating any plant products, either. It’s no more “okay” to eat plants than animals.
But we need to consume them for our survival. Just like other animals need to eat animals, and plants. And just like some plants need to eat flies, and drink water, and take nourishment from worms, and the rest of the earth.
Now that we see both are more equal than we thought, if we didn’t eat animals OR plants, we wouldn’t survive, just as plants wouldn’t survive without the worms, or the animals wouldn’t survive without BOTH.
In conclusion, everything is living, even the earth. And everything is symbiotic. We all must feed off of each other, for our own survival. And we shouldn’t be ashamed of it, or offended by it. In the end, we’re all the same.
As early Native Americans saw it, the buffalo was holy to them. They worshipped it, with the utmost respect. But they also understood they needed the buffalo for survival, and therefore consumed it, but wasted no part of it, and treated it with the utmost respect during the process.
Even though we must consume, as is the law of nature, it does not mean we get to treat the things we consume negatively during the process. Taking a tip from our early Natives, while we understand we need our plants and animals, the least we can do is treat the things we consume with respect.
That is our duty.
Just don’t eat your own kind. That, my friends, is cause for anarchy.
Noah Sanchez 