One older lady asked me after discovering, that I am a vegetarian...
Lady; Why don't you eat meat?
Me; I don't want to take someone's life, just so I can have a dinner...
Lady; But vegetables are alive too and you need to pull them out of the ground... Me; Yes, but they will not run away from me terrified, trying to save their life...
Lady; She looked at me silently and I knew, that that was a perspective that she never seen before.
I became a vegetarian for few different reasons.
One of them is loving animals and not wanting to harm them. (You can find few videos in the videos section about this topic, that really made a difference for me and I found them life changing, eye opening... One of them is called Earthlings.) I also feel better from the health perspective when I am not eating animal products. You can find more information about that in the article migraines and heavy periods.
From a very young age we are thought by adults...
What is cow giving us? Milk and meat...
What is sheep giving us? Milk, wool, meat...
What is chicken giving us? Eggs, meat...
We are training our children to see, that we are not doing any harm to them, well, that is what they are giving to us, isn't it... The correct question in my opinion would be, what are we taking from these animals? Eggs, wool, meat, their lives... I do not think that any of them is doing it willingly, especially the meat part...
Have you ever paused and questioned why we call their meat pork instead of pig?
Why we call it beef and not cow?
Why we call it poultry and not chicken and so on?
I remember thinking that when I was small, but I was not given the answer, that would really make sense to me. Is it that we just make it easier for ourselves to detach from the emotions that we would feel, if we say I am eating cow, or a goat, chicken or pig... And it would be especially easier for children if you call it something else because they would definitely not want to eat and harm a chicken... And by the time they are big enough to think about it themselves, they are so used to eating meat that they will just continue, because many times it is the easier thing to do...
I also remember from the times when I was small and my grandma was killing some of her animals for the dinner, being told that the animals do not have feelings like we do. They do not feel the pain like we do... I was not happy when I saw the poor animal being killed, their heads being cut off while they were struggling and trying to free themselves...
To make me be OK with it, they forced me to hold the chicken's legs while they cut the head off. No matter how they tried to desensitize me, it was never OK with me to harm animals.
It was not just my grandma, it was a general opinion at that time, that they are just animals, they have no feelings and they are here for us to serve us. Therefore, we can do whatever we want to do with them... Being cruel towards dogs was excused, well, because the dog has no feelings they said. But clearly you could see the fear, the pain, the love and joy... The same way you could see these feeling in pigs, cows, sheep...if you look with your eyes and heart open. All the animals have feelings. And that is something that we can not hide from ourselves and our children anymore.
LOVE, JOY, HAPPINESS, SADNESS, FEAR,
the same feelings that we would experience in different situations...