by shadow of doubt » Sun Aug 17, 2003 5:50 pm
Let me just show you both sides of the coin here. <br> On one hand, most veggies appear to be hypocrites. They still use leather goods, toothpastes and Lipsticks. Even medicines like cod liver oil... not to mention the other medicines that are made after gruesome testing on animals. It is not love for animals. It is only convenience. I am an animal lover. But only as long as its convenient for me. <br> <br> So what\'s the other side of it? <br> <br> I am a veggie by choice. And I do face many taunts becoz of this. One common rhetoric is: if you can kill a tree and eat it, what\'s wrong in killing a chicken, a pig, a cow or a dog. What next? A lizard, a cockroach? There is no end to it. <br> Let me apply this analogy to something more extreme. If all this is okay, so is cannibalism. Kill your neighbor and microwave him. Serve him for dinner. Even that should be okay. When you can kill a chicken, a pig, a cow, why not a human being? <br> <br> It is becoz you relate to human suffering. You cannot hurt a humnan being becoz you can feel that suffering in your heart (correct me if i am wrong). In the same manner, I relate to animal suffering. I do not know about others, but having been part of both the groups (of veggies and non veggies) I can tell you one thing: a person feels sympathetic towards another\'s pain ONLY if he/she can associate with that pain. So I see a chick in a chicken. Shop today. I see its neck slit barely half way thru. I hear it shriek, before it dies down painfully as it is plunged in boiling hot water. It pains me because I can relate to its pain. It touches my heart. And so I cannot imagine myself relishing a food made after putting an innocent creature to so much pain. The way you cannot imagine yourself eating your neighbor or your best friend, I cannot imagine myself doing that to other creatures. Maybe a day will come when I will rise to such a level of consciousness that I will begin to feel the pain of a tree when vegetables are plucked from it. Maybe that day I will renounce eating food altogether. <br> <br> Other veggies... agree?