The Dilemma of Meat

"For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."

         Pythagoras, mathematician

Over the past few years, I've had a lot of trouble with the concept of eating meat. I love animals and feel quite empathetic toward them. I can't grasp why I spoil my dog and my fish, spending money to make sure that they are happy and healthy, while I eat chicken and pork. Why is one life worth more than another? Why do people feel such a difference between hurting people and hurting animals?

how anyone can harm something this cute is beyond me.

We tend to gloss over that we're eating living things. On the farm, you'd call pigs pigs. At the dinner table, you can it pork. It's a euphemism. I feel like lots of people assume that animals live happy lives until they graciously give their lives for human consumption. Especially after watching "Food Inc.," a documentary about meat production, I couldn't believe how animals were treated, not just in slaughter, but how they are raised. 

For example, chickens are often raised in too-small warehouses in complete darkness which are not kept clean. They are genetically modified to grow bigger than their legs can handle, and they often die because their legs can't support them. Animals like ducks are force-fed from tubes to fatten them up. It's disgusting.

I want to be able to be a vegetarian quite badly. It would fill my life with much less guilt. I'm afraid it would just be too hard for me. I've successfully cut out certain types of meat--I haven't regularly eaten beef in seven years. I just can't figure out a way to get by nutritionally without a little bit of meat. 

Apparently I'm not the only one that feels this way about animals being killed just for humans. Here are some of my favorite vegetarian quotes, with much thanks to this site. 

    "The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men."

          Leonardo da Vinci, artist and scientist

    "To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime."
        Romain Rolland, author, Nobel Prize 1915

    "If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth -- beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals -- would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?"
          George Bernard Shaw, playwright, Nobel Prize 1925

    "What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
        Jeremy Bentham, philosopher

    "In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought."
          Isaac Bashevis Singer, author, Nobel Prize 1978

    "Our task must be to free ourselves . . . by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."
    "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
          Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel Prize 1921

    "I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."
          Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President

    "You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
          Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist

    "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."
   "What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty."
          Leo Tolstoy author

    "I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished."
          Henry David Thoreau, author

    "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
    "To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being."
        Mahatma Gandhi, statesman and philosopher

    "I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."
          Mark Twain, author

     "Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
        Thomas Edison, inventor