My daughter and I have been abstaining from the flesh of dead animals since Christmas. For me, it’s at least my third attempt to be vegetarian, but it feels more serious this time.
Here are my reasons:
– Eating meat or fish requires an act of violence to be carried out against a living being. That just seems wrong. I am increasingly convinced that hope for the world lies in the formation of a community of all creatures. The cow is my sister. I shouldn’t eat my sister, should I?
– Modern farming is too intensive and too many animals suffer as a result. Pigs shouldn’t be kept in sheds or behind bars. They should be in the woods, rooting around in the leaf mould.
– The amount of meat we eat in the west is unsustainable. It uses too much land, produces too much waste (not least methane), and is an extraordinarily inefficient way of converting plant protein into Mabbsonsea protein.
One problem with being vegetarian is that there’s very little choice when eating out, and so I eat far too much cheese. My objection to intensive farming applies very much to dairy farming, where sometimes cows are bred and made to produce so much milk in their first few years that they’re all milked out and go into cheap pies. The natural lifespan for the cow is somewhere in the region of 20 years. As I’m hypocalcaemic (thank you, thyroid cancer) I need to drink/eat dairy for the calcium, so I’m making an extra effort to buy organic, as that’s about the best welfare standard for the cows. But that still leaves the issues of land use, waste and emissions.
There are no cost-free easy answers to all this. There’s a price to be paid for me to be alive. An upside of a vegetarian diet is that it is making me think much more carefully about food, and I hope that becoming more caring and thoughtful might bring my price down.
Alex Mabbs 
I agree with most of what you say. The treatment of animals is appalling and much needs to be done. I love your stance and ethics. As a biologist I would only add the proviso that there is an anthropomorphism in assuming plants do not feel things. It is true they have no nervous system but all their cells interact in much the same way as nerve cells. They could be aware.
It’s food for thought.
Cheers
Opher – Opher’s World.
Plants having feelings is something that has crossed my mind before. I think Roald Dahl wrote a short story about it in one of his Tales of the Unexpected. I feel some sympathy for a foraging/gathering diet, but my excuse is I live in a city. But I agree that plants are often not respected & certainly not (along with the soil) in intensive agriculture. I wonder how a less hierarchical worldview would look & how all beings could live together peaceably?