I was brought up as a vegetarian and coming from a conservative brahmin background I was told not to eat meat, that it was not in my custom and consuming it is a sin. Remember when we were little , when our parents told us not to play cricket or not to do something in the house, but we would still do it when they were not looking ,thats exactly happened to me in IIT, I was not under the observation of my parents , there was no one to stop me, to scrutinize my actions, no one to answer to , so I started tasting non-vegetarian food to the point that my stomach got upset with the sudden change in the diet and I was restricted to the bog for two days.
Then this video comes up in you-tube showing the grotesque killing (killing is never pleasant , except maybe in video game and its not you who's dying) of these animals for food. Victims in concentration camps had a better life than the animals that were raised in mass production for food. That affected me, it changed the way I looked at an egg completely, not as an omelette but as wasted life for what, for food.
But the next natural question cropped up, How is killing a plant different from killing an animal? Well most of the food from plants is obtained as a side product of a plants natural life cycle, trees grow fruits to make birds eat them and spread the seeds, we obtain rice at the final stage of the plants life cycle after which the plant dies, and there is no "pain factor" involved, basically we are not "killing" the plant at any stage to obtain food (removing a limb of a pig is definitely different from removing a branch of a tree).
My friends argued that it was in nature to kill for food, lions have to kill to survive, and so does man. Well they are right, I cant argue the fact that I used to enjoy the chase of a hunt in discovery channel, when a tiger crept up to its prey and lunged for its neck and killed it by suffocating it. But we as humans have a choice animals dont, we were given the gift to search for alternatives, to discover, to adapt, why not in the case of food. I agree people in Antarctica don't have a choice in their meals but most of us have access to vegetarian food which is equally tasty and nutritious if not more than non-vegetarian food. Why kill a poor defenseless animal, when you have an option to eat a vegetable.
To be a vegetarian or not is purely subjective and depends on how one sees the issue. As the great Dumbledore from Harry Potter says "Who we are is not about what we are doing , but its about the choices we make." So make your choice, become a vegetarian :) .
