[mtrimpe]

I'm not a vegetarian, yet, but I do think I will become one. My reason for it is quite a different one though so perhaps it might be used as a repartee.

I want to become a vegetarian because eating meat is lazy. I believe we have to murder plants too when we eat them, just like animals and to me there is no ethical distinction between the two. It's life, we're eating it, period. If we don't do it however, we die, unless we learn how to how to do photosynthesis, live directly off of the energy of the sun.

Eating is about ingesting energy, which all eventually has to come from the sun. Face it, even oil comes from the sun. Every organism has to find some way of getting that energy from the sun.

So why do I think it's bad to eat meat? Well I don't. I think we must be really careful with the energy we receive from the sun. We must use it sparingly. We must conserve it as much as we can, since how little of it we need to live determines how many people this world can harbor, or determines how little 'negative' effect we have on this world (which is linked to the spiritual concept of non-interference in my mind).

So why eating meat is bad for me is that it's lazy and inefficient. When we eat meat, we use the animals to do the hard work of turning plants into tissue for us. Then we kill them and consume the fruits of their hard labour just to make our life easier. In the process we've robbed an animal of his freedom and forced him to grow up as a slave doing our hard work.

Apart from that all the while that animal has to spend a lot of extra energy to live himself, to walk around, grow up, enjoy himself etc. Then we have become SO arrogant that we only want the best parts of his efforts and throw the rest away, all in all disrespectfully throwing away things that animal has worked so hard for in his enslaved life.

So why I would like to become vegetarian is because it allows us to:
1. Get closer to getting our energy directly from the source, the sun.
2. Free ourselves from having to enslave a part of nature (cattle)
3. Improves the energy efficiency of this world.

This doesn't mean I think vegetarians are home free ... they still force plants to grow in man-made gardens, limiting their freedom to explore the world, enslaving them as well. Vegetarianism only allows us to stop doing that to the animals as well. If you want to be truly respectful to nature then:
1. Learn how to do photosynthesis
2. Only eat plants (or meat) that have led a free and fulfilling life in the wild and that is willing to surrender it's life to serve you.

Hehe, I sound crazy again, but hope it helps clarify someone's thoughts.