Vegan, vegetarian, evolution? Humans are herbivores

Nicolle,
I believed before what you do believe now.
“Being a vegan is something I would consider ..” Thanks!

“I don't mean to make people angry, it is just a personal opinion”
Don’t worry. I won’t become angry. I believed like you did for almost 28 years. We eat meat because of our cultural indoctrination. That we can justify killing another sentient being, who values his/her life as much as we value our own life, for “taste”, habit, tradition or convenience, is something that we do because we have been bombarded with this propaganda since we were born. Anthropology shows that our ancestors mainly ate a starch based-diet. Some hunted some of their food. At least some of our ancestors. At some point humans decided that it was right to kill another sentient being, maybe someone moved to a cold place and did it for survival. We don’t know. However, we do know, that humans to a large degree follow their ancestors behaviors based on our cultural indoctrination.

We can’t look at other species, and justify our behavior, just because there are predators that hurt and kill other beings. There are many behaviors that some predators do that we would never justify, and if we use this methodology almost any human behavior can be justified. We could justify cannibalism with the same argument, but we have evolved and do understand that it is morally wrong to kill other human beings.

Put a small bunny in the same room as a small child. She will not try to hurt and kill the bunny. Hurting and killing other sentient beings is something that is contradictory to our inner nature, our loving, compassionate and nonviolent nature; and is something that is only learnt by the indoctrination of our culture, which has reduced animals to being commodities. Doing this as a regular habit, we disconnect ourselves to the animals, and we lose some of our capacity to understand that it is wrong to take the life of another being - who is consciousness just like us. Just because they have been given another body than us, doesn't mean that there is any essential difference. This is also discussed in the wonderful book World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle (www.worldpeacediet.org). If you visited a slaughterhouse you would see that the animals don’t want to die and that they suffer tremendously when someone is taking their precious life. Can’t we respect this. Can’t we respect their lives, their purposes, their families and their friend relationships?