I want to understand you?

Question

Why did you become a vegetarian/ vegan?

Answer 1

i dont eat meat because i care about my health and it is a bit repulsive. i see fish as fresh and healthy. dead animals however are like rotting flesh to me, pumped full of c**p and toxins, and bad for you bowel as well.

RN and nutritionist

Answer 2

Each persons diet is usually a private,personal choice . So every one has a different approach.

Answer 3

i did it for animals, the world, and my health.

but mostly for the animals. i believe that animals and humans are equal, and its wrong to slaughter them just for our enjoyment.

http://www.chooseveg.com/animal-cruelty....

watch that video. it'll probably convert you 2

Answer 4

Becasue I find it cruel and highly disgusting that animals are being killed and we are eating them also, because its a healthy life style

Answer 5

I did it for:

1. health reasons (and I reap the benefits every day - my blood pressure is phenomenal, my cholesterol levels are remarkable, nearly all diet-related cancers, health conditions and problems like obesity are no longer a concern for me - but I do worry about genetic and environmental and inherent cancers still, in particular skin cancer, which not only has happened in my family, but which 1 in 3 Americans will battle in their lifetime. I have enough concerns and health problems to worry about, whatever can be prevented through a healthy vegan diet sounds like a blessing to me.)

2. environmental reasons (animal agriculture is the leading cause of global warming, according to United Nations/Kyoto Protocol reports and numerous news programs globally)

3. ethical/moral reasons (to mass-produce meat to meet consumer demand, factory farming has been spawned, which relies on absolute hideous conditions and squalor, abuse and confinement, filth and moral decay and every possible wrong you can think of that someone could do to an animal in order to be able to lump them by the thousands into as little room as possible, breed them on artificial chemical compounds and processed feed so they grow as fast as possible, and then slaughter them in a heartless, mechanical way)

4. the heartless nature of the meat industry (while someone in a slaughterhouse can castrate piglets by the hundreds, slicing their genitals off raw to prevent them from becoming aggressive against each other in close quarters, if someone did that in their own back yard to kittens of puppies they'd be serving time in jail. Meanwhile, pigs are known to be one of the most intelligent animals on the planet, able to be trained like the smartest of dogs, and have been proven to have an imaginative, highly cognitive nature - some can even play video games. Scientists estimate that a pig has the intelligence level of a 3 year old human child - and anyone who has witnessed the atrocious conditions on mass market pig farms would have their stomach churning if they realized that each of those pigs was in a sense as aware, hurting as much, as innocent and intelligent as a 3 year old kid).

5. my own personal experiences (I personally participated in a major cattle farm investigation, I have talked with slaughterhouse employees and some of them I still keep in contact with, and I continue to volunteer and seek out opportunities to see with my own eyes the indecency we all permit to happen. If people knew how disgusting the food they eat is, the things it went through, how many filthy hands handled it, how many slaughterhouse workers vomited because of the stench, just the pure filth and misery the animal lived in for most of it's life, the chemical additives in it - if the blindfold was pulled off and people personally saw and investigated it like I did, they wouldn't eat meat either. It's always safer when you read about it, it's always the easy cop-out to assume it's exaggeration and propaganda. It's comfortable to buy into the image of the tiny minority of farms that actually are anything like what nature intended, to just imagine everything's a jolly scene from Babe and to sever any moral responsibility. But whether you knowingly contribute to something inherently evil or just out of pure ignorance, what goes around comes around in the end).

Answer 6

I watched the video, "Earthlings."  Anyone who can still eat animal products after watching that movie is just heartless.  Earthlings:  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=...  (If this link doesn't work, go to Google and search for "Earthlings."  That should work. It's how I found the video in the first place.

This movie is 5 years old and incredible, and yet so few people have even heard of it.  EVERYONE NEEDS TO WATCH THIS MOVIE.

Answer 7

I became a vegetarian for health, ethical and environmental reasons and became a vegan for the same reasons.

Veganism seeks to eliminate the exploitation of animals for completely unnecessary human gain.  Breastfeeding is not the least bit incompatible with that philosophy as a nursing mother is not being exploited and nursing an infant is far from unnecessary.  Now, if a mother who had recently given birth was kept in a stall, removed from her infant, milked by a machine and forced to keep producing long past the time that her now long gone infant would have required milk, THAT would be incompatible with veganism.

Meat is prominent part of the food pyramid because the beef lobby spends a small fortune to make sure of it.  Meat is wholly and completely unnecessary and doesn't provide any nutrients that cannot be gotten elsewhere with far less saturated fat, no cholesterol, fiber and beneficial phytonutrients.

Answer 8

Excuse me but are you "Bull Baiting" or do you really want to know? You have received several honest responses with heartfelt sincere reasons clearly defined and still you persist with your disrespectful comments on those responses and are clearly entrenched in your own point of view.

Frankly, I think you made a category mistake. This section is dedicated to vegan and vegetarian concerns. It is not a forum for an open debate with the closed minded, who only claim to want to understand us. The loving souls who frequent these pages will try  continue to communicate their reasons in good faith -- you might want to learn  bit from their good faith and respectfully receive their information and then, if possible, think about it before you shoot from the hip.

Answer 9

I became a vegetarian for moral reasons. I don't see why something should have to most probably live a miserable life and then be killed just so my tastebuds are pleased for a few seconds. Especially as I'll soon forget the taste and it won't affect my life or make it any better. Tastebuds don't lead to true happiness so why should something go through so much pain for them?

There is also the environmental factor. The meat industry causes more pollution than all of the transport in the world combined. And people are starving to death right next to fields of food which is sent to the west instead to feed animals which are then eaten themselves. It takes 10kgs of food to produce 1kg meat. If humans ate the veg food directly it would save millions of human lives.

Also you say that meat is good for health... this is what I thought too until I did some research. What I found shocked me so much that I'm now scared of what else I could be so wrong about! Try reading 'The China Study' by Thomas M. Cambell. It's written by an ex-farmer who made some break throughs when actually researching the benefits of meat. That really will open your eyes.

Also here are a few interesting articles:

http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/news/ar...

http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/news/ar...

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/425824/14254...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/408882...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007...

And of course vegans dont have a problem with breast milk. It's natural! Drinking the milk of another species however isn't, especially after infancy.

Vegans dont just have a set of rules they must adhere to. It's not like we obey 'Thou Shalt Not Drink Milk'. There is logical and ethical reasoning behind it. Drinking human breast milk when you're a baby is both logical and ethical.

Answer 10

http://www.meat.org

That's all I need to say.

Answer 11

I became a vegetarian because I love animals and I can't bear looking at a cheeseburger and then eating it, knowing it was a once living animal. After watching videos about it, I made my choice and became a vegetarian. I told my parents about it and they told me it was a good reason. My family still eats meat but my mom makes non-meat food for me. It may be hard, but to know I'm saving lives makes it worth while.

I could never be a vegan though, I love chocolate and muffins and cookies and stuff I couldn't live without dairy or eggs. Teehee.

Answer 12

To be honest, this is why i became a vegetarian then to a vegan.

It all started when i heard that my mum used to be a vegetarian, and i kinda wanted to see what it was like, plus the fact that i loved animals.

At first i didn't, but at this time i was getting bullied alot at school, because was overweight.

So i became a vegetarian, and at first i didn't know that there were all the hidden animal products in foods such as some particular crisps / sweets etc. Then i started to understand all of it and new not what to eat. After about 1 year, i lost 4 stone (i was 11 stone and went down to 7, so i did loose a bit to much... im 14 by the way).

Then another 6 months into it, i started to think about becoming a vegan because i heard alot of stuff about animal cruelty, and i had seen alot of pictures and things that made me want to, and i stopped drinking regular milk for organic, and then all dairy products and eggs, and then honey. I'm glad i turned, and the main reasons are here:

1. Because i love animals.

2. Because i was overweight.

3. Because its much healthier.

4. Because you still have a wide variety of what you eat.

5. Because over all... It kinda makes you feel great.

So that's how i became one really.

Answer 13

I became a vegan after witnessing firsthand the severe acts of cruelty that take place in factory farms and in slaughterhouses.  I am a film student and during my freshman year of college, I joined a documentary team in which we went undercover in several of these institutions. While some of them were worse than others, they were all BAD and it was enough to convince me never to eat meat again.

To answer your other questions, yes fish is meat. Someone who is a vegetarain does not consume fish.

Vegans do not consume meat or anything that comes from an animal (milk, eggs, etc).  This is usually because the animals that are raised to give humans these products are treated just as bad, if not worse than the animals raised soley for their flesh.

The food pyramid is made by the USDA, who is responsible for most of the meat supply in the United States. Of course, they are going to try their best to make you think meat is a necessary food group but the truth is that it is not. The USDA has admitted that one can live a perfectly healthy lifestyle as a vegetarian and get all the necessary nutrients (including protein) from an animal-free diet.  They have also stated that vegetarains, on average, tend to live longer lives than meat-eaters. If you are interested in viewing some sites where they state these things, let me know and I'll find them for you.

As for meat being good for you, most meat is actually pumped full of the same harmful hormones that they inject into the animals raised for food in order to make them grow faster.  Over time, these chemicals are very harmful to your health and have been proven to cause cancer (check out the helpful links posted by the user above me).  

As for vegan humans breastfeeding, the answer is: no, most vegans probably do not have a problem with breastfeeding their children. As a vegan, I don't have a problem with a cow giving its milk to its babies.  If fact, by nature the only reason a cow produces milk is to feed its own young.  Human beings are the only species in the world that drink the milk of another species (unless you count leaving a bowl of cow's milk out for your cat), and are the only species in the world that continue to drink milk into adulthood. As a vegan, I would give my child my milk because it is mine to give. The milk produced by a cow who has no say in the matter is not mine to give.

Hope this helped :)

Answer 14

I became a vegan because I believe humans and animals are equals and that it is wrong to exploit our brothers and sisters for our benefit. So many animals suffer so terribly at the hands of humans and I want to do my part to make sure it stops.

Answer 15

Just browsing, and I thought I'd answer the breastfeeding part... The basic idea of veganism is not exploiting anything, because we don't have the permission to... Mothers are obviously giving permission to their newborn children to drink, whereas cows do the same to calves (we don't drink their milk for this reason, as it was intended for them).

It's all about consent.

Answer 16

Because I don't feel us humans have the right to decide how and when an animal should die.