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Comment by anticodon | Hacker News Reader

I'm a vegetarian myself, although for another reason: I don't want living beings to be tortured and killed for my food.

But I find is that vegetarian propaganda is many times so disgusting and based on lies that it's probably going to turn people away from vegeterian food. Some vegeterians and vegans are obnoxious bigots and their efforts are generating opposite result - people start hating vegeterians and vegeterian food.

So I don't evangelize vegeterian. Besides, my reasons are too complex for most people to understand: "But chicken and cows were created for us to eat! They are not suffering!".

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Dito for me (although I personally take the climate influences more as a reason than the ethics). The interesting thing is that, if someone finds out by chance that I'm a vegetarian, they always ask me for the reason. At times I almost suspect they expect some moral lecture just to be able to oppose it.

Something in human nature just seems to force us to dig trenches that way.

Also, there are the moments when you as the vegetarian get lectured on how "it's natural" to eat meat when in my area, some 50-60 years ago, you would have been inredibly rich or lucky if you got one piece of meat each day. Go figure.

Although, male calves are killed in milk production. Dairy cows cannot produce thousands of liters of milk without living a short life. Chickens that produce eggs were bred into monsters that can't live long.

I do not think any hate is rational and believe that any kind of vegan propaganda is beneficial to the cause.

Fossil fuels are nothing compared to nitrite waste.

I've noticed that when you blame people for something (eating meat, for example), they're not going to listen, it's causing opposite reaction - to defend and continue doing the same thing.

So, maybe it's possible to persuade people to stop eating meat, but it requires much wisdom and patience... I don't really try. When my friends ask me, I answer politely, but it's very hard, because when I say: "I'm do not want to kill living beings for food because they're suffering" it's already sounds like I'm blaming them. :(

I know. Lately I've been realizing the enormity of the fact that of all the planets we've found this one is the only one where life flourished.

How then can we possibly take the killing of life so lightly?

It's the mass extinction event that we've created that really grinds at me. All these amazing species of flora/fauna erased from the universe to make our lives a little more convenient.

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