: Arent you killing plants when you eat them?That's a question I've heard many times before. Here's the answer:
Yes, we are killing plants (except for fruit, as McLibel pointed out to you). The way the world works now is, you have to kill something and consume it in order to live if you're an animal, which we humans are. Until we evolve to the point where we can utilize sunlight for food, or eat rocks, we have to eat something. The question is, what do we eat?
Vegetarians choose to go as far down the food chain as possible in order to minimize suffering. Plants lack the advanced central nervous systems of animals, and while they might in some way feel distress when we kill them, any reasonable person would agree that they do not suffer on the same level as animals, which we know for a fact think and feel and have the capacity to suffer both mental and physical pain.
Another argument (lower on my reasons for being a veggie, but submitted for you information) is that by eating low on the food chain, you are engaging in less killing, in that veggies kill and eat plants, but carnivores kill and eat animals which have first killed and eaten plants.
Then there are the environmental and economical and humanitarian reasons for being vegetarian, but since your question seemed to be getting at the morality of killing, I won't list those here unless you ask for them.
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McSpotlight: That's McSpotlight, not McLibel, by the way.
