Making peace with the animals

It's no big secret that I am a huge animal lover.

Well, over the past year (although it bugged me my whole life to a degree) I have really been thinking, "If I love animals so much, why do I eat them?"

That of course spun off into several tangent conversations (usually with my friend Sheldon as we go for walks at lunchtime....love our deep conversations).

Why do human think we are so much better than any other life form that we believe the planet is ours and everything on the planet is here soley for our purpose?

Is it because of that silly religious notion that we have a soul and everything else doesn't, therefore we are better? (Scary that people really still believe that nonsense)

Do we experiment on(in a lot of cases torture) animals simple because they can't yell out "Fuck, that hurts, stop it!" or "I'll sue if you do that again?" Hmm, no that can't be right. There are some species we CAN communicate with, like Gorillas for example via sign language. Some of those guys know so many words, they can sign whole sentences and paragraphs. And instead of looking at them as equals, we still keep them behind bars for people to laugh at.

I look at my cats "Dizzy" and "Doodle" and (just like any other animal) they have emotions and feelings. They are just as alive as we are. They play, get sad, angry just like we do.

I do not want to be responisble any longer for a cow waiting in line to be slaughtered. They know its coming, they can see the one in front of them getting the axe.

Therefore, for some time now, I have given up eating all red meat and pork. No more cow and pigs. No more Tommy burgers, cheesesteaks and bacon.

It will be easy since I really didn't eat much of it anyways.

That leaves me with chicken. Once I find a way that I can prepare wheat gluten, I'll give up those guys too. (I had wheat gluten once at a chinese restaurant. It was veggy orange chicken and I could NOT tell the difference, the taste and texture were the same!)

It'll take some time to go off of chicken since thats all I eat. But for now, I feel better knowing that at least cow and pig are being spared my digestive track. This is all just a personal choice and (with spirituality) I won't be pushing these beliefs on anyone. Besides, I can i preach not to eat meat when I still eat chicken?

I just want to look at a cow or pig and let them know they've got one more friend among humanity. A bucket of KFC is a different matter though....for now...