by Stephen Austen

Created on: November 14, 2009   Last Updated: November 16, 2009

I gave up eating meat at the age of 19. At the time, that included fish also, and I was a strict vegetarian for 20 years. I still do not eat any meat or meat products, my age being 49 at the time of writing this article. For about the last ten years my diet has also included some fish about once a week which no longer makes me a complete vegetarian.

My purpose for giving up meat (every kind of meat and meat product) was for compassionate reasons. This was and always has been my prime motivation for abstaining from meat. I reasoned that the methods involved in factory farming were inhumane and often cruel, and therefore not compassionate. I knew that I would not personally want to kill an animal for food and did not like the idea of someone else doing the 'dirty work' for me.

Humans and animals (particularly mammals) share much in common biologically and emotionally. Mammals care for their young just as human mothers do; cows, sheep and pigs all nurture their young, suckle and protect them. Emotionally and physically, animals experience fear, suffering and pain, like humans do. Animals respond to kindness and love from humans and are able to communicate and interact with us. In the case of pigs, it has been proven in scientific studies that they often seem to be more intelligent than dogs.

It is very questionable indeed, if humans have the 'right' as it were, to herd animals into abattoirs and kill them for meat. The fact that humans are more intelligent does not assign us a special dignified right to behave towards animals in this way. Perhaps aliens from another world, more intelligent than humans, might come here and do the same to us. We would certainly fight against such an outrage, yet we do not reason that human behaviour towards the animals is just as exploitative. Yes, we might also use the same argument about eating fish, although in terms of comparing emotional development and self-consciousness of fish to the animals, there may be aspects of debate here. Yet the animals are clearly much like humans in terms of basic physical structure, including the arrangement of the internal organs (with some modifications as in the cow's digestive processes) which have the same basic design as for all land animals and human beings.

There is a very strong physiological argument that humans are not really meant to eat meat at all and these deductions are based upon human anatomy compared with the anatomy of all vegetarian animals. Let us examine these deductions

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