Your thoughts on Vegitarianism

This is untrue. Kosher cheese does not rely on the death of cattle since it is made from non-animal rennet. I would also like to ask you how you have determined the Jewish process for animal slaughter is "worse"?

I agree totally and that is why I responded.

Nah, they make good pets, especially the fancy ones.

Full disclosure: I'm a vegetarian (few years now, having previously eaten an overwhelmingly meat diet) who doesn't have the stones to go vegan, though I accept veganism is rather morally sounder. (Veganism is a challenging diet, vegetarianism's dead easy). Realistically you're not going to completely avoid animal products if you don't devote your entire life to it (probably not even if you do) but it's better to do something than to just pretend it makes no difference.

Jim Garten wrote: True - many years ago, my mother was told by her doctor that if she wanted to lose weight the best & most foolproof way was to eat exactly what she ate everyday, but just less of it. There is no correlation between vegetarianism & health; lifestyle/moderation & health, certainly, but eating meat or otherwise makes no difference.

Well, studies of it suggest there is a correlation for things like incidence of ischemic heart disease, alzheimer's, cataracts and reduced blood pressure. What you eat affects your health. In the interests of balance, vegetarians are more likely to have bone problems if they don't pay attention to vitamin B-12.

Ivan_Melgar_M wrote: Yes, and if everybody became vegan, chicken would become extinct in a couple of years.

Absolutely, because all of the animals people don't eat have gone extinct... (frankly, if you care about things going extinct, the damage various types of overfishing are doing to marine diversity and environments is probably the biggest thing you should worry about)

Gerinski wrote: I guess that 500 years ago when all meat and fish were obtained in similar fashions, people rarely cared or even thought about vegetarianism (let alone veganism). It's the modern mass-volume ways of providing meat and fish to the alarmingly huge population which have caused the issue to raise. I guess that some vegetarians (I'm not one of them) practice it because they see it as a noble cause, meaning that their concept of 'nobility' is possibly different from ours. Probably they see it not too different from refraining from buying a real mink fur coat or things like that, and this is not meaning that they deluse themselves thinking that their choice is gonna change the world, but it's just their personal statement to raise awareness about some issues that might otherwise get ignored.

Vegetarianism has been around for a helluva long time (more so in South-East Asia but Pythagoreans were also vegetarian) - vegetarianism for health reasons is comparatively recent, I think. Vegetarianism for environmental reasons is very recent. For me it's basically just that I like animals and don't really want to have the poor buggers raised to die so I can eat them - I accept I could and probably should do more by going vegan... but I'm a lot happier with doing something than just giving up. It's not really a matter of it being a noble cause or thinking you can solve anything, I just know it's the right thing for me to do. Others can make their own minds up.

There is a difference between eating something which directly and necessarily results from the death of an animal and something which probably involves the death of animals as a byproduct of the commercial system currently in place.