Vegans protect animal rights, treatment
by Sherri Jones, reporter

    Many people become vegetarian for ethical reasons. The beginning of ethical vegetarianism is the knowledge that other creatures have feelings that are similar to ours.

    This knowledge encourages one to extend personal awareness to encompass the suffering of others.

    In an essay titled The Ethics of Vegetarianism, from the Journal of the North American Vegetarian Society, the conception of “humane animal slaughter” is refuted.

    “Many people nowadays have been lulled into a sense of complacency by the thought that animals are now slaughtered humanely, thus presumably removing any possible humanitarian objection to the eating of meat. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the actual facts of life ... and death,” according to PETA.

    PETA also reports that the breeding process used to produce animals for food is unnatural. The organization says that animals are “viciously” castrated or injected with hormones, fed a diet designed to fatten them and suffer through uncomfortable trips to the slaughterhouse.

    “The holding pens, the electric prods and tail twisting, the abject terror and fright—all these are still very much a part of the most ‘modern’ animal raising, shipping and slaughtering.

    “To accept all this and only oppose the callous brutality of the last few seconds of the animal’s life, is to distort the word humane,” PETA has reported.

    The truth of animal slaughter is not at all pleasant. Commercial slaughterhouses are like visions of hell. Screaming animals are stunned by hammer blows, electric shock or concussion guns.

    Animals are hoisted into the air by their feet and moved through the factories of death on mechanized conveyor systems. Still alive, their throats are sliced and their flesh cut off while they bleed to death.

    Why isn’t the mutilation and slaughter of farm animals governed by the same stipulations intended for the welfare of pets and even the laboratory rat?

    Many people would no doubt take up vegetarianism if they visited a slaughterhouse or if they themselves had to kill the animals they ate. Such visits should be compulsory for all meat eaters.

    When we lose respect for animal life, we lose respect for human life as well.

    Twenty-six hundred years ago, Pythagoras said, “Those that kill animals to eat their flesh tend to massacre their own.”

    We’re fearful of enemy guns, bombs and missiles, but can we close our eyes to the pain and fear we bring about by slaughtering, for human consumption, over 1.6 billion domestic mammals and 22.5 billion poultry a year?

    The number of fish killed each year is in the trillions. And what to speak of the tens of millions of animals killed each year in the “torture-camps” of medical research laboratories or slaughtered for their fur, hide or skin or hunted for sport?

    Can we deny that this brutality makes us more brutal too?

Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “The time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.”

    Mahatma Gandhi believed that ethical principles are a stronger support for lifelong commitment to a vegetarian diet than reasons of health.

    “I do feel,” he stated, “that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants.”

    I agree with Ghandi when he said, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”