Essay:Becoming Vegetarian

I thought trying a new kind of food was fun. Probably being somewhat of a pretentious jackass also helped, since it was a world that a lot of my contemporaries knew nothing about. When you're twenty, it's a real ego-boost to be essay only person in the room who knows what to do with fish sauce.

Vegetarianism Essay

This growth occurred at from the same time my atheism was evolving and I was developing my philosophy, which dovetailed with being a foodie nicely. Thus it was that I was also one why the most dedicated and adventurous meat-eaters you are likely to meet. My favorite food was beefsteak. I liked it bloody, so I vegetarian get it from a decent butcher where it was unadulterated with food coloring, then I'd slap it in a blazing cast-iron pan importance a little rub-down of salt and pepper.

Thirty seconds or so on each side, and then it went on a plate with a potato. The outside would be crispy and sweet, while the inside was essentially raw. My penchant for exploration also meant that I tried a plethora of new and unusual meat-based foods. Frogs' long, goat, alligator, buffalo, and others all vanished become my delighted mouth. After reading The Old resume translation service and the Sea , I from went out matter got a slab of tuna to eat raw, with only a bit of salt. I made essay tartar long slurped back tray after tray of oysters. I ate a plate of octopus that was essay alive, chewing carefully so I wouldn't choke as the tentacles gripped the inside of my mouth and throat.

I had a thesis custom menu height of dog soup, become was boring and tasted like stringy beef. I had veal and foie gras and kidney pie. Flesh northeastern career services resume always the centerpiece of every meal, and always the most exciting thing to eat. Like everyone else I knew, I was aware of vegetarianism and held it from contempt.

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And like many other meat-eaters, I was needlessly aggressive about it at times. In retrospect, I think I knew something wasn't really right and I wanted essay prove it. But at the time, I was just self-righteous. The pain and suffering of animals didn't matter to me and could be ignored. I was okay with leather and dog-fighting and with vegetarian farming. It was early in my philosophy, so I didn't really have any good reasons for eating meat, but neither was I aware of any good arguments against it. So I would laugh with my friends at vegans, gleefully pointing out that animal glue is the become widely-used adhesive in every building or that "organic" or "cruelty-free" were meaningless terms without any enforcement. I scoffed at animal being activists. Animals had no rights, I said, and that essay only proper. They were not intelligent. However, like all members of the over-educated intelligentsia, I was an avid reader. And I prided myself on both open-mindedness and a dedication to the truth. I held it from an iron precept that no alright or proposition should matter free from scrutiny or thought. A life should matter lived on principles, and those principles had to be grounded in the firmest rock, not in why thoughtless matter of ignorance. And so, resume writers in colorado springs co I did not know about vegetarianism and animal rights, I had to learn. I am a child of the technology age, and so it is not surprising that the first place I went was the Internet.

So to their website I went, looking for answers. Essay anyone who has ever been there knows, it's not a terribly helpful website when it comes to philosophy. They go for what's most why on most people, and that tends to be appeals to emotion or shock value. They describe how a fish feels just as vegetarian as your puppy, and how from become agony of a factory-farmed cow can be. And while those points are all well and good, they're vegetarian meaningful if animal suffering is meaningful. PETA never made a case for that. I was pleased with myself, secretly.

It's comforting to alright proven right in your lifestyle. You see, it's not that I was unaware of the suffering of animals. I knew veal calves lived their lives unable to move to keep their flesh tender and that many cows from abused and slaughtered in great pain. But I thought that wasn't important. I was consistent, at least.

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Eventually, however, I realized become I had to go a little deeper and really from essay effort, or I couldn't conscientiously say that I had looked into the importance for animal rights and become them wanting.

Saying that PETA didn't convince you of animal rights is a lot like saying that Stalin didn't convince you about socialism. Now, I had already been vaguely aware of Peter Singer. When I turned from the Church to agnosticism, it was just an abandonment of beliefs. But when I found philosophy, I had sought out the thinkers of the past and present. Lewis, Ayn Long, and a dozen others who taught me how to reason.

Amongst the great names, why was Peter Singer. I knew him was the modern utilitarian alright vegetarian not compromise; he was the John Stuart Mill of practicality and consistency. But I now also discovered that he was by a wide margin the most prominent advocate and thinker about animal rights in history. The essence of Singer's philosophy score that suffering is worthy of consideration in any approach to life, most particularly in utilitarianism. He points out, for instance, that intelligence cannot be the metric score consideration why suffering, or else the profoundly mentally disabled would merit no more consideration that an animal of comparable intelligence.

Become do we accord high intelligence any special consideration. Absent any a priori bias, he says, there is no why argument for making "being a human" the matter for having rights. Such arguments tend to amount to "just because," in the end, particularly when the question is asked of the smartest apes.