WHY VEGETARIANISM ?
“Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places ! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men”.
Leonardo Da Vinci
“It is in my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind”.
Albert Einstein
“Animals are my friends …. And I don’t eat my friends. This is dreadful! Not only the suffering and death of animals, but man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity – that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself – and by violating his own feelings, becomes cruel”.
George Bernard Shaw
Hindu scriptttures have long advocated a vegetarian diet for man.
Lord Krishna in the Bhagwad Gita (17:8, 9, 10) has categorized food into three types:
a. Those that promote life, vitality, strength, health and joy are sweet, firm and nourishing and agreeable to good men (sattvic).
b. Foods that are bitter, sour, saltish, pungent, astringent, pain producing and grief causing are liked by the passionate (rajsic).
c. Foods which are stale, tasteless, putrefying and unclean are liked by men of darkness (tamsic).
Flesh is tamsic because it will always be in a state of decay as Lord Swaminarayan reveals in his Dharmamrut: Nishkami Vartman (12), “Even the respectable class in society, out of sheer passion, indulge in the consumption of undesirable non-sattvic foods as fish and other flesh, meats, alcohol…”.
Sattvic food is ideal for man – having no adverse effects on his behavior. For the aspirant who is treading the path of self-realisation and God-realisation, control of his body’s natural instincts is a must. “Ahar shudhau sattva shuddhih !” (Chhandogya Upanishad VII 26, 2) – If your diet is pure then your thoughts will be pure.
The animals raised for meat, dairy products and eggs are being subjected to ever more deplorable conditions and treatment. Merely to keep the poor creatures alive under these circumstances even more chemicals have to be pumped into their bodies. The worst drug pushers don’t walk the city streets, they operate today’s “factory farms”.
Millions upon millions of people are merrily eating away, unaware of the pain and disease they are taking into their bodies with every bite.
The raising of chickens today is not a process which overflows with compassion for these birds. Nor is it anything like the backyard operation that comes to mind when we imagine the lives of chickens. Formerly, chickens were free range birds, scratching and rooting around in the soil for grubs, earthworms and grains. But today all this has changed. The raising of chickens has become completely industrialized. We live now in the era of the assembly-line chicken.
Male chicks, of course, are of little use in egg production. How are the little fellows greeted then, having pecked their way out of their shells, expecting to be met by mum ? What happens is vividly described by J. Mason and P. Singer in their book Animal Factories.
“They are literally thrown away. We watched at one hatchery as chicken pullers weeded males from each tray and dropped them into heavy duty plastic bags. Our guide explained “We put them in a bag and let them suffocate”.
It’s not a picture to bring joy to a mother’s heart, but over half a million little baby chickens are ‘disposed of’ in this fashion every day of the year in United States.
And they are perhaps the lucky ones. For, those that are allowed to live, life is truly a nightmare.
Auschwitz of the Poultry World :
Chickens are highly social animals. In the natural setting they develop a social hierarchy known as ‘pecking order’. Studies published in New Scientist reveal that this pecking order can only be maintained in flocks with upto 90 chickens. Beyond 90 birds, however, things can get out of hand. In today’s chicken factories flocks tend to be much larger than the 90 bird limit. How much larger ? The figures run into thousands, depending on the factory.
In such mechanized hells, the birds are unable to establish any kind of social identity for themselves. The cooped up animals constantly fight with each other. They are driven berserk by the lack of space and the complete frustration of their primal need for a social order. They peck viciously at each other’s feathers, frequently try to kill one another and even try to eat each other alive.
The experts have of course responded. They have to do something, because if very many of the birds kill each other money is lost. What is done ? The conditions are made even more unnatural. A part of the chicken’s beak is cut off ! The experts and factory managers are of course not disturbed by the fact that the chicken is caused intense pain and is crippled for life. For them, profits must be kept up.
Further, irregular beak growth prevents the birds from eating and drinking water. The result is death from starvation and thirst, within inches of food and water.
Today’s chickens are allowed no expression of their natural urges. The result is panic. In their panic, the birds will sometimes pile on top of each other and some will be smothered to death. Not to be outsmarted for profits, experts have decreased the problem by crowding the chickens so tightly into into wire cages they can hardly move. The wire cages have created further problems. With no solid ground to wear the nails down, they become very long and get permanently entangled in wire. Needless to say, those birds who get stuck in the back of the cage starve to death...
This was about the chickens. Some other time I will tell you about the sufferings in slaughterhouse faced by other animals...
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