Another reply to Rahul

[Guest guest]

Hi Rahul,

> Their reply is that: why do eat plants then? arent they living things? its

cruel to eat > a living thing, so why do u eat plants? I simply have no answer

to that; I just say that I just cant eat meat and stuff, but I have no solid

argument.

 

My favorite reply to this ever most annoying question (how do you know carrots

don't feel???) is one I read in a book about buddhism. Every living organism

" feels " , and even inanimate objects have karma. Yet the " pain " experienced by a

carrot is much smaller than that experienced by a rabbit, in the same way that

elephants and ants are different. In our lives we should strive to accumulate as

little negative karma as possible. Yes, hurting anything, results in negative

karma, but hurting a carrot carries with it much less negative karma that

hurting a chicken. The scientific argument that goes along with this, is that

pain is experienced through (and only through) a central nervous system, that

all vegetables lack. No central nervous system, no pain. No pain, no bad

karma... (to make it more simplistic.) On a sidenote (for the record...),

plants DO seem to communicate distress through chemical signals. However, we

really have no understanding of this phenomenon on a scientific level, and

certainly cannot grasp it intuitively (at least not in a trivial way).

 

 

> Another argument that I am confronted with is: eating animals is part of the

food chain.. everywhere organisms eat other organisms, so the world goes round

this way.

> Once again, I am stumped.

 

Right. The answer to that one is VERY simple. How many times have you heard

someone mention that a certain person has a horse face, usually referring to

teeth? (Sorry for the crude example, making it blunt on purpose). Yet, how many

times have you heard someone say about someone else that they have lion's teeth?

Yes, lions need to eat meat, it is part of their food chain. This is why they

have sharp canines, jaws that open very widely (but cannot chew), and very short

intestines. Lions are not part of the buffalo's food chain, and so indeed rarely

ever does one come across a buffalo chasing a lion... If the food chain argument

held (the way they pose it), the person asking you the question should be

willing to eat chimpanzees and cockroaches. See what they think... Yes, nature

is made of many food chain. How wonderful to be human, we get to choose ours, to

make it both healthiest and cruelty-free.

 

 

>

> And, finally, they say that animals are made for human beings. They are here

so that we can eat them n stuff. This argument is one which I simply refuse to

agree to, but again I have no proof or reason.

>

 

Kinda similar to last one. First, refer to ape and insect comment. Beyond this,

there is one more minor trivial point to mention. Animals have been roaming the

earth for hundreds of millions of years. Billions of years if you also count

simpler life forms. Humans have been around for a mere 50-100 THOUSAND years. A

mere spec in the lifetime of the earth. Now, if animals were made for us, that's

REALLY bad wasting of resources... You can reply that if animals were made for

us, you really feel you need to question the strategy of anyone with such bad

planning... ;-)

 

Cheers...

 

Tal :-)

 

 

 

 

 

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