[Sydney]

The only reason why people continue to eat meat is because of selfishness, those meat-eaters who are not selfish may use the excuse of ignorance.

When you ask someone why they eat meat, they occasionally respond with "Because it tastes good." But often they become agressive and start spouting "facts" about humans being omnivorous, or needing protein from meat, or iron, or some other idea that they really have very little understanding of. It has long since been established that a human being will live perfectly healthy on a diet consisting of non-animal products. In fact, such people have been known to have a lesser instance of high blood pressure, cancer and heart disease, etc. The benefits of a vegetarian diet are astounding.

Most vegetarians, however, do not reject meat for the reasons of a healthier lifestyle. It is just an extra benefit packaged with a more important issue. Few people see how their slabs of plastic-wrapped steaks get to their dinner plate. Few stop to even realise that the dripping piece of burnt flesh on their fork was actually a part of a living, breathing, blinking creature less than a week ago. It had a face, a mother and a brain that was capable of pain and thought. It's easier to see your meat as always looking like it did when you bought it. Few people have an emotional reaction to such notions because they're detatched from the physical act of botched electric shocks, throats being slit and limbs being sawn off fully conscious animals. Every meat-eating person in the western world is an accomplice to what happens in slaughterhouses. Each of these persons only associate these animals with food. They're not living creatures with desires, thoughts and feelings. They're simply raw materials to be exploited, diced up and devoured by greedy families who could satisfy their hunger sufficiently with other foods. But they choose to destroy lives to satisfy their hunger, just because to them, animals taste a little better.

Any meat eater, I challenge you to kill your food before you consume it. Could you do it? Could you look into the big, soulful brown eyes of a cow and slit its throat? End its life because you want to smear the tissues of its body onto your tongue? There would be a greater sense of responsibility on the part of the consumer.

Is such concern for animals a joke? If you think yes, then you are a victim of the meat industry, who make us think we have less in common with animals than we do. You think we're special. To a degree, we are. But remove our clothes, destroy our cities and burn our books; we are nothing more than animals who can communicate with each other in a slightly more sophisticated manner. The fact that our species stores its information in libraries is what allows our environment to change so dramatically. These few factors contribute to the differences that we perceive make us great. How many of you will develop a vaccine for cancer? How many of you will be compared to Mozart, Einstein or Pasteur? Few humans will accomplish something that will change the world. Perhaps you will pump out a few babies, and they will be your life's greatest acheivements. It's nothing more than what any other in the animal kingdom can accomplish.

Compassion for all living creatures is necessary for the growth of our species. It's only then that we can come close to differentiating ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom.