Vegetarianism: Three Reasons You should Consider it
By Kur Wel Kur, Australia
June 11, 2015 (SSB) — In a place where people value munching meat, sipping alcohol and indulging in sex for procreation or for pleasure, it always take people by surprise to learn that someone doesn’t eat meat or drink alcohol. Though people of this place are yet to see a sincere celibate individual, the idea of surviving only on vegetables is a weird one to them.
As sensible as it may occur to you, to kill another animal just to satisfy one’s need, generates feelings of selfishness. Leo Tolstoy puts it right:
“A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.”
All animals experience pain as equal to humans so inflicting pain on an animal whether in dehorning, tattooing, branding or killing it for meat is absurd.
According to the best-selling and ageless book, The Bible, God privileged the human to care for animals and the environment, the garden; however, when the humans sinned against God, God killed the first animal to which God used its hide to clothe the first humans. The killing of the animal signified suffering and death as a result of sin. The writers of the Bible, scribbled no explanation to what happened to the meat of the first butchered animal. Did the first humans eat it? Or was it buried? No records about it in the Greatest Book.
Then came the great flood, which God used to wipe off every sinful being on the face of the earth. After the flood, waters levelled off and into oceans, lakes and rivers. God ordered Noah to eat only clean animals (animals with parted hooves) because all vegetables rotted and died in the flood. Another occasion when God offered meat to His people is in the book of Exodus when God air-dropped manna and drove quails to Israelites in the wilderness. In some senses, God approved of meat for humans’ consumption because apart from approvals in the Old Testament, statements such as this below appeared in The New Testament:
“Not that which goes into the mouth defiles a man; but that which comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man”
All in all, in the beginning, God intended humans to eat fruits so you have a choice to spill no blood for your appetite. The following reasons are bonuses for you to become a full time vegetarian. So read on……..
#1: Your religious beliefs and taboos
In Islam, Muslims consider some animals such as pigs unfit for believers’ consumption so if you’re a Muslim then considering vegetarianism will do you good because many business persons are untrustworthy. They can mislead you into buying meat from them by labelling it as ‘HALAL’ or non-pork, ham and bacon. Likewise to Hinduism, its believers don’t eat beef. So shunning meat altogether will spare you from all worries.
What you consider unclean and unworthy to eat, doesn’t carry the same weight and meaning to others. In Eastern Equatoria at Palataka, a place where some very best minds curved their own histories, my northern friend asked me in 1992, “Magui (mispronounced Makwei), do you eat (lamb’s, goat’s or cow’s) kidney? Without giving his question a second thought, I yelled out the word Y.E.S in capital letters. He reluctantly told me that I shouldn’t eat it because it’s the dirtiest and probably toxic part of the animal. I didn’t believe him until I studied Animal physiology in 2009. My friend was responding to my nagging behaviour in which I bothered him because he called every part of the cow, meat, even the reproductive organ of the cow. “Kulu laam” he would shout in Arabic.
#2: Money driven days (21st Century)
You mingle with dirty money minded people everywhere, every day. In Europe, the customers found Cheval (horse’s meat) mixed with beef. The experts in public relations gave clarifications to make sense of the case but none of the explanations convinced the customers whose appetite for meat is buried by the incidence.
Imagine, you come from a society where people have nothing to do with any kind of frog but sometime in June or in July, I mince your chicken with a yellow-belly- frog. How would you feel if you learn about this act? I know how you would feel but that’s not my argument. My point is that money is evil so people do evil to obtain money. To drive this point home in another example, I would go extra mile to Nuers, y/our shared ancestry relatives, offering them monitor lizards (‘Marial-Nyang in Thok Naath’) in the names of lambs or goats is a fatal mistake if they discover. The idea is that, we can’t trust anyone so to be safe, just turn vegetarian (vegan).
#3: Your blood, same blood in animals, the same feelings.
Blood fuels all animals’ bodies. It streams in veins and arteries, carrying ions, oxygen, carbon dioxide and other gases to their areas of functionality or of disposal. The same blood runs our nerves; the humans’ nervous system resembles all animals’ nervous system. With these facts, why treating animals with less regards? Animal cruelty edges to human cruelty. People with no interest in animal’s life have no consideration for human’s life.
As our world populates, scientists bear towards making artificial meat to combat high demand of meat product and to avoid killing of animals:
“-Vitro meat is the (idea of) manufacturing of meat products through “tissue-engineering” technology. Cultured meat (= in-vitro meat) could have financial, health, animal welfare and environmental advantages over traditional meat. The idea: To produce animal meat, but without using an animal. Starting cells are taken painlessly from live animals, they are put into a culture media where they start to proliferate and grow, independently from the animal. Theoretically, this process would be efficient enough to supply the global demand for meat. All this would happen without any genetic manipulation, i.e. without the need to interfere with the cells’ genetic sequences.”(By Future Food)
Though artificial meat may come with health hazards, it would be a better option for meat lovers and the best option to spare animals.
As a conclusion, our world craves for money so money minded business persons killed off their ethics. Without ethics, you won’t be surprised if rumours about some foreigners, barbequing (roasting) dog’s meat for the public in Juba are circulating. Without ethics, you won’t be surprised if you come across an article on social media talking about human’s meat boiling in the restaurant in Nigeria.
Well, to avoid all these stories, you better turn vegan.
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