[gotrythis]

Here's reason #4. You'll look younger, have better skin, and live longer. Vegans typically live 15 years longer and don't have many of the degenerative diseases which are caused by meat and dairy.

I was pushing my parents to let me become vegan when I turned a teenager. I stopped eating meat on my 16th birthday despite their assertions that I would die. Gave up dairy a few years later, which I only ate because the dairy industry's advertising is so damn strong.

I'll turn 46 this summer, so it's been almost 30 years, and people think I'm 10-15 years younger. Teenage girls still try to pick me up. My fiance has been vegan for something like 20 years and is 40 this summer. Last year, two high school kids invited her to the prom.

And reason #5, which was the primary reason I went vegan, followed by having a sense of ethics and feeling it was wrong to enslave, torture, and murder animals, because meat is yummy: Eating rotting corpses is pretty gross when you think about it.

[mod]

> Eating rotting corpses is pretty gross when you think about it.

I tend not to let them rot before I eat them, personally.

I don't understand why you had to turn your otherwise-upbeat argument into a pretty overt attack in the last sentence.

[gotrythis]

I'm telling you the reason that I went vegan at 16. And those were the main reasons. Though at the time, I called it grody, but I'm not sure of the correct spelling.

Animals start to decompose at the moment of death. The meat at the supermarket has been dead for how long? Days, weeks? It is in the process of rotting, just not visibly so. Much of it is actually spoiled, but I've read 70% of meat in supermarkets is treated with carbon monoxide to keep it from going brown or grey. You might not like it, but it's a very valid and important argument.

And as for feeling that it's unethical. We (people) enslave entire species, remove their body parts without anaesthesia, cage them in cells so small they can't move, force them to have babies over and over and then kidnap their children and eat them, grind them up, or enslave them as well. It's horrible. I think that anyone who knows what is done and argues, but meat is yummy or delicious as someone else did in here, is a sociopath. Can anyone who is connected to their sense of empathy be okay causing that much pain to other feeling beings?

[mod]

> We (people) enslave entire species, remove their body parts without anaesthesia, cage them in cells so small they can't move, force them to have babies over and over and then kidnap their children and eat them, grind them up, or enslave them as well. It's horrible, and I think that anyone who knows what is done and argues, but meat is yummy, is a sociopath.

I produce my own meat, on my own property. Not in cages, no forced babies (chickens lay anyway), no enslavement (the arrangement is closer to me being their slave), and no 'body part removal.'

So many of your arguments are made up for non-commercial meat sources.

Also, do you not see how your language is just an attack on meat-eaters? You say you're just "telling us the reason," but you're not, you're making an attack.

[gotrythis]

You are part of a tiny percentage of people, so that doesn't really mean much compared to the billions of animals who are part of factory farming.

But, I applaud you for doing it yourself and think everyone should eat meat the way you do, if they must eat meat in the first place.

The "positive" stuff at the beginning were the unexpected side-effects. The attacks are answering the question that this thread is about. Why did I become vegan? That's exactly what I was thinking as a teenager, and continue to think 30 years later.

Is it an attack to say, "Take a look at the results of your actions. This is what you're a part of. This is the suffering you cause."?

Calling someone a sociopath might be an attack. lol. That comes from being attacked for being a vegan hundreds of times, just for not eating what everyone else was, when I didn't bring it up at all. When I explain why, I get, "but meat tastes good" (Subtext is, "so it's fine for animals and the planet to suffer because of factory farming, because meat is yummy"). Oh, well, that's fine then.

[mod]

The attacks I'm referring to are the misuse of the term "murder", calling a couple hundred million folks "sociopaths," and the implication (which has some truth, no doubt) that those eating the meat are responsible for the mistreatment of animals and are causing their pain.

I'm sure you can think of dozens of examples where people who are a cog in a machine are not exactly on-board with the whole thing, yet feel powerless to stop it.

Diet is not something that everyone feels they can change on a whim. If it were, I suppose we wouldn't have an obesity crisis, and perhaps more people would join you as vegans, too.

The cultural pressure to eat meat is also a big factor, just as you have mentioned in your response here. Not just to be normal, but maybe to avoid hurting mom's feelings when she makes your childhood-favorite lasagna or something.

People use the same argument for eating meat (it tastes good) as they do for getting morbidly obese. Nobody wants to be morbidly obese or impose those kinds of health problems on themselves, so perhaps you need to understand that the issue is deeper than just "I do or don't want to hurt animals." It certainly is with obesity.

[gotrythis]

I've never actually called someone a sociopath when they said that meat tastes good as justification for eating it. But now that I think about it, justifying killing for pleasure (of eating) seems like a pretty good definition.