Duane's Vegetarian Page

One of the most important facts about me is that I'm a vegetarian, which has been the case for six years or so. I chose to be vegetarian for three general types of reasons: health, ethical, and environmental. The main health issue is that meat tends to be high in fat and cholesterol, which are known causes of cardiovascular disease and cancer. The main ethical issue is that causing animals to suffer unnecessarily is wrong and the beef, poultry and fishing industries are responsible for lots of unnecessary suffering. Finally, the environmental cost of using animals as food for humans is very high compared to a vegetarian lifestyle.

Humans are able to ignore their close kinship with other animals primarily because of their ignorance of evolution and secondarily because our nearest common ancestor with chimps lived 5 million years ago. If we could see all the species that separate us from chimps, each one virtually indistinguishable from its nearest neighbor, we would much more readily understand that drawing an ethical boundary anywhere along that line of species would be an essentially arbitrary act. Even the biological boundaries between the species are possible only because of the vast extinction of intermediate forms. If we had a complete record of every organism that has ever lived, we would not be able to draw nonarbitrary species boundaries at all and our prejudices for members of our own species would be easily seen to be nonsense.

If you live in or near Pittsburgh, where there is no such thing as a vegetarian restaurant, check out Justin Boyan's Eating & Shopping GREEN in Pittsburgh page for tips on groceries and vegetarian friendly restaurants.

® (the seedling is a registered trademark of the Vegetarian Society of the UK)
For more information about vegetarianism and related issues, you might like to visit the vegetarian home page.

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