The strange behaviour of meat-eating people

Reading your blogs, my SUK4-mates, made me realize how little I've told you about my personal life. I'm always sticking to facts, mostly because I don't think my life is particularly interesting for you. True, I could tell you about my cool new i-pod (and it's REALLY cool) or about the huge Temmel ice I ate today or about that stupid "Vollmond Caffe" (yes, that's the way they spell it) next to my apartment, but then again I'm not sure if you'd really care. However, I really like your personal entries and I'm absolutely not bored by them, so let's try if I can do that as well. So here we go:







The strange behaviour of meat-eating people




I’ve been a vegetarian for three years now and I’m really content with that. I don’t eat animals, because I don’t like the thought of animals dying for me and eating their carcasses. That somehow seems weird to me. However, I’ve been a meat-eater for the better part of my life, so I find it absolutely understandable if people keep eating meat. I mean, it is tasty and we vegetarians know that and really don’t mind you eating it. However, most meat-eaters don’t seem to know that. When they find out that I’m a vegetarian after a nice chat, they suddenly start to behave in a very strange way and I’m not talking about individual cases here.

Firstly, there’d be a short silence, after which they’d say, “A vegetarian, are you? Don’t you like the flavor?” After I've explained my reasons to them and that I don’t care if other people eat meat they say, “Yeah, you’re right. Everyone has to decide that for himself/herself.” So far so good. However, after this nice introduction they normally go through the famous (at least among vegetarians) three meat-eater phases:

Phase one: I’ve got really good reasons to eat meat! Though I’ve made it clear that I couldn’t care less for their eating habits, they still try to justify why they eat meat. They tell me where they buy their food, that if they don’t eat meat they’ll get terribly sick, that one can’t live from vegetables only, that animals are created to be eaten and so on. After advising me to consult a doctor about my unhealthy vegetarian lifestyle they usually drift into phase two.

Phase two: Did you know you still eat meat? Whether I eat an apple with a worm inside, a beetle while I’m riding my bike, a spider in my sleep…I do eat animals and there’s hardly a meat-eater who didn’t enjoy telling me about it. I don’t deny I do all those things, but the point is that I don’t do it on purpose. I’m not lying in my bed trying to spot spiders I could eat for supper and I don’t open my mouth when I ride my bike to snack a few flies on my way to university. Things like that happen and although I’d prefer not to eat insects, I can’t help it.

Phase three: Don’t you pity the plants you’re eating? Here it gets really tiresome for me, because at this point my counterpart has obviously run out of ANY reasonable argument. Then I normally try to explain to them that animals consist of flesh and blood like we do and that they can also feel pain due to their nervous system plants just don’t have. We argue a bit about our opinions, but in the end we’re both happy when we finally change the subject.

So, can anyone out there explain that phenomenon to me? I mean, people always claim that vegetarians are so intolerant and then they are the ones who keep nagging on us. I’m not speaking of all meat- eaters here of course, but the majority definitely reacts the way I described.



Speaking of carnivores: