Here we have some reaction by our esteemed reader Anish shah. He has sent his heartfelt reaction on the subject we considered in the last posting; “Ahinsa and non-vegetarian food.”

Then the same logic applies to non-veg food. Think of a goat raised and slaughtered for meat. Or even a chicken.

1. It would have consumed tons grains, grass and water during its life time. If one person eating veg food is responsible for killing of 20 million lives then person consuming a goat would be responsible not only for goats life, but for killing of billions of life that goat would have killed while eating its veg food.

2. An additional burden on environment and the food that could have gone to some other hungry person. If a goat lives for say...5 years it would be consuming food daily for one person.....so we could have fed 1825 (365 x 5 yrs) persons.

3. Violence and non-violence needs to be studied from the point of sentience. Animals are sentient creatures...they have capacity to feel pain. The plate of tasty chicken on your table is a saga of pain, suffering and animal abuse. True, plants have life and there have been some experiments to test their feelings, but they do not have sentience and complex nervous system and brain to feel the pain.

4. Another point -- The grains, the vegetables, the fruits needs to be plucked or harvested when ripe or they start deteriorating and damage the plant.

On the environmental impact --

1. Animals fed on grain, and those that rely on grazing need far more water than grain crops. According to the USDA, growing the crops necessary to feed farmed animals requires nearly half of the United States' water supply and 80 percent of its agricultural land. Additionally, animals raised for food in the U.S. consume 90 percent of the soy crop, 80 percent of the corn crop, and a total of 70 percent of its grain. When tracking food animal production from the feed trough to consumption, the inefficiencies of meat, milk and egg production range from 4:1 up to 54:1 energy input to protein output ratio. This firstly because the feed first needs to be grown before it is eaten by the cattle, and secondly because warm-blooded vertebrates need to use a lot of calories just to stay warm (unlike plants or insects).

It requires 10 times as many crops to feed animals being bred for meat production as it would to feed the same number of people on a vegetarian diet.

2. Ecology professor David Pimentel has claimed, "If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million" [Cornell Science News, Aug. 7, 1997

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Aug97/livestock.hrs.html]

3. In 2008, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, stated:

"The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) have estimated that direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions. So I want to highlight the fact that among options for mitigating climate change, changing diets is something one should consider."

4. According to the World Watch Institute, "Massive reductions in meat consumption in industrial nations will ease their health care burden while improving public health; declining livestock herds will take pressure off rangelands and grain lands, allowing the agricultural resource base to rejuvenate. As populations grow, lowering meat consumption worldwide will allow more efficient use of declining per capita land and water resources, while at the same time making grain more affordable to the world's chronically hungry"

I trust that you are in agreement to my above arguments. Now it is up to you to decide which more violent -- Vegetarian or Non-vegetarian diet is!

Warm regards,

Anish

I posted this letter to other players of the “game of intelligent gossiping” and they sent their points. We shall see them in the next posting.

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