The Ethics and Spirituality of Not Eating Meat

I remember my grandmother telling me that during the early years of their marriage they raised chickens on their vineyard ranch. My grandmother said my grandfather could not bare to kill the chickens so she could turn them into supper, and she always had to do it. Although my grandfather was a lifetime meat-eater, he deeply loved animals, and I share that love.

Today, the majority of us in industrialized countries are far removed from the slaughter of animals. "If slaughter houses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian," Paul and Linda McCartney said in a statement about why they no longer ate meat. Perhaps if more people watched footage from slaughter houses before eating meat, there would be more vegetarians.

Violence begets violence

There are many arguments to justify eating meat, from "it's all just part of the food chain" to "they're only animals, after all." Maybe countering each argument just doesn’t work, and asking a few key questions might get a meat eater to consider the consequences of his or her diet.

Is there a link between human on human violence and killing animals for human consumption? In an article titled "The Cruelty and Wastefulness of Meat Eating," the author John Couch said, "It is not such a very big step from justifying the quite needless mass slaughter of simple sentient creatures to condoning the killing of human beings...Indeed killing animals for food could be said to be the primary form of human violence." Robert Louis Stevenson said, "Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own."

In the 6th century B.C. Pythagoras linked killing animals with humans killing each other. "For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."

Meat eating and spirituality?

Many adherents of the world's great religions believe not eating meat is part of their spirituality. Adam and Eve, the first human beings, according to book biblical book, Genesis, did not eat meat until after disobeying God. Rabbi David Aaron points out, in his article "Meat Your Morality," that we don't know the "exact connection" between humanity's sins and the "subsequent permission to eat meat, but we do know that eating meat is a concession God made."

"Humans were not created cruel; they incorporated the characteristic over a period of time. And now that we are challenged with this inclination, we have to figure out how to sublimate it and eventually overcome it," Aaron also pointed out.

The Christian Vegetarian Association’s pamphlet discusses the biblical concept of humanity’s dominion over creation. The pamphlet points out that dominion can be seen as a “sacred responsibility, rather than as a license to do whatever we want with the earth or God’s animals.”

Many Buddhists and Hindus do not eat meat. The Buddhist text Mahaparinirvana says, “The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of great compassion.” Mohandas Gandhi, a Hindu, did not eat meat. “To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body," he said.