All Animals Were Created Equal

People often ask me, “why are you a vegetarian?”, and for the longest time, I had no definite answer to that. I know why I had given up meat, but it was just difficult to sum up in a sentence. I knew that the meat on my plate used to be a living animal, free to do as it pleased. But no one realizes the horrors that these animals bred for food have to go through. No one realizes that a cow, a pig, or a chicken are all animals, like a dog or a cat, a giraffe or a tiger. So then, what happened in our many years of existence to allow us to say that this animal will be killed for food, and this animal will be my best friend? Does the simple behavior of an animal reflect the type of life it will live? No one said that life was fair, but some animals were born into a life of death. So I tell these extremely curious but ignorant people, “I don’t eat meat because I refuse to eat a dead animal that was killed by men.” Yes, we were put on top of the food chain for a reason, but doesn’t that reason entitle us to have a lot of options when it comes to food? Humans have so many alternatives to meat that we don’t have to eat meat ever again. With great power comes great responsibility. The mass murder of pigs, cows, and chicken is made to seem ok. Many people say “I could never give up meat. It’s delicious.” Well honestly, if everyone was raised to eat cats and dogs then we’d probably all be eating those animals too. But apparently, morality is the only thing that decides what kinds of animals will die and which ones will live. It really angers me to see people who say that they love animals and want to take care of animals for a living, and at the same time they feel nothing when they carelessly eat animals just like the ones they save from dying. It’s ridiculous that there are animal hospitals for pets, but hundreds of animals bred for food die every single day and no one cares. I believe that no animal should be killed for food