To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today. Starvation, world hunger, cruelty, waste, wars - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.
I also found this quote by Singer elsewhere:
People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.
So I finished the No-Nonsense Guide. I knew a lot of the issues they talk about, but lots of the examples were new to me. For example I knew that a big criticism of the fishing industry is that somewhere around 1/3 of all the fish caught in those big trawling nets are returned - dead - to the ocean because they weren't the type of fish that that trawler was going for. I didn't know however that roughly 100 000 dolphins are killed this way each year.
I also learned something about animal testing, which I'd never really read about before. Isn't the Draize Test a wonderful thing? Because rabbits' eyes have no tear ducts to wash away irritants, and their eyes are large enough for any inflammation to be clearly visible, researchers will drip various fluids that they're testing into the rabbits' eyes to see what effects they will have - i.e. ulcerating the rabbits' eyes or burning the eyes out completely.
This is especially wonderful when the scientific community doesn't even agree that the draize test works.
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