A reminder

When I think of how animals suffer due to modern factory farming methods, when I think of how they suffer being transported to slaughter (from excessive heat, cold and thirst and hunger), when I think of how they are often skinned and scalded while still alive because the workers are under too much time pressure to stun them properly, I want to beg the whole world not to contribute to this horror by eating meat:

Oh, my fellow men, do not defile your bodies with sinful foods. We have corn, we have apples bending down the branches with their weight, and grapes swelling on the vines. There are sweet-flavored herbs, and vegetables which can be cooked and softened over the fire, nor are you denied milk or thyme-scented honey. The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass.

-- Pythagoras

And now just let your imagination loose with this:

Can you really ask what reason Pythagorus had for abstinence from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of mind the first man touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, set forth tables of dead, stale bodies, and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? It is certainly not lions or wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us. For the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.

If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of ax.

-- Plutarch, in an essay “On Eating Flesh”

Am I willing to kill an animal with my own teeth and bare hands? If not, then it is not appropriate for me to eat meat.

And while we're on the subject, remember that the meat industry contributes far more to global warming than all the motorized vehicles in the world.