Just another blog on eating habits

Did you ever get involved in a debate when you needed to justify yourself as a vegetarian ? Well, I get myself into this trouble very often.
The easiest way of justifying vegetarianism is to blame it on religion or culture. But I can't do that because I believe that culture should keep changing as the society progresses. Then religion is nothing but a bunch of rules, written by our respectable ancestors, that can not be amended at any cost. (Imagine a constitution that can not be amended :o).

Trivial objections

1. Animals are animals and plants are plants: Obviously, for non-vegetarians this distinction does not matter. The dictionary definition does not mentions anything like animals are living beings the can locomote and that can not be eaten. So this is not any sort of argument in fact.

2. Food chain efficiency: This one is my favorite. If we eat plants then we get almost 10% of the captured solar energy. While in the other case when we eat a herbivorous animals then we get only 1 % of the captured solar energy.
Assume that 1 sq m of vegetated land produces 1 kg of eatable plant product in 1 year, which in turn provides say 1 kJ of energy. Further assuming that a man needs 1 kJ/year to survive, then a herbivorous can survive on only 10 sq m of vegetated land while a herbivorous-eater need 100 sq m of vegetated land to survive.

Thus non-vegetarians are wasting a resource on the planet which is actually limited.

Though this argument fails if animals being reared on waste food from humans and this argument clearly discourages the use of animal products as eatables.

3. Nutrition and health: These days non-vegetarian food can be made as healthy (fat-free) as a vegetarian food and there are, of course, hygiene standards set.

4. Cruelty: This one seems reasonable, but non-vegetarians argue that plants are also living being and have been observed to feel pain, so what makes them different from animals.

So lets have a deeper thought on this.

Cruelty, sympathy and similarity

Cruelty is strictly emotional, and it develops from a feeling called sympathy.

Why is it more cruel to kill a dog, then to kill a chicken or a cockroach or a mosquito for example ?

Sympathy for someone develops when we can feel the feelings of the person or thing . We have more sympathy for people that look more like us or look like the people that we love. For example, regionalism. A bus accident killing 100 children in punjab is more likely to disturb a punjabi then a hyderabadi. No one even reports a bus accident in North America to Indians.
Since, sympathy directly depends on the degree of similarity we (or our loved ones) have with the object of similarity, so we are more sympathetic towards humans and other higher mammals like monkeys, horses and dogs than cockroaches, mosquitoes and plants.

In many places of the world, fish and other sea-food is considered to be vegetarian.Though literally speaking they are not vegetarians, but I think that is the best thing to do because they are not wasting 90 sq m of vegetated land. It is true that vegetarianism develops at places where there is are is lot of cultivable land. Eating habits has lot to do with the cost of eating options available.

I would like to include fish in the examples of sympathy and similarity. Since fish is an aquatic animal, does not even possess blood, it can be considered quite dissimilar to us when compared to chickens, lambs or pigs.

So if we arrange organisms in the decreasing order of sympathy
1. Yourself
2. Relatives and loved ones
3. Other humans ----------------------Limit of cannibalism
4. Dolphins (brainy creatures, help humans)
5. Dogs (common pets)
6. Parrots (common pets)
7. Apes and chimpanzees
8. Monkeys
9. Horse
10. Cow--------------------------------Limit of most non-vegetarians
11. Pig
12. Lamb
13. Chicken
14. Snakes
15. Crabs
16. Fish
17. Mosquitoes ( not commonly eaten due to filthy habitat)
18. Cockroaches ( not commonly eaten due to filthy habitat)
19. Plants-----------------------------Limit of vegetarians

We see that the animals on the top of sympathy graph are most similar to us in feeling things, they feel love or pain and have highly developed emotional system. We have more sympathy towards common pets.

So we are all part of a natures food chain with different eating habits, we all have set some limits for ourselves ( I can't argue with you if you advocate cannibalism). Though there seems to be no reason why we should not cross those limits in case we need (or want) to do so.

The only distinction between vegetarians and non-vegetarians is that vegetarians have set there limit at number 17 while non-vegetarians are liberals to go up to 8 in the sympathy graph. But because of some emotional constraints no normal human will go beyond 2 in that graph

Please feel free to come up with a counter argument, fallacy in logic, mistake or spelling mistake.

Disclaimer:

I am not an activist nor I want to convert any non-vegetarian to a vegetarian. I just want to prove that vegetarianism is not unjustifiable even in the world of liberalism. I didn't had these reasons in my mind when I decided to remain a vegetarian.

I was reared as a vegetarian, then I came to understand about vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism, then there was time when I had a choice to remain vegetarian or become non-vegetarian. My parents have been vegetarian all the way long and I had experienced 18 years of vegetarianism. I thought this is my identity and I can preserve it without appreciable amount of "sacrifice".