to and on Vegetarians

I have absolutely nothing against vegetarians. Many of my GoodFriends are vegetarian, and how dare I have anything against them?

sample vegetarian. Notice the look of extreme sadness on her face.

Nevertheless. Nevertheless, they manage to bewilder me. They make me scratch my head and make  me ponder upon the futility of such a life; the inherent sadness of such an existence. And all this they perform by the sheer power of the fact that they are vegetarian.

At a personal level, (I hope I don't get into issues with the PETA) I believe that it is an animal's moral duty to present itself on my plate when I sit down to eat, at least once in its life time. The fact that it can do that only once makes the previous statement sound a tad redundant but let that not taint the vitality of my faith.

I've been involved in countless food-brawls with my GoodFriends. By food-brawls I refer to brawls over food, not brawls with the food (the thing that the WWE superstars are so competent at). And most of this have ended with a tongue-lock when I am left to counter the very very ancient and incorrigibly clichéd argument regarding the "compassion and love for all things living". Which I admit, I cannot. The best reply I can give when someone stumps with a "How would YOU feel like if you were to be eaten someday?" is that "I cannot foresee a future when I would be within 50 miles of cannibalism at any point in my life." Lame, I admit. But works.

Which brings me to the question of plant perception. Can plants feel?

Hell, yes they do. I base my conviction on the numerous results that appear when you type the same question in the Google search-bar. This, being the most glaring. Discarding non-vegetarian food on grounds of "compassion and love for all living things" can now go to the dogs. But yes, them vegetarians, are hard nuts to crack. My GoodOldSidey (I don't know whether whether he's reading this) (yet another vegetarian, needless to say) comes up with this extremely contrived extension of the same reason. Which is, "I don't like eating something which has yelpt in pain and cried so that I may eat it".

If he had as much of a white soul as he appears to, after this revelation, God bless this sin-stained world, but that is besides the point.

To him, and to others who would like to emulate him, let them be made aware that when Sir George Bernard Shaw visited Sir Jagdish Bose's laboratory, he was stunned to see that cabbages suffered from violent convulsions when boiled to death. (A piece of information shamelessly wiki-lifted from the above link). To them I ask,  "Will you stop boiling cabbages now?" I think I know the answer to that.

Plants (continuing upon the same spree of shameless wiki-lifting) actually have a very well developed nervous system and they respond to shock by spasm in exactly the same way as an animal muscle does. Just because one cannot visibly see or hear the pain a broccoli plant goes through when you chop its limbs off without a bother doesn't prove anything. You can as well wait for goats to sleep (or use tranquilisers for that matter) before you behead them and proceed to cut them into nice chops and blah-blah.

Another thing.

Vegetarian food has this weird way of staring up at you and shouting, "Hah! Your ancestors fought their way up the food chain and you're somewhere down there again." Quite right! Being vegetarian is like openly disregarding the revered concept of the food chain and showing scant respect to the laws of evolution, which over millions of years have carved a path for you, so that you, as a Homo sapien are given the birth-right to be a secondary consumer. If not higher.

Therefore, by being vegetarian, you actually go against nature and it's predetermined laws.

Hah. So much for your compassion and love for nature now.

Quad-erat-demonstrandum.

would you have all these?

or well, just this?

PS : Andy Rooney ( I have absolutely no idea who he is) says that "Vegetarian is an old Indian word for 'lousy hunter' ". I say, "Bullseye."