If you eat chicken or pork, you’re supporting extreme animal abuse on factory farms;
If you eat beef, you’re supporting the livestock industry that kills bison, elk and wolves;
If you eat fish, you’re supporting the demise of our living oceans;
If you hunt, your selfish food choice robs a life and cheats a natural predator;
If you eat meat, you’re part of the problem instead of the solution;
Exposing the Big Game 
Let’s not forget to add mustangs to the list of who you kill when you eat beef…
Good point
I work at a mustang sanctuary, so I had to bring it up!
No meat or fish for me!
Thanks Maureen,
We do enough harm simply by being part of the human species, we don’t need to compound the problem by eating animals.
Perfect…vegetarian here..almost complete vegan..sharing this ☺
Thanks!
Jim, thanks for making this connection. When I first became interested in animal rights issues as a young woman, I didn’t hear as much about the meat-wildlife connection. Then, when I became involved in wildlife rehab and advocacy, I realized that a lot of us didn’t fully understand the impact of meat production on the welfare of the wild animals we were helping. It’s a learning curve for everyone, and posts like this help people piece it all together.
I so agree about the accrued damage principle. I debated a particular hunter at her blog where, once she learned certain statistics about wildlife deaths, she’d use them to justify her own kills. For example, windows kill upwards of a billion birds a year, so why don’t people focus on those things, instead of targeting us poor, victimized hunters? The idea of malicious intent is obviously lost on these people. And never mind that wildlife groups do, indeed, focus on issues of ancillary death … or that officially reported hunting kills are so much lower than the actual carnage figures.
Beyond that, it’s precisely because we inflict so much harm through our very existence, our waste, pollution and technology — as you astutely point out — that we ought to refrain from causing additional, deliberate harm. I’ll never understand people who justify compounded violence! We do enough horrible things to other animals already — just stop, right? Of course, that idea is far too selfless a notion for anyone would, in the first place, take up killing for personal or culinary enjoyment. The brain starts to short circuit just contemplating it. 🙂
“for anyone WHO would …” (typo)
I agree completely Ingrid, my brain shorts out every time I think of people who willingly add to the animal suffering already going on, then try to rationalize and justify it.
I grew up eating meat, but not a lot of it because we were not well off. I always had a nagging feeling about killing an animal to eat – and one day I just stopped eating red meat, after I saw how many animals were wasted during the first mad cow scare. I’ve never looked back and that was over ten years ago. I don’t see meat as ‘meat’ anymore at the meat counter, and I avoid looking at it for long. I’m not a complete vegetarian, and have a ways to go yet.
The mindless gluttony of today’s world where we eat anything just because we can and when we don’t need to is just plain gross to me.
Whoops, it’s more like over 20 years! I stopped really thinking about it after 9 or 10. How time flies! 🙂
That’s for sure–good for you! We all started off as meat-eaters, but it feels good to make a conscious choice rather than go along with an unthinking tradition.