Let's start with the reason why I became vegetarian: Because I was young and impressionable and I was keeping company with an older guy who I thought was really cool. He was a vegetarian and a member of Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. He had long hair and a beard. Within a few months of meeting him, I too was a vegetarian and a member of Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. My hair was also starting to grow long but I couldn't quite manage the beard.
So why should other people become vegetarians? Why not? Why eat meat? There are hundreds of good reasons for being vegetarian. Here are just a few.
In a world with a constantly increasing population to support, many people say vegetarianism offers the best option for feeding everybody. Agriculture has less impact on natural resources than meat farming when you compare them on the basis of equivalent nutritional output.
A well balanced vegetarian diet is just as healthy as any omnivorous diet and compared to the 'burger and chips' sort of diet of many people in Western countries, it's miles ahead. Think 'cholesterol', 'blood pressure', 'fibre', 'vitamins', 'heart disease'...a veggie diet is the way to go to avoid problems in these areas.
Animals get a break if we go veggie. They don't have to live in the kind of squalor which is currently regarded as acceptable by many people. Animals have feelings. They get depressed when they are confined and they get scared when treated cruelly. They also feel pain. There's a fairly common, bullshit, 'idiot in a pub' kind of argument that goes, 'How do you know plants don't feel pain too?' Well maybe they do. And maybe rocks are sentient. Anything is possible, but we don't usually rely on such levels of possibility when we make reasoned judgments about the world. Feelings of pain come from nerve impulses. Animals have nervous systems and plants don't. We can assume that most other animals feel pain in the same way as we do, just as acutely and for much the same reasons. We identify with the pain of animals. We know when they are in pain by the way they act and the noises they make. We can predict the kind of things that will cause animals pain because the same things generally cause humans pain. Can we say that about plants? No. As I said, bullshit argument. Just ignore it.
Vegetables taste better, smell better and look better on a plate than bits of animals. This argument was put forward by Moby on the sleeve notes of one of his CDs. I like it, but it is a fairly subjective argument. Meat looks horrible. That's a fact. It has to be disguised to look at all presentable. But it's not until they've been veggie for a while that most people begin to notice that meat smells really bad too, and then they can't imagine how they ever enjoyed the taste. Carnivores often use the opposite argument that food is bland and tasteless without meat. It's definitely subjective, but as a long-time vegetarian, I'd say I enjoy food more now than when I was a meat eater.
The list of arguments goes on. Take your pick. But why do we need a reason? No one goes up to meat eaters and says 'Why do you eat animals then?' At least not in everyday situations, they don't. If you're veggie, however, as soon as you say 'I'm vegetarian', you get all sorts of rubbish about why your arguments are wrong and why your eating cheese contradicts your beliefs. This often comes before you've even been asked what your arguments or beliefs are. Such assailants are usually arrogant enough to assume them for you. Usually, when I announce that I'm vegetarian, it's to make sure that I'm not given a meat dish in a restaurant, for example, or maybe to explain why I've just declined an offer to join people who are eating. I rarely do it in order to invite criticism or argument. I'm a vegetarian every day and have been (more or less) for over twenty-five years. It's habit now. Normal. I don't want to go on chat shows and say 'I've seen the light and everybody else should do this if they want to be a better person.' Why do people insist on challenging my lifestyle?
An assumption that is often made is that you are vegetarian in order to
be, in some way, virtuous and that if you can't be 100% virtuous in that
particular department, then there's no point bothering. This is where
you get the 'but you eat cheese/wear leather/kill mosquitos' kind of
arguments. Why don't these people just go away? Such views aren't only
held by non-vegetarians. I knew a guy once who became a vegetarian. Two
months later he had become a vegan and started sneering at other
vegetarians. A few weeks after that he was checking every product he
used to see if it had any connection with activities involving animal
abuse. He went on a cycle tour of rural Africa for two months and, by
the time he returned, had understood that such a lifestyle was
impossible there and, furthermore, had been forced by circumstance to
eat a chicken. He concluded that there was therefore no point in trying
to be a vegetarian. Total time as a vegetarian = 14 months. If you want
to become a vegetarian and stay vegetarian, you have to be practical,
realistic and remember you're a normal human being. You're not joining a
religious order (well, actually, in some cases you might be, but most
new vegetarians aren't).
So. If you feel that you want to become a vegetarian, don't worry to much about analysing your reasons and developing a systematic set of beliefs. After all, most people don't feel the need to defend their lifestyle choices so rigorously. Just do it. You won't be a worse vegetarian.