Health - Draft - If Vegetarians love animals, why are they eating their food?

Plus I read that vegetarians have better sex :)

But even if this were true, it's most likely not because of what they eat, but because of the inherent traits that make people become vegetarian: sensitivity to others, empathy, awareness, impo...rtance of health and body, etc.

zatch Didn't Mufasa sum this up definitively in the Lion King? And who here thinks they are wiser than Mufasa?

Mufasa: Everything you see exists together in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance and respect all the creatures, from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope.
Young Simba: But, Dad, don't we eat t...he antelope?
Mufasa: Yes, Simba, but let me explain. When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life.

If I take what he says literally, seems that you must eat something or someone in order to be connected in the great Circle of Life. If lions were to stop eating antelope, and say started eating fish, which do not eat grass, would... the antelope become extinct? And could the world possibly collapse?

By the same rationale, I don't eat the antelope, but skip right to the grass. This means, I pretty much leave the antelope out of the circle. So by not eating the antelope, I deny it its purpose in this world and therefore undermine its existence. Wow, this increasingly becomes a convincing argument for eating the poor antelope.

This means that if we all stopped eating the antelope, it would become extinct. It's possible that would happen if there were no predators for the antelope. The population would increase tremendously and eat all of its food. Then it would probably either all die of hunger or go back to manageable size. But then such a population would probably be unable to remain at a steady state. So I am not sure that such world could be sustainable. So someone's gotta eat the antelope, it seems... to let it live...

So this is how it would be in the perfect world. Where people hunt animals. In our case, we grow animals for our food wasting an enormous amount of resources on the way. So Mufasa was right regarding the world of the Lions. But the world of the Lions cannot be applied to the human world without adaptations...

none of these make much sense because we grow both animals and "animal" food for our own consumption. We don't "exterminate" animals for food. (We do in some countries, such as Japan (wales) and we also kill animals for other attributes endangering their species. But that's a different story, unrelated to the conversation on vegetarianism.) The statement above is merely a joke