Yes, I am a vegetarian.

I have been off of meat since March 1998. Eggs and fish are going to go around September 1999, although I try to avoid them now. Dairy I still eat. Perhaps I'll quit that someday also, but not right now.

I'm not going to go into a long explanation as to why. I have to do that too much in everyday life. Suffice it to say that I simply cannot handle the idea of eating another creature that thinks and feels as we do. And I am horrified by the way animals are treated before they are murdered. It is no different than the Holocaust, or the American oppression of the Native Americans and Africans.

I don't really care if you "convert" or not. I'm not a fanatic - I'll eat meat if it is necessary. I'm not trying to recruit anyone. This is my choice, and you will or will not agree. That is your choice. But if you are interested, here is some information:

Chickens and Turkeys

distributed by PETA
Every year in the U.S. alone, more than six billion chickens are slaughtered for food. Shy and sensitive animals, most of them spend their unnaturally short, miserable lives confined to a windowless shed on a factory farm.
Male chicks, useless to the egg industry, are either tossed live into a grinding machine, killed with carbon monoxide, or tossed into the trash alive. Female chicks have their beaks seared off with a red-hot iron. Then they're squashed into a tiny cage with five or six others; they have as little space as you or I would if we lived our entire lives in a compact car with six adults. Eighteen months and about 300 eggs later, they're packed into trucks and sent to slaughter. Their battered flash is made into dog food, "chicken franks," or soup.
"Broiler" chickens are bred for their flesh and they don't fare any better. Twenty-five thousand or more are shoved into a dark shed where they are forced to live in their own excrement, among corpses of birds who die of filth, suffocation, or stress. Their natural lifespan of 15 to 20 years is cut short when their throats are slit at just 48 days. Broiler chickens spend their lives in such pain that they are unable to move.
The slaughter machines spatter bacteria-laden feces onto the carcasses. Up to 50% of all chicken flesh sold in the U.S. is swarming with salmonella, campylobacter, and other dangerous bacteria. As many as four million Americans get sick from salmonella "flu" each year and about 500 die. Chickens and eggs are a leading cause of food-borne illness. Chicken contains as much cholesterol as beef (100 mg in just 4 ounces) and a single egg has twice the cholesterol of a hamburger.
Every year, the U.S. poultry industry produces six billion pounds of manure, and chicken processing plants use up to 100 million gallons of water per day.

Every year 290 million turkeys are slaughtered while still young, after spending their unnaturally short lives on "factory farms."
More that 80% of turkeys slaughtered today subsist for months in sheds packed so tightly - three square feet per bird - that flapping a wing or stretching a leg is nearly impossible. They stand mired in waste, the urine and ammonia fumes burning their eyes, lungs, and legs. To keep the overcrowded birds from scratching and pecking each other, their upper beaks and toes are amputated (without anesthesia).
One percent of young turkeys (more than a million birds each year) don't make it past the first week, sometimes drowning in water dishes or starving to death when eating with their mutilated beaks is too painful.
At the slaughterhouse, birds are hung upside down on a conveyer belt, their artificially induced bulk suspended from weak and crippled legs. Their heads are dragged through an electrified "stunning tank," which terrified birds often dodge, meaning they move on, fully concious, to automated blades or human butchers. When the knife misses its mark, birds are boiled alive in a tank of acalding water.
A roasted turkey's leg contains 72 milligrams of cholesterol and is 47% fat, more than many cuts of beef. Salmonella has survived as long as 13 months on the skin of frozen turkeys.
Twelve gallons of waste water is produced per turkey carcass, adding up to millions of gallons used each day industry-wide.

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