Not Eating Animals................

I do not know anyone who is not (at a minimum) a partial vegetarian. I would even go further and say that at least 99% of Canadians, U.S. Citizens and citizens of Western Europe are at least partial vegetarians.  The preceding statements are limited to those particular geographic areas because I am pretty confident about my knowledge of cultural behaviors there....the truth is probably 99% of all human animals on the planet are partial vegetarians.

A partial vegetarian is someone (my definition) that avoids eating certain kinds of non-human animal people.  In other words almost all of the human animal people on the planet already have some internal programming that precludes their eating certain kinds of non-human animal people.  Most "western" cultures teach the avoidance of eating dog people and cat people.  To a lesser extent, horse people are presented as unsuitable for eating.

My point here is that teaching that animal people are not suitable for food is not difficult, nor is it unusual.

So, remember, most people you encounter are (species-specific) vegetarians but fail to identify themselves as being such.  What they avoid doing to one or more kinds of animal people, they can avoid doing to any animal people.

A more formal statement of this notion: Behaviors that are already practiced or avoided in certain contexts are available to be transferred to a new context. 

Most people do not have to be taught to avoid eating animal people, they already know how to refrain from such behavior (depending on the type of animal person involved)......all they have to do is generalize this behavior (or behavior avoidance) to new situations or contexts.

A book.

There is a book, titled Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, that is absolutely required reading if you enjoy well written books.  Mr. Foer is an incredibly talented writer....I cannot over-emphasize his skills.  This book contains wisdom, insight, pain and laughter.  It is not a jeremiad, it is an inquiry and it is entertaining and very well researched.  The book was published in November of 2009 and after I read the book from my library.....I bought my own copy.  The reference section of the book is alone worth the cost of the book.

The book has been reviewed extensively, you can read reviews here or here.  Your library most likely has a copy.....read it and let me know what you think of it.

By the way, I first became aware of Mr. Foer because of a quirky, powerful little movie that was based on another book of his: Everything is Illuminated. The movie blew me away and I highly recommend it also.