From Carnivore to Fruitarian

The number of vegetarians and vegans is increasing significantly.

They believe that animals should not be killed.

For vegetarians and vegans, the difference between humans and animals is small.

For people who do eat meat, the difference between humans and animals is so great that they consume meat without a guilty conscience.

However, vegetarians and vegans also kill animals. While walking, they may involuntarily step on ants and for the cultivation of their plant-based food countless worms, beetles and mice are crushed while the fields are worked and thus die an agonizing death.

Most people have much more sympathy for horses, cattle, sheep and rabbits than for chickens and fish. But we also feel more for chickens and fish than for insects or even for the unicellular paramecium. Or don't we also hesitate when we have to kill a paramecium in biology class?

Do we have the right to feel more for horses than for a paramecium? We have more consideration for animals in which we see a resemblance to us or which behave similarly to us, such as dolphins.

Fruitarians take it even further. They believe that not only animals but also plants have a right to life.

Fruitarians strive for a diet with plant products that do not damage the plant. These include fruits, nuts and seeds, for example. The wood for furniture should only come from trees that have fallen over.

I feel bad when cutting lettuce in the garden. The crunchy lettuce actually wanted to shoot up and form seeds.

The stalk of a freshly cut birch ejects large quantities of xylem juice. Is that comparable to bleeding or crying?

Steve Jobs was a fruitarian for a while. He had empathy for growing plants. Was that why he was so good at understanding the minds of us IT laymen and became the first to develop a user-friendly cell phone?

Mahatma Gandhi also lived as a fruitarian for five years before becoming a vegetarian again.

On November 27th, 2017 I published a blog post in which I wrote that I would welcome the reawakening of a moderate pacifism. I think it's a pity that vegetarians and vegans aren’t expressing themselves in this direction as well.

In my eyes, meat eaters and fruitarians are the most consistent. Vegetarians and vegans have to face a lot of questions - questions they can only answer with great difficulty.

Vegans avoid carmine red, which is often used as a food coloring. Carmine is a red pigment extracted from cochineal scale insects and is therefore an animal product. But what do vegans do when their roses are infested by aphids/greenflies? No one is forcing them to use harsh chemicals. You can use ladybirds, which are now available in specialized stores. Is that permitted if you don’t also watch the ladybug gobble up the flies? Or are you allowed to use a nettle decoction to kill the aphids slowly?

Vegetarians don't want animals to suffer or be killed because of them. They only eat dairy products, eggs and plant-based products.

In the past, I thought vegetarians could easily live by their principles until I came across the website animal-rights-switzerland.ch/milch during my research:

Every second calf is male and would have to be killed immediately after birth if there were no meat eaters.

The newly born calf may spend just one to three days with its mother. After that, it is torn from its mother so that it does not drink away the cow’s mother's milk.

After only ten weeks, the cows are artificially inseminated again. Cows give the most milk after calving. If they wouldn't be giving birth constantly to calves, the milk production would drop significantly. Hence it follows that a lacto-vegan diet is only possible thanks to meat eaters.

Vegetarians and vegans don't want animals to be killed because of them.

Extreme animal rights activists describe the killing of animals as a criminal act. They demolish raised hides, free chickens and pigs from animal factories, deface butcher shop windows and threaten people who oppose them and despise even moderate animal rights activists.

In his book “Tiere Denken", Richard David Precht writes that this demarcation marks one's own identity and holds together self-esteem and group solidarity. ....an intellectual insight that one follows uncompromisingly, or the desire to see others as worse than oneself.

In my opinion, these are all characteristics that can be found in any other ideology and religion. These mechanisms can be found with the young socialists, with the neo-Nazis and with all extreme religious movements.

It’s called eat or be eaten in nature. Mice eat crickets, snakes eat mice and eagles eat snakes. Nature is brutal.

So why can humans not eat animal meat? Animal rights activists are often of the opinion that the difference between animals and humans is small. But why are we not allowed to act like a link in one of the food chains?

The difference between humans and animals must be so great that entirely different rules apply to us!

We are responsible for the animals.

When I was born there were 2.5 billion people, now there are 7.5 billion. Thousands of animal species are facing extinction. Humans have reproduced at the expense of animals without holding back. And there are still people around the world who oppose the promotion of voluntary family planning.

We are responsible for animals, so we must stop the extinction of species as soon as possible and we also need to stop the suffering related to livestock farming.

The surface area that is given to a single chicken or pig continues to be scandalously small! And many animal factories are horribly big!

Most consumers would hardly continue to eat meat if they were to visit an animal factory with the minimum and legally permitted standards.