What's for Dinner

6 minutes. That was how long it took before I wretched my eyes from the computer screen. Tears streaming down my face, I closed the window and ran to my room. My dog's trailing behind me, confused, they watched me as I cried into my pillow. How could anyone do such a thing? Don't we have hearts? Home alone, I didn't know what to do. Should I call my parents? I already felt like the odd one out. Should I do this to myself again? Add a redheaded atheist into a family of Christian brunettes and you're bound to feel like a 3rd wheel. Could I even get more singled out than this? But then again, how could I unsee the images on the screen? Chickens being beaten, crushed by their own steroid induced weight. Never to see the light of day. Cows herded into stalls by electrocuting cattle prods. Dangled by their ankles on a machine that chops them up, alive the whole time. Feeling every ounce of pain, I knew one thing for sure, I wasn't taking part in this, I'm becoming a vegetarian.

"Being a vegetarian isn't going to stop people from slaughtering animals." One of the many things people try to tell me to make me regret my decision. Obviously, just one person rebelling against something isn't going to make it stop. If that was true, there would be a lot of things that just stopped, such as school, and we would be in big trouble. I didn't do this to make people stop slaughtering animals. I hope they'll realize it's wrong and stop, but it's not my decision to make. I chose to do this because I don't want to support any kind of animal abuse whatsoever.

My dad always goes off on his, "Why don't you eat grass fed meat? It's better than regular meat," speech. But what he doesn't get is that they're not treated differently. Okay, so they only eat grass, good for them. If you were beaten your whole life, would it suddenly change because you eat grass? Obviously not, changing your eating habits isn't going to change how somebody else treats you. The only way to fix that is to speak out. The problem is, animals can't speak for themselves. They need people to do it for them. That's where I step in. People don't need to eat meat. Take babies for example, for the first year of their life, all they ingest is milk. No meat at all, and they're completely healthy. You don't need meat to survive; we just have it etched in our brains that eating meat is the way to live, no question about it. But when we think about it, we find out that it doesn't have to be that way. We can get the same nutrients from other sources, and it's not a big hassle. If everyone took the time to investigate why we eat meat, they'd find that we only do because we got into a habit when that was the only source of protein we knew of that was available. But I'm ready to stand up and make a difference,