Endless consumption
To start, I respect vegan and vegetarian diets. They require discipline and a consideration for life and health. Thank you for spreading these practices, but for those who feel resentment or are concerned about conventional diets, or for those of you who only ever consume food but don't produce anything themselves, I simply wanted to share some thoughts here.
We are by nature omnivores, which includes eating meat. To deny that entirely is deny your own nature. Some important ethical questions to consider are:
Where does the meat come from? Was it ethically raised and harvested?
When eating meat, do you take a moment to appreciate the sacrifice and significance of the life taken for you to sustain?
Are you eating meat more purely to satisfy a hedonistic tendency or because you are genuinely hungry and in need of that nutrition?
Should a person who eats meat go through the experience of hunting and taking the life of a wild animal for food in order to have a deeper connection to their food and sense of consequence when eating it?
We are merely animals, not some beings that are above the realities of natural laws and cycles. To that point, we can choose to be vegan/vegetarian but murdering animals for meat is part the human cycle of life. We one day die and our meat becomes food for other organisms.
On a final note, as humans, we have to capacity to give back and contribute to the proliferation of life through things like native gardening, ecosystem management, and forestry. It's what many of our ancestors did and what allowed them to have abundance in way that connected them to their environment. In other words, we can be a beneficial keystone species. This is far more important and beneficial than simply consuming only plants endlessly, but never giving back to the world that sustains you.
If your concerns are environmental or on the ethics of killing animals, I encourage you to reflect on wildlife and to reflect on things you can do to help proliferate life so that animals can also thrive in a world where they will be killed by other animals (including us).