I’m not a vegetarian. I eat meat. Sometimes without thinking too deeply about it. But there’s something about vegetarians, that I’ve come to respect. It’s not so much what they eat. It’s how they think.

Among the many things I’ve learned in life is; you can appreciate the way someone thinks, the way they build their case and carry themselves, even if you don’t agree with their conclusion. You can differ with a person, and still walk home impressed by how gently they reasoned, how honestly they stood in what they believe.

That’s how I feel when I listen to the arguments of vegetarians. I don’t share all their choices, but there are places where our thinking overlaps, especially on the idea of the right to life.

They say animals have a life too. Not just a heartbeat, but a life. A presence. A path. They have routines. Instincts. Memory. Maybe even affection. Some have offspring. Some protect their own. Some roam and return.

They eat, they hide, they build. They exist. And when we kill them, we don’t just take meat. We curtain something that was unfolding. We stop a story mid-sentence.

Why do we do that? There are many answers. Survival. Culture. Taste. Tradition. Habit. Some believe it’s natural. Others say it’s necessary. I’m not here to argue that. Not today.

What lingers with me is not the act itself, but the attitude behind it, that deep, unspoken belief “We are allowed to.”

We feel we are superior. Smarter, stronger, more evolved. We are the higher beings. And maybe we are. Maybe reason, language, and morality do make us “above” the animals. I’m not here to dismiss that either.

But the danger comes when that same logic doesn’t stop with animals.
It spills over into how we see each other. We start ranking people too.

That one is less educated. This one is poorer. She’s too old. He’s not confident enough. They speak broken English. They’re too slow, too fat, too rural, too average, too unknown.

We carry the same quiet entitlement. Because they are “less,” I can do more on them. I can step over them. I can silence them. I can ignore them. I can take from them.

Without noticing, we kill stories. Not with knives or bullets, but with ego. With indifference. With jokes. With silence.

We kill someone’s confidence with a single comment.
We end a dream by not responding.
We block someone’s growth because they make us uncomfortable.
We rob someone’s dignity by dismissing their work in public.
And it feels so normal, because, deep down, we’ve told ourselves they’re lesser.

But they have stories too. They have wounds they’re trying to heal.
They have a reason to be here.
A purpose not written on paper.
A right to live and enjoy, just as they are.

This isn’t about food anymore.
It’s about how we see life. All of it.

I’m still not a vegetarian. Maybe not yet.
But that reflection, that pause, has cleared something in me.
And maybe, just maybe, it might clear something in you too.