When Vegetarianism started in the Western countries?

I am from India living in the UK at the moment. Vegetarianism was prevalent in India for more than 2500 years and generations together people were vegetarians may be because of many religions born in India advocated vegetarianism. I am wondering how long ago people in the West started to follow vegetarianism and why?

I think for as long as the West has been populated there have been people that didn't eat meat at all (for whatever reasons - not liking taste, didn't like seeing animals die, etc). There's really not too many statistics of vegetarianism that go back thousands of years, but more recently in the history of mankind (primarily in the last 2,000 years or so) there's been concrete evidence of it's existence.

There's been evidence of Native Americans (not all, some) that ate a vegetarian diet and many famous historical figures - Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein and more. There just aren't very many statistics until the 1800's.

Also, there hasn't been any completely concrete word or definition of vegetarian or any way to organize and to see how many vegetarians there were until the 1800's.

A quote I found online for you:

"On September 30, 1847, a group in England had the inaugural meeting of the Vegetarian Society. This original group of 140 free-thinking individuals publicly supported meatless eating. Their publication, Vegetarian Messenger, urged people to live and let live."

There's a lot more about vegetarianism and it's history here:
http://www.vegsoc.org/info/developm.html

Well, I still contend that our ancient prehistorical ancestors lived off of a vegan diet (gathering before hunting...what could we do before tools were invented?)

But I know Pythagoras was a vegetarian, and that was about 2600 years ago.

It started the day someone wasn't running fast enough to be able to catch a rabbit.

they started 2501 years ago

I don't think it is as popular in the UK because of like religions and stuff but i think it's been roughly the same amount of time