What influenced your decision to go meatless?

Of course this is also for those born into vegetarian homes. What have you decided for yourself and why? Thanks.

But it's more than beef. What about other types of meat?

7th grade field trip to slaughter house is what got my attention, & when i was in 9 th grade my now husband told me if i got really serious about being a veggie it would make my asthma go away - i got serious no asthma formore than 25 yrs. now that i am over 50 i have suck to being a veggie most all my life. raised 4 boys & 2 girls all grown all still veggies - now raising veggie grand kids! :)

I was first influenced to be a vegetarian after reading Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation". It is an expose about the fast food industry and it addressed all aspects of it. He went in-depth when talking about the factory farms where fast food restaurants buy their beef, chicken and pork.
I happened to be on a plane for my Christmas holiday and I swore that as soon as the wheels touched Earth I'd never again allow a once-breathing animal cross my lips. I did that and never looked back.
The long and the short of it...my reasons are: 1) animal cruelty reasons 2) religious reasons 3) health reasons 4)environmental reasons.
I'm now a vegan and couldn't be happier.

hahah the first response was funny..
I grew up in a meat-and-potatoes family but I was never a big meat eater.. when I got to university and met muslims and hindus I began to appreciate the determination it took for them to avoid meat. When i started researching the undercover investigations conducted by PETA I was really motivated to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle.. soon after I converted to Hinduism after discovering that it englobed everything I beleived it perfectly! I haven't looked back since :)

Having several dietician friends helped push me over the edge- I have thought vegetarians are kinda cool for years.

I guess I was fine with factory farming (well, not fine, but I figured I was not going to change it by going meatless)

I was fine with eating meat because I did not realize how harmful factory farms are to the environment, and whatever inkling I did have, I squelched by rationalizing that a big city produced more pollutants than a feedlot, and that, there again, one person could not make a difference.

But when i found out that countries with the lowest milk consumption also have the lowest incidences of osteoporosis and breast cancer, that 18 ounces or more of red meat a week increased my risk of colon and stomach cancer by 30%, and there was no safe level of processed meat, it raised my chances by 40%, ...that doctors will go to wellness centers and eat diets of fresh fruit and vegetables and GET WELL, but at the same time, refuse to send their patients there, subjecting them to radiation and chemo, and that patients with cancer who ate a strict diet of fresh fruits and veggies recovered more wholly than those who drank milk for their bones, managed their stress, and ate a healthy diet... that antibiotics and growth hormones fed to animals actually were being absorbed into my body, into MY muscle tissue, well, suddenly it did seem like one person could make a difference. I don't need to start a revolution to live with a decreased risk of cancer- I can do that all on my own.

The first thing that opened my eyes to vegetarianism is when I went to my uncle's house. He had made fish, and when I went to take a bite, I noticed that one whole side of my piece still had the scales on it! I was so grossed out, and it made me realize I was eating an ANIMAL. I never wanted to eat meat again...and I haven't. That was almost a year ago. During that time, I've seen a few videos on animal cruelty, which only confirms my decision. I do it now purely for the rights of the poor animals who are raised only to be killed, or spend their lives in small cages giving milk or laying eggs until their death.

The reasons why i went meatless is b/c i tought i had worms 4 a minute & i use 2 love eating raw meat.Another reason is b/c 2 me its healther & it makes me looses weight so far its doing pretty good.I never been 2 a slather house or seen how animals r treated.Plus going veggietarain i feel alot more energized.<33 xoxo

I decided to go meatless after moving into a house near a cow pasture. I would see these animals every day. The truth was staring me right in the face that this is where meat comes from. After seeing the video on meat.com I became a vegan. I no longer wanted to play a part in cruelty to animals.

The animals. When I read about what was happening to them I knew I wanted to do my part to stop it. I also found out that the meat industry is one of the main producers of greenhouse gases and that a it takes around 10 pounds of grain to grow 1 pound of meat. I guess i stopped for the environment too.

I read the book Skinny B*tch.
After reading about the animals being killed and stuff, I cried for hours.
If you havent read it or are determining whether to be a vegetarian or not, I strongly reccomend it.

Ughh, the thought of slaughter houses makes me shiver (no liee).

after watching meat.org in the 7th grade i wanted to become a vegetarian. they treat animals so horribly and it just digusts me how they are treated, what if humans were treated like that every day and every minute.

i love and care for animals more than anything there is.

finding out how animals are treated on factory farms and what they go through before they become meat on your plate. i don't support torture. nothing that feels pain should have to go through that ... meat isn't necessary. so it feels rather selfish to me to put an animal through that just so i can have a mcdonalds burger that tastes good cuz i feel like one.

As a follower of an earth-reverent religion, I could no longer justify the harm my diet was doing to the environment and to the animals involved in the system. So for me, going meatless was a way of bringing my morals in line with my life.

Well, i am not meatless but i think the main reason to be meatless is the obesity, and if you have high cholesterol hypertension,or any cardiac disease.
and these also depends on the diet you are going to deal with.

Ethics, politics, environmental awareness, the desire to stay as healthy as possible, and a dash of the gross-out factor. Basically, I'm vegan because I can't come up with an ethically-defensible reason not to be.

I decided to become vegetarian after I saw a video on how they slaughtered animals, they seem to think its fine... but to me I call it legal murder... I think being a vegetarian forces you to make healthier choices , which is good...

I became a vegetarian (and later a vegan) because of animal cruelty. I love animals and I just can't stand the thought of animals being killed in awful ways and treated horribly.

well, i just quit cold turkey one day..
but i've never been much of a meat eater.
i guess i've just always felt wrong for eating meat anyway.
i'm so glad to be vegan..wouldn't change it for the world!

i saw an award winning pig farm when i was 14

If that was the "best" we had for those animals, i was having nothing to do with it.

In the following 28 years I've seen nothing to change my mind

for my love of animals, i can really not even believe at one time i thought it was okay to kill a living creature just to eat it when there are plenty of other options.

Action For Animals.
they have a lot of stuff about animal cruelty and factory farming.

My father saw a PETA video and couldn't eat anymore and so I became one too. Plus I love animals too much to eat them and the way they kill them is soo disgusting and horrible.

I went "vegan" purely for selfish reasons - for my own health. Animal products are NOT good for our bodies. But now I'm learning about animal cruelty and am very thankful I'm not a part of the problem anymore.

My love of animals. I also saw a lot of distrubing stuff on PETA's website, which influenced me to start being one right away.

Once I read and saw what goes on inside factory farms, I could not take part in the industry any more.

The accusatory glares from the cows on my block

peta : |

i think if a person sees infront of him tht how animals r killed for food or any other work they just can't take a piece of it inside them aftr all dis.......
but still d whole world is eating it n they can't stop them .....
so there shud b eyebrows raised for it as i suppose tht people do big -big talks like i love animals n so i can't eat non-veg n so ...i wud just like to say to all the veggi's tht if u r not eating non-veg ur missing sumthing very gud in life n there's always a 1st time for everything so no harm in just trying as it is gud for our body in sum or the other way thts y we r eating it otherwise we wud hv not...
i knw tht sum people ll feel bad ......
so a big sorry to all of them..
but this is d big truth n nobody can change it..