vegan views, what are yours?

You are right. Meeting, interacting and respecting other people's views and beliefs is a great way to live.

This is very well said!:)

I'm a vegan.

I choose it for my own reasons. I assume other people choose what they eat for similar reasons.

My only attitude about it isn't about veganism, it is about the health costs to individuals and overhead written to the health care system by the grossly unhealthy diet purveyed by fast food vendors and what is colloquially called the "Standard American Diet". But there are plenty of ways to eat a more healthy diet that don't require plant-based menus.

But for the record, I don't "preach" - I only provide advice when asked. I used to spend alot more time having to "defend" my diet (which I don't bother with any more) whenever anyone found out I'm a vegan, than I see others having to do when it emerges that they eat meat.

So please keep in mind that there are those of us who are not "judgmental" - and please don't judge us! I'm a little tired of all the complaints about vegans. Aggressive morons come in all types.

When it comes to people's ethics and personal tastes, e.g. someone choosing to be vegan because they object morally to eating animals, or the idea of it disgusts them or they simply don't like the taste of animal products, then I'd say each to their own, and of course we should respect each others different beliefs - you don't have to agree with someone's opinion to respect it and their right to hold it.

However it totally does my head in when people try to claim that meat eating in humans is unnatural. Humans would not have even evolved without meat. And the argument about gorillas being vegan does my head in too, because a) gorillas eat insects and b) gorillas have the smallest brain to body size ratio of all the great apes and are also the least intelligent. Chimps, who have the largest brain to body size ratio of non-human apes, eat monkeys. In fact they cooperatively hunt monkeys, which is a very human-like behaviour. Early human ancestors like Australopithecines and Homo habilis probably cooperatively hunted monkey sized animals in a similar fashion to chimps. Homo erectus cooperatively hunted considerably bigger animals and Homo neanderthalensis cooperatively hunted huge, dangerous animals like bison and mammoths. And Homo sapiens invented long range hunting weapons like throwing spears and bows and arrows, to be able to take down big animals without getting injured quite as often as neanderthals did. So humans have a rich history of hunting bigger and bigger animals using progressively more sophisticated weapons, and also a correspondingly increasing brain size first as a result of eating more meat and later as a result of cooking meat (which makes it easier to digest and therefore means you can get more nutrition from it). Animal fat, in particular, is essential for growing a large brain. Modern people can be vegan only because of recent advances in agriculture and the ability to transport food around the world, because otherwise it's really difficult to grow enough high protein plant food to get enough protein, and also the technology to refine plant oils, and no-one can gather enough high protein plant food from the wild to survive, hence the need for humans to eat meat for pretty much the entirety of human history until fairly recently.

You are right. Meeting, interacting and respecting other people's views and beliefs is a great way to live.

This.

Yep.