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<title> Do YOU eat Meat? </title>
I often get the question why I don't eat meat. I didn't stop because of the cruel treatment of animals all around the world, but because I felt that I actually didn't need to eat meat. I won't starve or get malnourished if I don't. Since I stopped I have heard so much about many animals horrible life and all because of humans desire for meat, or money. When I now get the question why I don't eat meat, I only want to answer -Why do you eat meat? 
	 Animals are maltreated in many parts of the world even in Sweden. Gene engineered animals are brought up to become bigger and grow faster for a mass production of meat. Cruel animal transports are nothing unknown to anybody. Cattle are many times transported with no respect for their life during horrible conditions. Many horses, mainly racehorses without a great talent are sold to the butcher, not always in Sweden. The mad cow disease has now been spread out in many countries as a result of meat based foodstuff that had been infected. (I thought that cows were grass eaters?) In this part of the world everybody could today get more than enough nutrition without eating meat, maybe it could stop this madness and lack of respect for the animals.
	 Everybody has heard about Belgian Blue, the genetic engineered cows that grow really fast and become abnormally big. The grown up cows have a hard time to move at all because they are to heavy. The calves have to be taken out by a caesarean section because it would kill the cow to give birth the "normal" way. Those big cows look like living beefs more than animals and they are suffering from it. What is it good for? In Denmark they have brought up chickens that grow so fast that they after a couple of weeks, many of them, can't stand on their own legs anymore, the ones that could were linking around. On the documentary where I heard about this, they were giving the chickens painkillers to see if they were in pain. The chickens walked a lot better under the influence of the drug...
	 On a radio program last week they were talking about horses from Sweden that got transported to butchers in Italy, as that would give more money than to sell them to a Swedish butcher. It was about two thousand horses per year going this way from Sweden. The horses were sometimes very bad kept before they left as they anyway were going to get killed, it even happened that some of them couldn't manage the whole way, but died during the transport. Anyway horses are mainly in good care as they have other more important functions to people than to be eaten by us.
	 The mad cow disease is a fact that has stopped many people from eating meat. The scientists don't really know how it can or has effected people, already many people chiefly on Ireland has died from the brain disease Creutzfelt Jacob that has a connection with consumption of infected meat. They don't know yet but they also think that the symptoms of the disease can show up many years after that you ate the infected meat. Why do cows eat meat based food anyway? Humans decided that cows should eat food made of other cows, then I don't think it is very strange that those weird kind of diseases shows up. It is so far from cows' natural diet of grass that you can get.
	 My main point is always to try to avoid unnecessary suffering for animals. I choose not to eat meat and I don't support maltreatment of animals in anyway. Farmers and other animal owners or animal dealers have to take better care of their animals and make sure that the transportation to the butcher won't be long and painful. I know that many do take care of their animals very well but it is all those extreme stories that scares me, that some people can have such a lack of respect for the animals. The many facts about animals' situations today strengthened my opinion that I made the right decision when I stopped my meat consumption. - Do you eat meat?
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