Vegetarianism
As you may or may not have learned from visiting other parts of the site, I strongly support the concept and practice of vegetarianism (especially veganism-- my own understanding of what a vegan actually is can be found on this page). My goal in creating this page is to help people understand exactly why I do.
However I don't see the point in making a page that is very similar to and probably less informative/professional than so many others on the net so I'll try to keep this very brief and will supply a link (at the bottom of the page) to a web page I've created that lists a multitude of vegetarian-related web pages and sites :)
All that said, my own personal reason for embracing the idea of vegetarianism is connected with morals. I don't really consider myself a wonderfully caring person for many things, but there are some things I might learn about that I just find taking it too far as far as cruelty goes. Plus I hate injustice, whether it's happening to me or someone else. And yes when I say "someone else" that includes non-humans too, because they, like humans, are sentient beings. That's it. I don't see that how intelligent, or big, or small they are or whether or not they have the ability to speak a certain language etc. makes any difference in how "worthy" they are of not having bad things happen to them. In my opinion any innocent beings that can feel and/or think don't deserve to have pain inflicted onto them. I feel more strongly about this with the more defenseless (e.g. "farm" animals) because, well... I hope that's self-explanatory :S
Aside from that, in places like the United States, in most if not all cases exploiting animals is not even necessary, it's just needless suffering. In other words, the reasons we use them (usually in turn hurting them) are often pretty silly or.. not very good reasons. Like convenience... oftentimes the reason someone will give for not trying to go veg after realizing animals actually have to undeservedly suffer for non-veg things (yes, it's funny how many of us never really thought about it, some of us never in our lives!) is something like "it's too much trouble" or "I just never got around to it." It's even possible I myself would feel that way if I'd never gotten around to actually seeing the process of turning animals into food or other things humans use. I think it was the online video Meet Your Meat that might have been the biggest motivation in my going veg. After seeing stuff like that it was easy for me to understand that my own convenience was nowhere near worth putting so many innocent beings through such torture. (And yes I'm very grateful to the internet as I know it makes going veg today a billion times easier than it was just years ago)
So that's pretty much it, I'm just not the biggest fan of contributing to needless suffering. And along with having some sort of compassion and/or conscience there are several health benefits to switching to a veg*n1 diet/lifestyle as well as much less negative impact on the environment when contributions to animal agriculture/ exploitation are avoided.
To find out more please visit the sites I've compiled on the Recommended Sites text links page in the Veggie Links section, those people can say it better than I can any day (and have included countless details I simply didn't mention here). Also listed on that page are my favorite veggie recipe websites and a link to a page I've set up which contains links to pages where you can order fun free vegetarian starter guides provided by generous outside sources. I love hearing about people who would like to go veg, so please feel more than free to contact me if you have any questions on this topic, I'd be glad to do what I can to help answer any of them :)
1 the terms veg*n and veg*ism, etc. are used when referring to either or both vegetarianism and veganism.