I dislike engaging with the debate on vegetarianism for many reasons, the foremost being I am an ardent animal lover.

Stopped eating meat at age of 16. I was unfamiliar with veganism or vegetarianism as an ideology. Stopped visiting zoos, consuming honey, buying leather, etc.

One reason I got along well when I began dating my now partner who was a Gandhian+vegetarian then.

Hostel life played havoc with our nutrition. I also developed some food intolerances. So switched to conservative meat eating. Together we gradually descended to barbarism. :)

But we never advocated it to others, it was a personal sentiment. Never felt people who ate meat are barbaric, like many people on my TL keep telling me.

We were both from a rural farming background. So we had some insight into how food habits were tied to farming/ecology.

We eat meat now, but we are still ardent animal lovers. We were active members in campus animal rescue operations.

I still don't visit zoos, can't handle aquariums, pets inside houses, dog cages. I just don't get vegetarians who engage in all this & cry non-violence.

I had no idea my choice could be seen from a caste pov. It was a school kid who opened my eyes.

On my 2 mile walk to college, I made friends with a Shetty school kid, who, when I said I don't meat asked me with a knowing grin "Ah! you want to be brahmin?"

I'd felt SO insulted.

I've come a long way since then. Today I'd eat just enough meat to maintain my "Shudra" status, to resist the violence of Brahminism.

And there are a thousand invisible violences we take part as consumers. As Jean points it so well, https://twitter.com/JeanDmello/status/1123658157908086784

I do sympathize with sentiments of animal lovers who stopped eating meat (not born vegns)

An individual choice isn't brahmanical unless you present it as a morally superior ideology, impose on others, aggressively evangelize or behave in ways reinforcing existing casteist mores.

This is the best thread I have read on the Nagaland dog meat ban issue by an animal rights advocate, who has first hand knowledge of how farming & casteism ties into it.

If you still can't get the point after reading this, give up. You'll never get it. https://twitter.com/coke_moonu/status/1279120142748643328

Here is a useful book on the topic, and this thread was an outcome of a heated discussion on animal sacrifice.

(The anti-animal sacrifice camp is the most irrational I have come across among UC liberals. Yes, you heard it right. Irrational.) https://twitter.com/Shudraism/status/1160217725370654720