Its murder.

[feibelal]

If you can be raw vegan with joy and without judgement of cruelty full meat eaters, then hurrah for your choices. But it's the personal choice, and the lack of judgement that matters. Better, I say to by a meat eater with joy, and to make room in your heart for alll[/i] the daily cruelties involved in life on earth these days.

So are you saying that being self-righteous about not being cruel, is worse than being cruel? It's worse to avoid needlessly torturing animals, if one is judging those who do, than to needlessly torture animals?

I'm a little nervous about using the term "self-righteous," and I can maybe see where I started the mud-slinging, by labelling some things as judging. I woke up today thinking that I had done some of that self-same "judging" in my post, which is perhaps what you are picking up on. In a wild, out there, kind of way, I suppose I don't really believe in the existence of cruelty. That's when I sit down and think about it, but not in my everyday, non-composed, off center, human reality. BTW, I had a house-mate who did a Perelandra garden one year, and used a pendulum to work with the nature fairies to design every aspect of the garden - when to plant what, where, and how much of it. I remember that it was a stunningly vibrant and pretty garden, and I think we didn't have any pest problems as well.
So, sister, it's where you say "needlessly torture animals" that I don't quite resonate to your question. We're all carrying out our soul's purpose. My own folks were mixed up in the Holocaust thing, but as I sit here it seems to me that Mr. H wasn't really cruel. He was rather pursuing his soul's purpose, and so were a whole lot of other people with him. He reminded us that technological society was not a panacea - that there were deeper matters to attend to. We, in the sense of global society, didn't really harken that much, but that's not his fault. He did his best, and we have temporized and remained asleep. I came across somewhere the ties between the Bush's and the Nazi regime, so onward, Christian (No, he wasn't Christian) soldiers, we go.
Ironically, I am pretty darn delicate in mind, emotion and body, so I go out of whack and into judgment pretty wholistically, which is to say I pretty much exist there. I fall into huge sympathy with just about anything, which is not very spiritually evolved. I did a vegan, and pretty much raw, spell for a couple of months this fall, and I did feel pretty good on it. Last night I cooked up a couple of grass fed New York strips for a special dinner, and I had a whole lot of mixed feelings about it.
My own constitution and psychology has fertile ground for playing with this idea of food as embodied spirituality, and, when I sit composed, I don't think it's the choices that matter. I think it's our attitudes towards our choices. Since I am a human mess though, in 3D right now regardless of what density I came from, wisdom, or even love, are going to be fleeting for me. The veil is too intense, and my soul purpose too maelstromey. If I were inclined to be a yogi, or some such that just meditated, then I could maybe, I think, chip away at the furor of my confusion, abate it some, but that is not my thing.
So I can see that I was insensitive in my post, that love and wisdom are much deeper and purer than what I expressed, and I take responsibility for that. My lack of clarity will keep me, well, unclear and confused. And provide opportunity for catalyst to my sisters and brothers. Sort of like Mr. H, I guess. Ick. But no, I don't "think" that cruelty, such as cruelty to animals, really exists. There are choices, and soul purpose, and the divine doesn't judge. There is balance too! There is also reverence, and gratitude, and when you have found dietary choices that resonate for you, then...you know that road. I guess. I don't know. Something's shifting for me. I suppose something maybe shifted for Mr. H when he committed suicide, maybe. So that's what it really comes down to. We're having a little catalyst, positive or negative, and if we work it, and are lucky, some kind of shift can come out of it, some micro-progress on our soul's journey. And micro-progress on our soul's journey is mainly behind the veil - all I get is a human felt sense of something shifting in my body, some sense of release of "something I have been working on," and then the night rushes in and I am confronted with another knot, another bodily and mental sense of confusion, and I scurry about like the vermin filled cockroach to look for more catalyst so I can, if I am lucky, carry it only about as far as a cockroach could carry it before I let one of my sisters or brothers, human or non-human, in to ramp up the catalyst to the point where I notice it, and then, if I'm lucky, I can insulate a moment from the hurley burley to focus and go deeper and maybe something will transmute, maybe I'll resolve some little thing that will bring me a discernible sense of release.
Good Lord - here's another aside to a post that is already rambling all over hell I want to honor and appreciate our mutual maelstrom, our mutual confused journey down here in the dark, our availability to catalyst. No wonder it took gumption to come on down here. We really won't know anything until we shed our skins, and even then, we'll be in lots of different places that I can't really quite relate to, being just in my own unique, singular place.
Sister, I want to honor our catalyst at this moment. I don't claim to understand it, but I feel the passion and the commitment and the caring for lots of things - for me, for the creatures of the earth - and I really want to honor that. Thanx mainly for bringing this up, for reading this post, for bringing your multiple densities of experience to bear in processing it and in interacting with me! Wishing you a fruitful and a rewarding day with much progress on your soul's journey!
Ok, in rereading this post, I just had another aha. I don't think there's a clear distinction between "choices" and "attitudes." They're sort of a mixed up mess. One sort of does both at one time. The sources of our choices contain attitudes, predicated on our soul's purpose and a hundred other things which are either beyond the veil or are too numerous to hold in the light of clarity all at once. So it all flows from our soul's purpose, and the thousands of intermediate steps from there to any particular, given action on a particular day at a particular time, steps that we have creatively built up over a lifetime,and over many, many lifetimes of pursuing our soul purpose. Each moment is some sort of quanta that is, through time/space, linked to the billions of moments in our soulstream. So any discussion of "cruelty free food," or a decision to wear red rather than green today, is a magical episode of unbelievable complexity that reaches to the far corners of our soulstream, and is not what we logically think about it all.

Namaste Sister.
Allen.