In article ,
Rusty Mase wrote:

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 05:49:22 GMT, jOhN
wrote:

"Buddhism, from its inception, enjoined treating all animals with
kindness and compassion as well as required the observance of a
vegeterian diet cannot be denied.

One of the groups espousing Buddhism are the Janists and as I recall
they extend this reverence for life to both plants and animals. In
their view, reincarnation can be in the form of both plants and
animals. So it is possible to be reincarnated as a turnip and,
egads!, end up in the produce section of your local super market.
Janists are thus relegated to finding their sustenance in the trash
can. It is not their fault that discarded food was prepared from a
living organism. Something like that, but I probably put some western
influence in the interpretation.

As gardeners, we are involved in growing plants. Many garden
vegetables and fruits have been genetically modified by selecting for
suitable food production and we end up creating real genetic
monstrosities like broccoli. Then we go out and eliminate a nice
native prairie and replace it with monocultures of these genetic
aberrations, then decapitate them when mature and haul them off, still
alive, to the local market where they are displayed, fatally injured,
waiting for someone to haul them off, cut them up, possibly boil them,
and eat them.

I have always been at a loss as to why this scenario is acceptable but
raising and then killing a chicken for food is not acceptable. It is
based on the fallible concept of "sentience", the human sense that a
living organisms mentally responds to you. The less you sense this
capacity to respond, the less you grant an organism the right to be
revered. This argument seems a little too self-serving to me and I
have always had difficulty conversing with people who espouse a more
or less religious view of vegetarianism.

As gardeners we are better off revering everything, whether we
considering it to be alive or not.

Rusty Mase

applause!!!
All life is sacred!
--
K.