Why I Decided to Stop Eating Meat for at Least a Year
For most of my life, I’ve loved animals in a way that felt instinctive, almost primordial. As a child, I lay curled up in the dog basket beside our family dogs. I spent holidays dragging my father through every zoo, wildlife park, and aquarium we passed. I saved my pocket money to maintain my two aquariums, testing pH levels by hand and caring for their inhabitants with a seriousness bordering on ritual.
And yet, like most people raised in Western consumer culture, I learned to separate my affection for animals from the meat on my plate. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was muscle memory, woven into daily routines so early and so thoroughly that it never felt like a choice.
In the past months, while working on my writing about consciousness, animism, and what it means to be alive, that internal contradiction has become impossible to ignore. The scientific literature I’ve been reading, especially the work of primatologist Frans de Waal, makes it clear that many animals possess self-awareness, long-term memory, social intelligence, and emotional complexity far beyond what polite society prefers to acknowledge.
Dolphins call each other by name.
Crows remember human faces for years.
Elephants mourn their dead.
Pigs, at the typical age of slaughter, score cognitively in the range of a human toddler.
These facts are not fringe opinions. They are well-established findings from comparative cognition. And once you understand them, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the illusion that animals are unthinking objects produced for our convenience.
Unconscious Meat-Eating
I don’t think most of us choose to eat meat. We inherit it, culturally, socially, emotionally. It is woven into memory, family rituals, and especially into habit.
That’s why even after years of feeling uneasy about factory farming, I still found myself ordering meat automatically. Not because I consciously wanted it, but because some primal version of myself, conditioned since childhood, continued to run the show.
The body acts first. The mind rationalizes afterward.
If I want to change this, I have to change my muscle memory:
a new normal that defaults to not eating meat, supported by familiar, comforting alternatives I don’t have to think about. New habits, not new theories.
Industrial Animal Farming Horror Stories
You don’t have to be vegan, spiritual, or scientifically inclined to be disturbed by how industrial farming actually works. Here are a few things that are not opinions but verifiable facts:
Broiler chickens (the kind used for most supermarket chicken meat) have been bred to grow so unnaturally fast that many cannot stand under their own weight. Broken legs, ruptured organs, and heart failure are normal outcomes, not exceptions.
Pigs in industrial facilities are often kept in gestation crates so small that they cannot turn around for months at a time. Their cognitive complexity rivals that of dogs—but their lives look like a dystopian prison.
Cows used for milk production often have their calves removed within 24–48 hours after birth, causing extreme stress for both mother and calf, which is documented, filmed, and extensively studied.
Fish farms can have parasite infestations so rampant that entire populations suffer open sores and blindness.
These are not activist exaggerations. They are described in veterinary journals, industry reports, and government inspections.
And yet most of us, myself included, eat the products of this system without looking closely. Not out of cruelty, but because modern life is designed to keep uncomfortable truths invisible.
Reclaiming Choice
So why give up meat for at least a year?
Because I want to make my actions match what I already know.
Because I want to stop running on unconscious scripts.
Because I want to change the default settings of my life.
This isn’t about becoming perfect. I’m not ruling out that I may return to meat someday, in a more conscious way, perhaps from ethical sources, local farms, or hunting. But I want to break the automatic reflex that turns animals into abstractions and meals into moral blind spots.
To do this, I’m building new habits:
go-to vegetarian and vegan dishes,
learning plant-based proteins that actually satisfy me,
planning meals instead of improvising,
treating food choices as part of the bigger conscious-living journey I’m on.
Most importantly, I want to give myself the chance to see who I become when I stop ignoring something that has bothered me for years.
A Year Long Reset
A year is long enough to rewire cravings, routines, and emotional associations. Long enough for abstinence to become normal. Long enough to change my relationship with food in a way that feels meaningful, not moralistic, not fanatical, but intentional.
If consciousness begins with awareness and motivation, as my research suggests, then this is simply the next step: being aware of what I consume, and choosing to act differently.
This is not a manifesto. It’s a reset.
A way of aligning my habits with my values, and my values with what I now understand about the minds of the beings we share this world with.
And if my experiment fails, at least it will fail consciously.