As humans, we do get to choose what we eat, and when we choose to eat a plant, we are eating (i.e., harming) just that plant, plus indirectly whatever nutrients that plant consumed over its lifetime (and we are also harming whatever beings may have been living on that plant or who were injured or killed in the harvesting process). But when we eat an animal, we are eating not just that animal, but also indirectly all of the plants and other beings that that animal ate over its lifetime - those plants became the flesh that we eat.

Lions and other carnivorous animals do a lot of things besides eat meat. They live outdoors, not in houses; they don't wear clothes or drive around in cars; they usually sleep for many hours after eating a meal. Why cite just one of the many things that they do and argue that we should imitate them? This doesn't make much sense.

Everyone is caught in the web of his or her own actions and is bound by past karmas (actions). Good and bad are relative terms. Every action takes one to the next place.

See the other person's potential for kindness and bolster your own expression of kindness. If you see them in a negative way, the power of your perception will only help to keep them that way as you polarize yourself from them, assuming a superior role, seeing yourself as the good guy and them as the bad guy.

Inspiration pushes me out of my tight intellectual comfort zone and into humility, the wonderous state of not knowing. From this place of zero, limitless possibilities seem to arise.

It is true that every being is enjoying life or suffering as a direct result of his or her own past actions. The animals in the factory farms may have been meat-eating human beings in a previous birth; we don't know, and it is not our place to judge.

Choosing to be kind rather than to be cruel benefits everyone.