(Excerpt from lecture series on Caitanya Caritamrta, Kartika 2006, Part 2, Lecture 6 – ‘Raghunatha Dasa and the Muslim tax collector)’
Anyone who eats meat can’t help but be cruel. At one time or another or at all times they must be cruel, because meat is produced by cruelty and whatever you associate with, that quality you take on, consciously or unconsciously, knowingly or unknowingly.
So chicken or goat or a cow or pig or bird or whatever, these animals are killed. They are conscious beings. They are living entities, like we are but in different form. So, when they are killed, they are very frightened, they are very afraid and they are full of fear and anxiety and all that fear and all that anxiety is in their mind and that goes into their blood and that goes into their meat and you kill that animal and eat that animal to live on.
So people that are non- vegetarian, they are very cruel by nature because their very existence is made of cruelty. Right? Because to eat animals you have to be so cruel - so much cruelty and violence is in the activity - that all that cruelty and violence comes into you.
So, in your basic dealings, your basic thinking there is always a touch of cruelty or hardness or selfishness or meanness or violence in your speaking, in your thinking, in your acting. You can’t help it. The more you eat meat, the more your will be like this.
That’s why these animals – these lions and tigers, these meat-eating animals, they are very cruel. They are vicious. That’s their nature. Their nature, it’s like a cycle. They eat animals, they viciously murder other animals and that comes into them and the animal is so fearful when he dies in their jaws. So all that fear and cruelty and violence comes back to them when they eat the meat. So it’s like perpetuating.
Human beings are not meant to be like that.