No respect for animals!

I have lived in the US during the past 4 years and one thing I have noticed is that being a vegetarian is quite a challenge in this country. When I was in India it was common saying "there is no value for human life in India", here it is the opposite, "there is absolute disregard for anything that is not human." This became evident during a conversation I had with someone I met. We were talking about the depleting Tiger population and he commented that the Sunderbans in India would be a good place to hunt. I replied saying that the tigers are a highly protected species in India and that there are only about 1,500 left in the wild. Pat came the reply: "There is only one me!". What I infer from this statement is that an individual is more important than everything else in this country.

Another pet peeve I have about this country is the way they price food products. A lb (454 gm) of tomatoes is around $1.99-3.99 while the cost of a lb of beef is about $1.41-2.51. Isn't that amazing? A living animal is valued far less than a plant, it would probably take many lbs of tomato plants to feed one meal to a cow. While a gallon of water is more than enough to feed several tomato plants. Hence whichever restaurant one visits, it is very difficult to get a decent vegetarian meal.