Sentient Experience, Conscience and Ethics

I accidentally bought a pack of chicken hearts, cooked half of them, and then found myself staring at the rest, wondering whether I should bury them instead of eating them. It was a strange moment, almost an epiphany—suddenly seeing that animals must have their own context, their own interior lives, and even if no one can “prove” emotion, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The materialists can go fuck themselves on that point.

The moment you see a plate of food not as an abstract product but as the remains of a creature that once pulsed with its own rhythms, the distance collapses. A chicken’s heart is not just protein; it is the center of a life that once beat against the same vulnerability every living thing shares. Awareness of that transforms eating into something uneasy, because it becomes impossible not to imagine what was taken and what is lost.

From there, vegetarianism—or at least a conscious softening of appetite for meat—feels less like ideology and more like rational consequence, inevitability. To take seriously that all sentient beings have experiences worth preserving is to see them as valid fellow travellers in cosmological existence rather than as resources. It isn’t about purity, or judgment, but about respect: a recognition that minimizing harm, when possible, is simply part of living with eyes (and hearts) open, kind and meaningful.