As People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India’s Cutest Vegetarian Next Door contest heats up, 25-year-old Deepti Nautiyal of Srinagar, Garhwal, may take home the prize. She has beaten out hundreds of other entrants from across India to be among the 10 female and 10 male contestants to advance to the final round. PETA will crown two winners (one male and one female) Cutest Vegetarian Next Door. All visitors to PETA's website can vote for their favourite finalists till October 28 to choose the winners who will be named on November 2.
Nautiyal says that she was a staunch non-vegetarian until one day she brought chickens home from the market. She says that they made her realise that “animals are sensitive and feel pain too”.
“On average, vegetarians are slimmer and healthier than meat-eaters are – and over their lifetimes, they spare countless animals the horrors of factory farms, slaughterhouses and fishing nets”, says PETA India nutritionist Bhuvaneshwari Gupta.
In addition to causing animal suffering on a massive scale, eating meat and dairy foods has been conclusively linked to heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancer and obesity. Also, a United Nations report concluded that the meat industry is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global”, added Gupta.