I was taken aback by Peter Axisa's arguments (The Sunday Times, August 12). I believe that people who have animal companions living with them and who love them would never ever think of killing and consuming them, for two reasons.

The psychological bond that develops between an animal companion and the individual who cares for the animal supersedes any other instinct. Secondly, we are brought up in a society where certain animals, such as cows and chickens, are treated as objects, while others like dogs and cats, are treated as companions.

I consider rabbits to be in a rather hazy place: ambiguous animals that are sometimes treated as objects, while at times they are treated as companions. Such contradictory demarcations are all a product of social learning.

In essence, vegetarianism is about challenging current thinking - as other similar movements before have done - and ultimately emerged from several ideas. One main notion inherent in the vegetarian ideal is ethically-driven and involves the choice of changing one's behaviour to reduce the harm done to the environment; and to the suffering inflicted on animals and to our planet.

Challenging society's attitudes of eating patterns and notions is not easy, and there is a variety of reasons why an individual is driven to adopt such a lifestyle. In 2004, I conducted local research for my undergraduate thesis "On becoming vegetarian: a study of beliefs and motives", which discusses the motives behind such a change in lifestyle. It is available on the Vegetarian Society of Malta Website (www.vegmalta.org).

A fact worth noting - an aspect of meat-eating that non-vegetarians are unaware of - is that when humans consume meat, they are, in essence, eating vegetables originally converted into meat, at a great financial and environmental cost, besides inflicting unnecessary suffering to animals.

This reality translates in non-vegetarians consuming much more vegetables than vegetarians. Consequently, the issue of GMOs proves to be a far more significant concern to non-vegetarians, especially more so since most of the GMO-produced soya goes to animal feed.

Having mentioned soya products, the gist of the article that Mr Axisa quoted from the Website, included two points. Consumer needs and wants are extremely powerful. So many substitute products are widely available that it is now much easier to make the transition to a vegetarian diet than it was several years ago. However, just because soya products are so widely available, this does not mean that vegetarians eat soya every day, as his use of the word 'staple' implies.

As a proud 'convert' to vegetarianism, I now couldn't imagine living any other way.