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I have to start with a true confession: I was once a vegetarian, for about four years. The reasons were to do with taste and smell — not religion, nor morality, not tradition, not feeling bad about eating the flesh of dead animals, as George Bernard Shaw so evocatively, if crudely, put it.

However, I am no longer a vegetarian — I was seduced into evil ways by a steamed crab — and can now hold forth about the joys of meaty gluttony with glee. And ghee, even.

Like any reasonable and compassionate person, I think that stray dogs have rights, wild life must be saved, global warming and climate change are real and so on. But I also believe that goats and chicken are food and that tigers have as much right to eat as deer.

So sue me. I have canines. I am an omnivore. I am an animal. I eat living things — animals and vegetables. I should add minerals to this, but I can’t think of any minerals I enjoy eating.

Newspapers carried a story the other day about men who grow breasts, a disease called gynaecomastia, where breast tissue in men gets enlarged. According to doctors this could be because of hormonal changes, certain kinds of medication or obesity. So far so unfortunate.

Promptly, the radical vegetarian brigade jumped in. It is animal fats, they screamed. If men gave up on animal fats, they wouldn’t have ‘moobs’. Animal fats are responsible for everything that’s wrong with the world, they yelled. Yeah, right.

If women stopped eating animal fats, would they also lose their breasts? And just what do vegans— those higher beings who would eschew to chew all animal products — do when confronted with mother’s milk, an animal fat if there ever was one? Do they deny their wee ‘ickle babies that wonderful colostrum, the first expression from their mummy’s breast, that gives babies immunity?

In fact, these vegans have the right to do what they want. Eat up all the roots and weeds that grow on the Amazon forest floor (destroy the rainforest in other words), concentrate on obscure grains and cereals, look sad and miserable from being hungry all the time, whatever. And so do I.

But they might just like to do it quietly and not get illogical and throw tantrums. There is little about vegetarians that makes them better or worse people than non-vegetarians just as you cannot really claim that a lion is worse than a cow. Adolf Hitler, after all, was a vegetarian.

He also loved music, little children and dogs. It was just people of a certain kind that he disliked, and enough to kill. Clearly, his proclivity to vegetables did not make him a better person. So why do these vegetarians think they have the right to reign tyrannically on us?

Vegetables, by the way, do not like to be eaten and that is why some vegetables give you gas and others are covered in thorns. Cows, goats and pigs on the other hand chose to be domesticated and in spite of being eaten, outnumber all other animals on earth.

When a great uncle of mine returned to India after crossing the seven seas to become a barrister, his father (my great grandfather) asked him whether he had eaten beef. “Yes,” confessed the son. “Ah well,” said my great grandfather, “What better place for a cow than the stomach of a Brahmin.”