> Simply put, I do not buy the idea that by being vegetarian I'm doing significantly less harm - I may be one slight degree more removed from the animal that has to die to put food on my plate, but morally it makes little difference, and technically it makes even less difference.

Those animals are going to be mauled by the machinery anyways. You are not saving them from the mauling by eating meat. If you avoid animal products or at least limit your consumption of them, you are reducing the demand to produce these products, thereby reducing the amount of animals that are ravaged by our industrialized food engine. While this might not seem to make a noticeable different due to our ever-increasing population, were all the vegetarians/vegans out there to revert back into omnivores demanding meat/dairy/eggs a resulting ramping up of production to meet this demand would occur.

There are two points that I have with your argument:

1. Animals that are ripped to shreds by farming equipment are at least able to live a 'free' life in the wild. Animals that are part of the industrialized livestock industry commonly live in cages where they can't even turn around. Sometimes their flesh melds into the cage walls (as can be the case with egg-laying chickens) completely grafting them to their cage (i.e. hens whose feet have grown around the bars/wire of their cage floor leaving them permanently fixed to the cage).

2. The idea that "well animals are going to die anyways so why even bother" is not an attitude that I find healthy or conducive to change.

> I object against this presumptuous attitude. Plenty of us meat-eaters ask these questions - and we decide to continue being omnivores while being entire conscious of its consequences (as well as the myriad of negative consequences of pure vegetarianism). "Them ignorant meat eaters" is all too common a presumptuous attitude I get from self-righteous vegetarians. Thanks for portraying us as a bunch of ostriches with heads in the sand, while heroic vegetarians lead the way. On, comrades!

I apologize if I came off that way. Most of the time when expressing your views as a vegetarian or a vegan all you get are responses like, "I'm going to eat TWICE as much meat just to offset your moral choice! Haw haw haw!" And I agree that there are people that have at least weighed these ideas and have made the choice to eat meat. I applaud you for doing so.

There are plenty of people that think of the topic as 'taboo' because it's 'unsightly.' I've met people that don't go to petting zoos because they don't want to see the farm animals that they are eating when they eat meat. The idea that they might associate the meat with the face of an animal frightens them because it means that they might end up with a moral dilemma. I have relatives that don't want to hear about the conditions in the slaughterhouses because it would make it hard for them to eat meat. I have a huge loss of respect for these people.

Update: I should add that I don't 'look down' on people that eat meat like a lot of vegans/vegetarians do. Though I may have come off as having a self-righteous attitude, I don't. Unlike a lot of vegans, I don't have an extremist attitude. If we were able to ween ourselves off of the heavy dependence that we have on animals (at least in food) I think that we would be in a much better place morally and nutritionally as a society (though I am not of the mind that a vegan diet is 'automatically' healthy like some people seem to believe; there are tons of unhealthy foods that are perfectly vegan).