You know, I feel like that wasn't a very good answer, and I'm going to try to improve on it -- not because I expect to convince you (given the nature of the forum, I doubt you're even still reading ;) -- but because the underlying philosophical issues are interesting and important to me.

It seems to me that the resources recommended by you and by the sister post here turn on horror at death and suffering, and recoiling from it personally. I think some of this is justified -- there are real abuses -- and some of it is simple shock. An attempt to reject and opt out of the principle that living things consume life.

Anything worth doing involves horror and hard things. Running a business involves being willing to fire as well as to hire. Running a forum means being willing to set rules and enforce them -- and creating a community in accordance with your vision means being willing to force people out or down who detract from that. A surprising amount of medicine involves hurting people in the process of healing them--an EMT might tell you that saving people's lives often involves wrestling them, because what you're doing hurts and they'll fight you. Writ large, I once heard it said that going to war requires accepting the fact that the war will cost lives -- the lives of soldiers, it's easy to accept; the lives of innocents caught in the war zone, that's the tough one. It is a statistical certainty that some children will be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and if you want go to war, you need to believe ahead of time that what you're fighting for is worth it, because it's a reality you will encounter on the battlefield.

There are two reactions to this.

To recoil from the horror of war by saying no war is ever worth it.

Or to look at the things war accomplishes and say that they mean that much.

I'm firmly in the second camp. I think to always refuse to fight guarantees a perpetual tyranny of evil, and I think that is worth resisting -- potentially at a very high and horrible cost. And I think, in more specific cases, sometimes the independence and self-determination of a people is a bright and valuable thing that absolutely can be worth war.

Does this state of affairs mean that these horrors are okay? It absolutely does not. The medic must be as kind and compassionate to his patients as he can. The solder must check and double check and triple check his intelligence, and keep his moral sense about him on the ground, and is compelled to refuse orders that are clearly wrong. The parent must never excessively punish the child. If firing workers is necessary for the running of a business, it is nonetheless the responsibility of the boss to navigate that situation with compassion and grace.

But never lose sight of the bigger picture.

Merely recoiling from horror makes you lose track of things that are worth it. What is needed is not someone who is so horrified at terrible things that he will never do them, and not someone so callous as to never mind doing them, but someone who can feel the horror of the cost and the joy of the payoff and hold it all at once and navigate the situation with both compassion and without compromising the vision of the bigger picture. In fact, what is needed is precisely what the parent post thought impossible: someone who can kill and love the same being, at the same moment. Such a person can be both compassionate, and achieve, and to be such a person is the only way to achieve compassionately.

Anyway. It is absolutely true that animal death -- however nicely done -- is a horror. The intuition behind that goes back centuries, cross-culturally. Do you know, in the ancient world, when they sacrificed animals to the gods, they would generally still eat the animal? The sacrifice wasn't the meat, it was the life -- the sense that life is sacred and belongs to something beyond us is ancient. And if we, in our materialist world, don't invoke the gods -- even those closest to animal slaughter feel the sacredness of the animal's life, and the sense that something precious is lost. Sure. It's terrible that animals die.

I think, in writing this, I've failed to make an appeal for what the tremendous upside is, that justifies that.

It is true, that all life costs life. Veganism doesn't excuse you from this. Crops wipe out entire ecosystems -- birds and mice and whatnot can't live alongside corn fields the way they can at a ranch. Farmers are compelled to shoot feral hogs to protect crops, or to wipe out insects of one sort or another. Even the notional monk who eats from his own, extremely gently nourished vegetable garden, has to keep the rabbits and the potato-bugs away, and if nothing else, takes food they want. And of course, the sort of nutritionally complete diet you need can't be accomplished that way -- shipping in exotic foods from far away! Emissions! Nothing is blameless. (And along this metric, I'm a pretty big fan of regenerative ranching; I think it does quite well.)

But why meat? Couldn't that animal death be somehow less, or more removed or... something? What's the big up side?

I would say, "human thriving". People like meat. They thrive on it! Oh, I know you could get in a big paper fight about optimal human nutrition, but let's ride past that and talk about some facts on the ground.

Let me start with a case where I think it's pretty likely you'll agree with me: alcohol. The manufacture of alcohol necessarily involves the slaughter of yeast. And yet, when I weigh the romantic dinners over wine, the beers with friends watching a game, the cocktails and parties and Christmas wassail against all the generations of the lives of yeasts, the scale tips so hard it's like they're not there.

I submit to you that meat is not dissimilar.

We're coming up on Thanksgiving. Since antiquity, people have celebrated with big feasts centered on meat. If I look at all the Thanksgiving dinners about to happen, and all the turkeys' lives it costs, again, I find the scale tips so hard as to make the question silly. These feasts are precious.

The discarding of meat is the discarding of burgers and fries with friends. Of crispy bacon and pancakes. Of backyard barbeque. Can you do these things without meat? I think that's like suggesting you can party without booze. You can.... but it's not the same. Perhaps you see hedonism here. Me, I see joy. I see human thriving. I see precious moments worth having.

And I think it's not as trivial as you might think. I could talk about the health benefits of animal nutrition -- substantial, if you examine the nutritional deficiencies of past, poor populations who couldn't afford it (and hoo boy, if you set the most horrible factory farming against the suffering of poverty and malnutrition, I will pick the humans with ENTHUSIASM. Save the children and bring on the caged chickens!). I could talk about carnivore diets and autoimmune conditions. I could talk about the achievements of atheletes and their crazy diets. I could talk about rickets and milk and eggs, and the improving lives of the poor people who finally got off of nothing but rice and beans thanks to factory farms. I could talk about the theory that humans only ever became intelligent because of eating meat.

But I think what I want to talk about is a pizza commercial. It's been years -- I don't remember the specifics of the ad -- but the gist was that pizza enables things. Say what you will about kale and quinoa, pizza is there at those final exam study sessions, at the midnight engineering sessions, on the hacking runs. Look at a big and complicated and difficult thing, and you're probably seeing something where, at some awful moment along the way, pizza helped. I think that's true. I find that a compelling point.

I'm convinced meat is like that. It enables human thriving. That the joy people have in feasting isn't mere hedonism -- it's the push that gets them to the goal. It enables the inspiration and energy that drives them to be awesome. I think that joy is important, and real . . .

. . . and absolutely worth what it costs.

Can you have that without meat? To be fair, I think the Hindu population is a pretty good argument that you can get there, at least with vegetarianism. They seem pretty happy. But I'm not so convinced by that that I'm ready to prescribe it for everyone. Perhaps it turns on some peculiarity of culture or biology; perhaps they're not doing as well as it looks. I'm not going to say that's doing it wrong, but neither am I ready to buy into it for myself -- you'd have to prove it to me. For my money, the Thanksgiving dinners are not an applecart I'm ready to upset, even if people who kill turkeys sometimes do it wrong. To me, this is one of those "don't lose the big picture" things. Maybe we could have Thanksgiving with tofurkey? I think a lot of people would tell you "it's not the same". And until they feel it is the same, in full measure, leave it be. It's that important.

Human vitality is a precious thing. And one of the forms it takes is gentleness! Some people who are vegetarian out of gentleness are sincere and beautiful souls, and that is the form that their human vitality takes. I think that's beautiful, and I think it's absolutely worth the feral hogs and mice and global emissions and whatnot that it winds up costing. I also think it's incumbent on the practitioner to make it worth that. Mighty examples of gentleness can change the world, even if the people inspired by it apply it in other ways. I think Gandhi exemplifies this path. I don't think he would have been Gandhi without his vegetarianism, and I think he changed the world in some really big ways. I'm glad we had him.

But on the other hand, I worry very much that some vegans are not like this -- that they are not running towards gentleness, but away from blame; that they are not driven by generosity, but by a sense of their own smallness. That they leave in their wake, not people inspired to be gentle in other spheres, but people made sadder and smaller by the drumbeat that all that matters in life is to consume less. I wonder, how small your self-esteem must be, to avoid ice cream to spare dairy cows who are clearly, if you meet them, quite happy with their jobs. This looks less like gentleness and more like abuse to me -- just who told you you were morally compelled to impose so little, that your joy was valued so cheap? -- and I want to hug them and tell them it's okay and they're worth it. I find the situation tragic for the human, and the more angry and self-focused the person, the more I suspect this path -- anger is often a result of being hurt. And like, perhaps the people around them are telling them that their thriving isn't worth the humane death of a cow (or even the statistical inhumane death). But I would firmly disagree. It is absolutely worth it.

People are awesome. Eat bacon with relish, and grin, and go create art. That's a trade I'd take all day, on anyone's behalf.