Elihnig: this part of one of those posts is just WRONG: "A question frequently posed by vegetarians is: how can you justify killing an innocent animal for food? This question may seem difficult to answer at first but really it is not. Would it be reasonable to ask a lion to justify his killing of an innocent gazelle? Of course not: it is natural for the lion to kill the gazelle and that is justification enough. And what of a gazelle's right not to be eaten? Put this way, you can see that such questions are really meaningless. The same is true for us, for we are not a vegetarian species. "

The lion has no choice but to eat a gazelle.

We have a choice.

It's this simple:

Imagine a person driving down a road at night. A deer is caught in his headlights, stunned, frozen.

He's driving a big huge SUV.

He COULD choose to wait for the deer to come to its senses and bound off into the forest. But he likes the taste of venison so he plows the deer down, takes it home, butchers it, and eats it.

It is absolutely CLEAR to me that he made the wrong choice. Clearly the more moral choice would be to wait a few moments, allow the deer to go off and live its life, and then go home and eat some tofu.

However, most meat eaters don't see this choice with any moral clarity because they do not actually SEE the animal suffer and die. Since they don't see it, they don't think about it.

And yes, there are some who actually do kill their own meat. Yuck.