You bring up some interesting points, Tiptup. I don't like quoting multiple parts of posts at once, so I'll just reference you as best I can. It's interesting what you said about factory farms, because I've pondered the very same thing myself. I hesitate to call it a necessary evil because I have a hard time accepting that something as cruel as that can be necessary. Bear with me for a minute. For the uninformed, before the advancements of preservation and refrigeration, meat was not eaten nearly as often as it is today. That and the cost was very high. As the ability to eat meat grew, the demand for it increased proportionately, and, as the demand grew, the industry of meat became profitable. Continue on, and, due to the high consumption of meat products now, it is hardly cost-efficient to produce meat without going to the factory farm system. I understand that. But it still seems like a poor tradeoff. I agree with your statement of one form of life being fundamentally from other forms of life. Well, in that case, a living consumer product is certainly distinguishable from a non-living consumer product. So you can hardly deem it fair or ethical to treat live animals in the same way you would treat the production of a chair or a car on an assembly line. But there's the dilemna. How can you keep up with the demand of hundreds of millions of people while still treating the animals you're preparing for consumption as living creatures? I honestly don't have an answer for that. But I can't allow myself to support it.

But I have to totally disagree with you on the notion of killing animals for sport. Even when I ate meat, I detested such reasoning, as I find it a blatant disregard and complete waste of life. Nowadays, I'm sure that anybody who hunts or fishes does so because they enjoy it to some degree. I never "hunted" per se, but I did used to fish on occasion when I was a little kid. Though it was usually catch and release, I did keep one, I believe. And, yes, I did so because I enjoyed it. But I would never kill for the sake of killing, and, as far as I can tell, most people (or at least most people I've known) hunt not only because they enjoy it but because they then use the animal for food. And while I may not ever be able to stomach the thought of going out and killing animals, I can respect that more than I can for people hunting "for sport."

Heh, and it seems my Hitler thing has been misinterpreted again, so let me again reiterate: I just think it's a funny and ironic comparison since Hitler was a vegetarian, and I do indeed understand the context in which it was originally being used.