I am farrrrrrr from being a vegetarian, but even I can appreciate some of their arguments about health and so on. If eating lead-contaminated fish causes cancer, you're just dumb for eating that fish instead of a salad. What makes less makes sense is the "humane" argument. If someone kills a child, that's plainly murder--even if it's just a toddler, that toddler would have grown up to be a rational human (in other words, it's murder). However, if you kill a cow, it's not as though that cow would ever have grown up to become a rational being.

A few things I wonder about are whether animals feel sorrow. I oppose that to feeling pain, since any animal will respond instinctively to burning and what-not. It's a different matter if the are somehow able to reflect on their experience and get depressed, or really look on with anticipation and fear. What I've seen, though, is that you can butcher an animal right in front of another (even of the same species), and they seem oblivious. In fact, in many cases they will cannibalize.