Many people say just that to vegetarians, but come on, there is a large difference between chickens and potatoes.
My indecision is to whether or not insects are really meat. 
Not if your objection is on killing and eating living things for food. Vegetarianism based on avoiding killing for food fails on that basis.
When I was a vegetarian, back in the day, the practice was based on not killing animals for any reason. Including for leather and fur. Exploiting animals for labor, eggs, and milk etc depended on one’s personai opinion and how the critters were treated. For example, eggs were largely okay as long as the were truly “free range” and allowed to retire from laying into old age and natural death. Ths same went for dairy cows, but I none of them.
I met a couple in New Mexico who would obtain wool only by combing. 
BTW; we were well aware that our chicken friends ate bugs. No problem. 
They like the taste. I think that’s really what it comes down to. People eat meat because they like the taste.
My only point is, a hypothetical person who did not kill anything for food could look at a vegetarian with the same disbelief that a vegetarian holds towards omnivores and carnivores.
I was joining the conversation, not argueing. 
As mentioned previously, our closest relatives, chimpanzees, also eat meat, and the way they kill animals is probably a lot more painful. Check this out (chimps killing and eating a monkey).
Does that actually happen in real life? On farms that do not go bankrupt in a few years because of all of the retirees they are supporting? Because IRL those chickens are nuggets, those cows are burgers, and the retirements are just stories to fool the people who want to believe them, like sending your elderly dog to live out his days on a farm upstate.
[QUOTE=BallinP0ck3t]
All respect. Its a tricky topic, being that yes we can and probably will do anything we feel like as humans, cause we can get away(for a time)
[/QUOTE]
We can to a certain extent today…thus you have folks like Vegans who can, with a bit of work and effort, have a healthy diet without eating meat or other animal products at all. In the past, however, it wasn’t a matter of personal belief or idiosyncratic behavior, but one of survival. We adapted to THAT environment, and in that environment meat was essential to our diet and to our survival.
Why this seemingly simple concept is beyond so many folks pushing their personal dietary choices and philosophy on the vast majority of humanity remains beyond me.
What do you base your assertion here that we were not happy? Would we have been happier as a species if we went extinct? Would that make us happy, collectively?
Yeah, sort of like water, ehe? Ever gone through sever water withdrawal? 3 days without the stuff and you are history. I mean, maybe we’ve been drinking water for 2+ million years, but we haven’t been happy about it or anything. I’m sure we’d have rather been drinking a nice ice cold beer or something instead of that nasty plain water stuff.
I see no reason to base ones decision not to eat meat on any of this either. It’s a personal choice. Again, why is that so hard to understand? If you don’t want to eat meat, well, I’m not stopping you…knock yourself out. I hope you are smart enough to monitor your diet to ensure you are getting everything you need, but in the end if you don’t it’s no sweat off my brow. I simply don’t CARE what you eat, in the end. Why the converse is not true is, again, beyond me.
That’s nice. I don’t like dwarf porn when it includes donkeys and nuns either, but I acknowledge that my tastes don’t constitute proof that everyone believes what I believe. YOU think it’s repulsive. I don’t. I think, frankly, that some of the stuff Vegans eat is pretty freaking repulsive, and I wouldn’t like to even step in it, let alone put it in my mouth. Different strokes for different folks though. To paraphrase Eddie Murphy, you go ahead and have that nasty tofurkey and squash…I’m going to have a nice steak here, rare, with a baked potato, my one concession to something vaguely vegetative.
Have you ever considered we eat it because not only are we adapted to eat meat, but that we LIKE the stuff? I mean, as a species obviously, since it obviously hinks you out. And have you ever considered that because YOU don’t like something, that this is really meaningless when talking about the other 6+ billion humans bumping along on this rock? That you aren’t, well, broadly representative of the rest of humanity with your aversions? Just a thought, once you put your mind back together for it’s recent explosion, of course.
-XT
It seems to me to that the solution to your quandary would be to just breed a dumber chicken. How much brain does it actually take to eat and poop? A wild chicken is one thing, but a chicken that spends it’s whole life in a cage? With enough research we could eventually come up with a headless chicken that it is fed intravenously and has only autonomic functions and not many of them.
The goal is to come up with a industrial process where meat can raised in a vat and get the animals out of the loop entirely.
I don’t know about commercial farming. I’m talking about a few hens in the back yard who went into their pens and coops at night and the dairy cows were communal. I wasn’t directly involved with the dairy except to get milk. If we had excess eggs we’d take them to the dairy and they’d give them to whoever wanted them.
BTW; we never (rarely) ate the eggs the same day they were laid. We rotated them in the fridge for a few days up to a week or longer.
What? My quandry related to insects?
To your other comment, remember the myth about Mc Donald’s frankenchicks? 
My mom raises a few chickens (mostly as a hobby, though she does get some small profit from them), and she really does let them “retire” after they stop laying. It doesn’t make as much difference as you’d think, since they generally die of old age anyway pretty soon after when they stop laying. So she’s paying for a little extra chicken feed (which is really cheap anyway), and she’s not selling any meat from them (which wouldn’t be worth as much as from young chickens anyway). Eggs from a “humane” farm which lets its hens retire would certainly cost more than from your standard factory farm, but not prohibitively so.
Of course insects are animal protein, just like the microscopic animals that nobody can avoid ingesting.
We’re all technically omnivores - it all depends on where you, personally, draw the line on the evolutionary advancement scale. Virtually all humans decline cannibalism, some refuse to eat the more advanced animals but will eat fish and shellfish, some won’t eat any animal but will consume animal by-products and others are strict vegans that won’t even touch eggs or milk (although I do wonder how they feel about breast feeding).
All vegetables seem to be fair game (I don’t know of anyone who will eat fungus but not the more highly evolved fruits) in spite of all animals and plants playing their parts in the symphony of life and death, but even the most devout vegans don’t seem to consider the mites or other tiny and microscopic animals in their food to be a violation of their ethics.
Thanks, Chronos. I was getting kinda lonely there for a bit. 
Unless we all go back to being farmers this won’t work on a universal scale. And probably not then. There are too damn many of us to feed us all without commercial farming, which in this case is anything more than subsistence farming.
Breast (human) milk doesn’t exploit the provider. Well, it does somewhat, but the mother usually doesn’t mind at all. In fact, I hear it’s quite pleasurable for both.
There are such folks as fructarians, who will not only eat nothing but plants, but only plant parts (generally fruit) which can be harvested without harming the plant. It’s almost impossible to stay healthy on such a diet, though.
I hope I didn’t imply otherwise. There’s no way we’d be able to support the entire population of the planet this way. But we can support that relatively small segment of the population that personally chooses to avoid factory-farming conditions.
DNA research shows that mushrooms are more closely related to animals than to free plants.
There’s always the artificial meat animal in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.