Not anyone, anything.
Someone once told me that hundreds of animals die just to make one plate of salad. It never occurred to me or i guess moral reason vegetarians that farmers have to kill tons of animals just to protect their crops, and not ugly ones like cows and chickens either but the cute ones like bunnies and mice. That’s without even counting insects as animals, in which case one plate of salad is down right genocide.
I’m really sceptical about claims like these. Besides, it’s an unusual meat-eater who doesn’t eat veg too.
Cows are cute! Not that that’s a reason not to farm them, but they are lovely animals.
Humans are omnivores. I embrace the carnivore side of my diet.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t give a shit how animals are treated. I do. I buy organic when I can. I buy free-range, cage-free chickens and eggs. I try to buy beef from farms that treat their animals humanely.
You missed mine- there’s no real reason not to include meat as part of a balanced diet.
Why don’t you watch basketball?
[ul]
[li]I’m a racist jerk[/li][li]At school people laughed at how bad I played, and I’ve never got over it[/li][li]I’m too poor to afford tickets or a TV set[/li][li]It’s all too fast for a slow-brained simpleton like me[/li][li]I can’t read, and therefore couldn’t read the question (or this response)[/li][/ul]
Well, that’s fine, but my point - and probably Uncle’s, since we wound up saying almost the same thing - was that even though I currently sit behind a computer monitor for 8 hours per day, if, say, the zombie apocalypse were to happen tomorrow and I had to revert to hunter-gatherer mode to survive and continue to eat, I would still be in posession of 100% of the “evolved gifts” that allowed our ancestors to hunt and kill meat and thus, survive and continue to eat.
Also, while I’m thinking of them, I’m pretty sure our ancestors didn’t eat tofu. I’m not going to go into whether or not it’s healthy, but whenever militant vegetarians and vegans start to wax poetic about eating all-natural food I always think, “What’s natural about tofu-based cheese substitute?”
Animals are killed during crop harvesting.
Ask anyone that’s driven a wheat combine.
Voles,rabbits, snakes, fawns and ground nesting birds, to name a few.
leans across previous posters to give Leaffan his well-deserved thump
i would strongly suggest against hunting zombies for food.. 
while i’m pretty sure my ancestors ate tofu, i’ll chime in and say i’m baffled by all the meat substitute some vegetarians eat. which apparently many do, judging by the few so called vegetarian food places i’ve seen. vegetables (and tofu) are delicious. however, a diet consisting of mainly tofu or beans pretending to be meat is just .. unnatural.
I know, right? This might be the stupidest poll I’ve ever seen*, and this is coming from someone who created a poll about whether or not your voicemail greeting is asinine.
*All Skald hypotheticals excluded.
I would say our family food choices in general come from health and planet considerations, and that does involve eating considerably less meat than the average person. We eat red meat rarely (ha) maybe once a month or so, usually at a meal not prepared at home. Sometimes in the summer we want real beef burgers or steaks to grill but red meat is not a staple. We eat a lot of chicken and turkey, I try to buy organic and local when it is possible, I pay attention to where our eggs and dairy come from, but I do buy regular stuff when getting the good stuff isn’t available.
We share a garden with my sister in the summer. We eat vegetarian meals quite often, just because I don’t center my cooking around meat all the time. I don’t think about how to specifically make veggie meals, they just often are that way. I didn’t really think about how many of our meals are vegetarian until I had a friend ask for vegetarian recipies and I realized I make quite a few. Almost every week we will have potato and spinach pie, veggie pizzas, or pasta with meatless sauce (sometimes all of these.) But I will make those same recipies with meat too, it just depends on what we have around.
Many vegetarians are unbelievably smug. Vegetarian debates rank second only to Mac vs. PC on Tingbudong’s “shoot-yourself-in-the-face” index.
That said, I employ a meat-lite diet and go with local flesh when I can because I do agree that eating lower on the food chain/locally is probably better for the environment. Being an omnivore also allows me the ability to easily chow down on most things offered to me when I’m traveling without having to awkwardly explain that I don’t eat meat.
Personally, I can’t stand traveling abroad with vegetarians, especially the more militant ones…to the point that I will go way out of my way not to dine with them.
There was a fairly hard-core vegetarian in my jeep group that wandered across Mongolia. I thought she was going to die…although she didn’t seem to have a problem with the airag.
This would be a pretty powerful critique if pasture-forage production was actually practiced on an industrial scale. Pasture-forage production is about as far from the modern industrial factory farming processes as can be.
For a quick snapshot of the environmental costs of the actual industrial meat production processes see here.
Nice exclusion. 
Is the ‘why are you a vegetarian?’ equally stupid?
Of course some animals are killed during the growing of crops - and they’re killed due to milk production, too. Is anyone really arguing that the average vegetarian diet kills more ickle animals than the average meat-eater’s diet, which includes veggies unless they’re really unhealthy?
The ‘veggies’ in that post was referring to vegetables, not vegetarians; I did not intend to suggest that the average meat-eater eats human beings as long as they’re healthy. I’ve heard they prefer the really chubby ones.
(This is the Dope - you never know what someone’s going to be pedantic about).
Well, it could do with an “other” option, but basically it covers the main reasons that people give for being vegetarian.
This thread OTOH, has no “other” and most of the options are either an admission of “I’m a jerk”, in one form or another, or don’t even make sense as responses to the question.
I am just chiming in with an “other” answer: Supposedly animals who eat plants are more palatable and healthy than animals who are carnivorous. I am omnivorous because if I get eaten by something, I want to taste as bad as possible.
I must remember that for the next time I’m forced to share space with a militant vegan.
Thanks for the critique.
BTW perhaps you should see a doctor and have him write you a prescription for “sense of humor.”
I’m quite amused at the level of seriousness with which this has been taken. Were the options for “I like my food to have had a name and a face” and “I have a moral objection to killing plants” too subtle for you?