[QUOTE=audi666;12801090]
If someone is squimish about meat or doesn't like it, thats fine, but what I don't get is (1) why people think the ethics of killing even applies to wild animals, and (2) why its ethically wrong to raise domesticated animals. Wild prey animals will overpopulate without a predator (wolves, humans) and there would be a whole lot more starvation, suffering, and ecological damage by not managing wild populations. Secondly, domestic species are here because they were bred by humans...they'd basically go extinct without being farmed. They aren't wild animals and freedom isn't something they are well adapted for. If there was ever any desire for freedom in a domestic animal, its long since been bred from them. I spent a lot of time working on dairy and hog farms as a teenager in rural Illinois and it never appeared to me that the animals cared if they were free, and they didn't appear to be malcontent in any way. I can't talk to them, so I really don't know, but neither can the vegans and animal rights activists.

Its may or may not be relevant to ethics, which are completely arbitrary anyway. It is relevant to human health and fitness, because those are the conditions we evolved in and from where our biological needs/constraints originated. Its worth noting that just because your ancestors survived eating a lot of meat for a period of time that is more than 100 times longer than the history of cereal agriculture, doesn't mean you have to, and most meats available now aren't of the same quality anyway. However, prehistoric ancestors give you a good idea of where you came from (generically and ecologically speaking), and is a good reality check for people (including vegans, doctors, and nutritionists) who's frame of reference is otherwise limited to the artificial world we have been living in for a very short amount of time, eating a diet that is certainly different from what we were eating when we evolved our present genetic make-up.