If you believe that everyone should have a vegetarian diet then ultimately you eliminate most of the world population. Vegetarian diets are expensive and most of the world's inhabitants can't afford the variety necessary to get everything we need to be healthy. Without meat most of the world starves.
In a strictly Biblical reading “Arise, Peter, kill and eat.” There are humans who have divine souls, then there are animals who do not. Cows, chickens and pigs are no more or less legitimate food sources than whales. We've raised generations that have watched garbage about how intelligent some animals are, what human traits they have, how they are evolving, blah, blah, blah. It's all part of secular humanist plot to degrade us to the level of animals. If you only want to kill ugly animals but not cute or majestic ones that's fine, just be honest about it.
I'm also very surprised by the number of FReepers who throw out the ‘endangered’ meme, because we all have so much faith in government agencies, government funded research and international governing bodies. As someone smarter than me pointed out on a thread a year or two ago, there is no safe minimum level for the hippies. They will never agree to any hunting of anything ever. It's not about extinction, it's about control.
Oh yeah, they’re fanatics. But I don’t go the other extreme and say there’s no reason to have an endangered list at all.
Animals have been saved by that.
I’m not a vegetarian. However, I don’t believe in killing elephants for their tusks or rhinos for theirs, or animals for their gallbadders, etc. If you have to kill an animal for food, that’s one thing.
Killing it for one small part of it to use in some bizarre ritual or for some non-essential delicacy or to just make money off it, as is so often the case in asian countries, I can’t abide.
Cows, pigs & chickens are raised as food. Whales are not so their numbers are fewer and there should be strict hunting regulations. I believe the Japanese would hunt them to extinction if left alone.
As for divine souls.....I wouldn’t care to go to a heaven that didn’t have animals.