Once again PETA shows they have the same IQ as all of Free Republic...

[Warren Stupidity]

307. so your new claim is that only "self awareness" matters and that we need

not concern ourselves with the pain and suffering we inflict on all the other animals that do not exhibit the level of consciousness categorized by self-awareness.

You continue to assert that there is some distinction between wild turkeys and domestic ones, continuing to claim that if one were around caged food-turkeys, one would have a different attitude. I've been around farm turkeys and understand why one would feel like that, but I've also been around chickens raised as pets, and there is a world of difference, but the difference is not in the animals themselves it is in our experience of them.

I agree that all of our food choices have consequences. We should be more aware of those consequences and strive to make ethical choices. It is not amazing to me at all that several people here hostile to vegetarianism post arguments about the horrors of plant consumption, but that is really an old and tired argument. If you are actually interested, the jainists laid out the basics of how one can think about making ethical choices, understanding that we will have to fail to cause no harm, but that we can, as conscious reflective self aware beings, make the best choices available to us. They did this circa 800 bce. Nothing much has changed other than more of us live in post scarcity societies where such choices come with minimal inconvenience.