If the Good Lord hadn't meant us to eat meat He wouldn't have made it so darned tastey and varied in taste. OK some distress is caused animals on the way to slaughter, but not as much as our chasing them all day with spears, cornering them and hacking them to death.

>Same here. I frequently think I should go vegetarian. Unfortunately, I like meat too much to have done so, at least not yet.
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Veal I draw the line at, along with pate de foie gras. The difference between a calf and a chicken can be discerned by looking into its mammalian eyes.
Keeping a calf in a pen, in darkness, away from the herd and esp. its mother, for all its short life ...

>Veal gets a lot of publicity but is it really any worse than the way other "food animals" live and die? Most chickens, for instance, live truly miserable existences, kept in tight quarters so they aren't running around burning off calories and increasing the time to market. Fatten 'em up quick, conserve that grain supply, and kill 'em.
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>>Speaking only for myself, I admit to being somewhat of a hypocrite in this matter. I could not kill a critter myself, but I do eat meat (I draw the line at veal), knowing full well that the animal had to be killed. Out of site, out of mind.
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>>I can happily go to a restaurant and have a steak, but I know that if they led the animal out and slaughterd it at my table, I'd be less inclined. It's probably one of the main reasons why I'm not a lobster eater. I hear how great lobster is, but having to actually choose which one will die leaves me out. By the time I looked at them all in the tank, I'd probably have given them all names and bonded with them.

Michael Palin, in one of his "around the world" series, ordered snake in a Chinese eatery. They brought the snake out and gutted it alive in front of him. That would rather put me off!
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