For several years my meat consumption has been on a gradual decline, and I have more and more sort of "flashes" of feeling that I just can't eat mammals anymore. As one pamphlet I read on the subject said, "The question isn't whether animals can reason, it's whether they can suffer." Clearly they can and do. At this point I am not even comfortable eating fish or chicken, although I sometimes resort to it. My dietary choices are a little more restricted than some because I'm lactose intolerant, so cheese isn't an option for me anyway.

Around the time that the war in Iraq started I wanted to find some way I could cease to contribute to suffering in the world, so I again lowered my meat consumption. I never buy commercially-produced mammal meat. I am looking for simple meat-free recipes I can use. I subscribe to Vegetarian Times, which I use a lot. If I could be certain that any meat I ate had been raised as Michelle describes, I might feel differently about it, but given the rampant cruelty in the current food-production industry, I just can't bring myself to contribute to it. The methane-production is another factor. I think we'd have a much better chance of co-existing without destroying our natural environment if the human race suddenly lost interest in beef and pork. Generally pigs have higher IQs than horses and dogs, IIRC, although as I said earlier, it isn't their intelligence that really matters to me but their suffering. As for the specious argument about vegetable suffering, the 70's book "The Secret Life of Plants" claimed that vegetables live to be eaten, it's their divine purpose and it actually makes them "happy".