You're eating life either way. If anything, it's life kingdom-centric to conclude that anything with a spine that moves is unethical to eat but you can chow down on millions of everything else.

I'm looking at the list of life classifications and it goes: life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. It seems to me that our choices of what we eat or don't, whether vegan or carnivore, actually already cross many of those classification boundaries. We're pretty inconsistent, other than the omnivorous folks who say F' it, we'll eat pretty much everything but other people.

As much as I'd like say, "Of course, in every conceivable way.", it wouldn't be right for me to do so.

Why? Because there are instances when I would not consider veganism to be ethical.

In a resource rich society where there is no shortage of food? Yeah. Veganism is better.

In a place where resources are scarce, and it is impossible for people to survive without eating meat? Of course not. I may love animals, but I always gotta put people first. I feel no guilt about this, I relate to people on a different level than I do with animals. I also admit freely that I am bias. If someone was put in a life or death situation and made the decision to starve over eating animal flesh, I would not say they were being unethical.

I don't think my attitude is very common among vegans though. I know a lot of people who love animals but hate humans, because you know, humans aren't animals, right? Animals do some pretty messed up things, they are never really held up to the same standards of humans. Should they be? I don't think so.

Compulsory vegetarianism is definitely something that some animal rights activists believe in. I think there is always more virtue in making a willful choice. Besides that, animals eat other animals quite naturally.

You know, the day some genius vegan chef figures out how to feed all the alligators a healthy plant based diet, we can worry about people demanding public housing and food stamps for all the homeless squirrels, pigeons, and bears out there. Why not even let them vote? Maybe adapt academia to teach all these critters how to read? Something about the absurdity of treating animals the same way as humans.. We all have a lot in common, but we very clearly experience reality very different from each other. How much do we have in common with plants? Maybe plants experience reality in a way that is a lot closer to us than we'd imagine. Where do you draw the line? At some point, it really comes down to who is going to die, right? The answer is clear. Everyone. For there to be any new state at all, there must be a destruction of the old state. Time itself is evidence of this. We all gotta eat.

I'd like to see animal eaters to go through a ritualized slaughtering in order to allow the gravity of what they are doing to sink in. It's really easy to be whatevs about eating animals when you can chuck a buck through a window and get ground up animals carcass wrapped up and ready to eat in less than a few minutes. I think the ease and availability of products that make use of animal based products detaches a populace from what is going on at the ground level.

Why do I not eat animals?

Because it isn't necessary.