Is it okay to eat animals???

[Siegmund]

People seem to put the barrier between "acceptable/not acceptable to kill and eat" in different places according to how much kinship they feel for their food. You find people willing to eat anything including each other; people willing to eat anything except humans; people willing to eat anything except monkeys, dogs, whatever; people willing to eat fish but not land animals; people willing to eat plants but not animals; and so on... but you don't find too many people who believe that eating monkeys is OK while eating chickens is wrong.

I think that's a reasonable spectrum of moral views.

What I think is wrong is the assertion that there is something special about the one point on that spectrum that thinks the cutoff must fall between plant and animal. If it's wrong to kill a clam, let's say... then how is it right to rip a poor defenseless plant up by its roots and boil it alive?

We have to eat SOMEthing. And EVERYthing we eat was alive at some point fairly recently before we put it into our mouths.