Morality of Carnivorism

The morality behind meat is an interesting one. I people can decide to eat however they want. I am all in favor of doing what you think is best but consider all positions first. I am personally against vegetarianism that is justified by the concept "meat is murder" because the followers are idiots who haven't thought their position through.

"ONLY EAT THINGS THAT ARE STUPID? FANTASTIC! I WONDER WHAT 'ANIMAL ACTIVIST' TASTES LIKE BET IT TASTES LIKE CHICKEN"

Let's say that you don't want to kill anything or anything to die so you can eat it and that's your objection. Completely understandable but how do you do define 'alive'. It's my theory that life is very hard to define and there are degrees of life, the same way there are degrees of machines. So if your objection was about taking life you'd be trying to find a way to get food directly from the dirt. However clearly that is not an option and yet people still object to eating meat. Is it an intelligence thing. Perhaps we shouldn't kill anything that is intelligent. We can only eat stupid animals. Fantastic! hmm... I wonder what 'animal activist' tastes like probably just like chicken. In all seriousness though how does one determine intelligence decide what to eat and what not to eat. Are cows intelligent enough to live. If some one killed his neighbor and ate him because he thought he was stupid enough to be food could you disprove that claim? So yes it's possible to justify what we eat by intelligence in theory however not in practice.

"WE CURRENTLY MAINTAIN A POLICY OF "HUMANS ABOVE ALL ELSE"- (HAAE)"

Let us assume that we can't determine what we can morally eat through intelligence. Self awareness is even harder to determine that intelligence. I'm not even sure what exactly self aware means. I think as a species we need to give it a good thought as to how we want to interact with other species. Eventually we will encounter something of similar intelligence of either terrestrial origin or extraterrestrial origin. We appear to have a policy of Humans above all else (HAAE). Are we going to maintain the HAAE policy that we have going. Despite what Gene Roddenberry seems to think we do not acknowledge other species as equal so easily. I doubt humans would be so nice in their interactions with other species nor that the converse will be true. From an evolutionary stand point HAAE seems very justified we have every reason to care about ourselves and our species and

"I SAY, LET PREDATORS EAT PREY. LET HUMANS EAT MEAT"

What I think should be the determining factor is the predator vs prey mentality of the animal. Deer, cows, sheep, rabbits and ducks are all prey. They run and panic when confronted where as humans, cats, dogs and bears all chase down and attack instinctively and are willing to fight back instead of run in the face of danger far more often than prey animals. We also seem to have greater intelligence than these animals and more control over our actions. Prey seems to be more subject to instinct(and emotion?) than predators. I say let the predators eat the prey and let humans eat meat. Seem pretty natural to me.


Update:
in response to the comment by the lion

Exactly, one theory behind the evolution of man(if you are a creationist who takes offense to that get the hell out) is that we evolved our large gluteus maximus(ass muscles) in order to run long distances so that we may chase our prey until they collapse of hyperthermia (heat stroke).

Eating meat may also have been the only way to develop civilization. A game animal probably weighs between 100-300 lbs. Say you get a 1/3 of that in edible meat. that is 33-100lbs of food per animal. Say it takes 1-3 days to bring back 2 animals. how long do you think it would take to gather 66-200lbs in edible plant material. So if people didn't eat meat then they'd have to live in small well spaced out groups until they developed farming techniques, which would take longer to develop because the there would be less free time to experiment and you don't have as many people so fewer opportunities for the idea to occur.

I would like to make it especially clear that while I think that certain animals should be considered more acceptable to eat than others. I absolutely believe that those animals should be treated with respect and that we should respect what we are taking.