I eat meat.
But I'm a defender of vegetarians and it really gets on my nerves when people are bitchy about them. Nobody gets annoyed about, say, people who don't like coleslaw, or cola, and they don't lark about trying to slip coleslaw into the sandwiches of a coleslaw-hater. Yet there's a certain kind of person who thinks that there's nothing more funny than making a vegetarian eat meat, or taunting them about the things they don't eat.
Really gets on my nerves. Let people eat what they want, dammit.

And yeah, I'm all for animal welfare. The way farm animals are treated in intensive farming is disgusting - and produces low-quality, awful-tasting meat, too. Better to have really good meat once a week than crappy cheap meat every day.

I tried it out for about a year or so, but i couldnt give up bacon in the end.

xD
Your the first person i've ever seen who stands up for vegetarians. xD Yay!

Animals are different then plants. They (animals) have souls and feelings. Plants do not because they have no heart or feelings..And well..most vegetarians just don't like to eat animals cause it makes them feel bad or other reasons. Sometimes people become vegetarians for health reasons to. :3
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Mmm, most people in the third world live largely on vegetable products. It's cheaper and more efficient to produce. Raising animals for meat uses up vastly more resources than growing grain and vegetables.

As for the appeal to nature, I can refute this on several counts:
1. We're omnivores. Our digestive systems can handle both meat and vegetables. We're not like cats, who can only thrive on an all-meat diet, for example.
2. Hunting is natural, but farming isn't. Predators often eat very rarely since animals get away so often, and they eat wild animals that have led ordinary, free lives. Whereas humans often eat meat daily, which has been raised in intensive, cramped conditions, more often than not filled with hormones and antibiotics to make it grow larger and faster than normal, which is nothing like an animal's life in the wild.
3. "It's natural" or "it's not natural" is a flawed argument anyway. If we only did what was natural, we wouldn't wear clothes, attend schools, or have the internet. Humans are intelligent and thus can transcend nature.

I'm not remotely sentimental about animals, and I don't think it's wrong to eat them, but I don't know why people who dislike meat for welfare reasons enrage so many other people. It's as if car drivers tooted their horns at me and threw stuff out of the window every time I went past on a bicycle because I'd rather avoid driving something polluting - what business is it of theirs?
Preachiness is always annoying, but most vegetarians I've met aren't remotely preachy.

I am a lacto-ovo pescatarian ^^ a vegetarian that still eats fish eggs and milk <3

I'm not a vegetarian, but I certainly ain't no carnivore. I mainly eat vegetables. The only meat I can eat is chicken, simply because I've had it since I was a child and have grown to adore it, it has a pretty good flavor. But only the inside of the legs. Everything else is yucky. I jus tcan't bring any other meat to my mouth, for some reason. It makes me disgusted, it jus tseems so gross. heh

What, even meat that's full of parasites or botulism?

...Okay, that was me being picky for the sake of being picky. I enjoy being pedantic rather too much.
It certainly is easier to get all of one's nutrients by eating a mix of meat and vegetables. It's not impossible to have a good balanced diet without meat, but it's more difficult. I know one of my vegetarian friends had occasional bouts of anaemia, though that might've been because she tended to eat pasta and pizza more than she ate actual fresh vegetables.

I would love to be a vegetarian, unfortunately I am so picky I dont like any vegetables and a few fruits I can stand. I hate it, but I cant control my taste buds. ^^'
I sometimes think that if I wasnt picky I would be all out vegan.

Im not a vegetarian, I am an animal lover but to love the animal your have to be the animal, eating meat is what animals do!

I am not a vegetarian.
I'll pretty much eat anything apart from things I've met and liked.
So I try my best to avoid eating Dogs, Fish and Humans. Other than that I don't really see a reason not to eat any other species, providing it's edible.
I'm a fairly fussy eater when it comes to vegetarian food, so I'd most probably starve if I didn't eat meat.
I don't eat salads, I avoid most vegetables like that plague and I only like a very few kinds of fruit. Quorn is downright nasty. Tofu tastes foul to me... I could go on, but I'll spare you xD

I'm most definately not a vegetarian. when my veggie friends come over they have to bring their own food due to a lack of not meat-based products at my house.
I lvie off of meat, and honestl I'm craving ribs right now.
But I've nothin against vegetarians, as long as they don't push their agenda on me.
I'll eat meat, but I may disagree with the way animals are treated.

In most third worlds yes they eat vegetables. What i'm saying is that if you went over to a starving child in africa and handed him a hamburger, there's an extremely slim-to-none chance that he'd say no.

Yes, our stomach's are made to digest meat and plants. It is also more recommended to eat meat to stay healthy than to do an all vegetarian diet. To be able to get the same amount of proteins and nutrients from nuts and tofu that you get from meat you would have to eat a crap ton more.

Furthermore, for those that are all "oh poor animals", i'm pretty sure that rabbit had feelings that got eaten by that wolf. It's still animal's dying for food, even if it's not a human eating it. Predation is natural and it HAS to happen. Why? How many of you vegeterians want you house smelling like cow and chicken shit because we all stopped eating meat and now there's not enough predation going on to keep up with the reproductive rates of chickens and cows? Predation keeps resources and populations in check. Human's only problem is that we have no real predators. I don't particularly want to die, but honestly, if human's had just as many predators as like...every other animal on the earth, places like China wouldn't have to have a child tax.

Yes, if it weren't for the fact that cannibalism is illegal, i would vote cannibalism to solve all the world's major problems: Over population, resource competition, world hunger.

I think a better approach to the united states slaughtering all over the place and such would be more human slaughter houses, and controlling meat waste. We waste a LOT of meat here. If you're actually going to use it for a good reason, i see it as no problem.