saying one living organism is 'higher' than another is just.. hypocritical, frankly vegetarians simply choose to see animals as living things and plants as inanimate objects and then act all high and mighty about their purity and morals
of their incorrect assumptions and blind themselves to the obvious truth:
you
cant
live
without
KILLING
or at the very least benefiting from the deaths of other beings
( ie if you forage dead animals or dead seeds or wilted plants or something )
vegetarians are misinformed, or just plain hypocritical
all you'll do is put people off their food in the meantime and it's not as healthy as it's advocates will have you believe
that said, if there were an efficient means to avoid killing things and still fill my stomach i'd do it
but eating plants isn't the way
currently there is a technology being developed to grow skin, flesh, meat or whatever you desire in a pure form without the need for harming any complex being in laboratory conditions from a single cell taken from an animal who wouldn't even notice the loss
and clone it billions of times to produce food, skin grafts, prosthesis and other bodily requirements for human use and consumption
when that technology takes off ( if it does in my lifetime )
i will surely support it, but until then there is no viable alternative
once it's fully working it will be cleaner more efficient and more effective than growing a whole cow to get food or leather you could even tailor it's genes to make it taste exactly how you want, you want a 1x1 meter square leather patch 14mm thick? sure let me plum the details in the computer to re sequence the genes.
bam, dino dna.
ups, wrong film.
putting your efforts into advancing that technology instead of trying to create 'awareness' for vegetarianism
will have far further reaching benefits for the entire human condition from burn victims to people needing heart transplants
you might well think that's not the same issue, or i'm overreacting but that's the state of play when you consider changing the world, and that's the sort of thing this thread is discussing
this actually reminds me of the bob's big picture episode on genetically modified food
( except this actually would be very genetically modified! )
ps,
the dino dna Jurassic park reference was to
the 14mm thick leather in-case anyone didn't get it.