They say that The Meatrix is turning some people into vegetarians.
My favorite irony about this issue is that countless millions of little critters; field mice, baby birds, etc, are killed every day by combines, threshers and other deadly spinning-blade machines used to harvest vegetables and grains, mowed down mercilessly, and then we don't even bother to eat them.
In the end, the only way to not cause the death and suffering of animals with your eating choices is to grow your own. Grown your own vegetables, grow your own wheat and corn, grow your own cattle and bacon. You can grow your own pot too, but this often leads to pizza, so you'd better have the cow milked and the cheese made first. It also often leads to federal agents, and nobody wants that.
I admire people who take their food choices seriously, even if they sometimes make me feel guilty. Liz and I do our best to buy cage-free, vegetarian fed eggs and chicken parts and so on. I wish more restaurants offered grain-fed beef, I'd gladly pay more for it. I don't think there's anything wrong with eating meat, but that doesn't mean we should eat any old meat or deal with the animals it comes from in any old way.
It's amazing that until a few weeks ago, we allowed so-called "downer" cows, cows that are so sick that they can't even stand, to be used for food. Umm... yuck? It's like eating rotten fruit, it's just common sense. It's also common sense that loading up all of our food animals, not to mention ourselves and our children, with antibiotics is a really bad idea, short-sighted in the extreme.
I suppose it is noble to try to reduce the suffering you cause, even though you can't reasonably eliminate it, but it's certainly worthwhile to note that all these choices have unintended consequences, from the chopped-up field mice to the pesticide-laden soybeans, and, objectively, they're no less horrible.
