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Raemon comments on Vegetarianism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Among people who are aware of some of these issues, I frequently hear the most amazingly complex discussions concerning which kinds of meat consumption are ethically OK and which aren't. The ethical systems constructed in this way can become quite baroque. Needless to say, a large degree of assuming-the-consequent is involved in creating these ethical "systems."
That is, it reminds me of nothing so much as the sort of handwaving that well-meaning people sometimes do concerning the necessity of death (recently discussed, e.g., here and here). In both situations, there's one possibility that seems too fantastic to most people to be worth discussing: in one case, that death is unnecessary and worth fighting against; in the other; that it's wrong to kill and eat creatures that can feel and suffer.
Unfortunately, the suggestion that there might be ethical considerations to one's diet is usually considered extremely impolite to discuss. Obviously, various community consensuses do arise about these things in certain circles, but in society at large there's this sense that "nobody has the right to pass judgment on someone else's diet."
Anyway, whenever I hear these kinds of contortions I'm tempted to chime in: embrace the consequences of your beliefs. On some level you know you shouldn't be killing animals and eating them. Stop it.
What strikes me as particularly weird is that I have a vegan friend who made a point of saying "I'm not going to tell someone else they shouldn't eat meat." I don't actually know what she meant by that - whether she honestly didn't think it was her business, or whether she simply had observed that telling people they shouldn't eat meat has the opposite intended effect - they get pissed at you for telling them what they should and shouldn't do, and either ignore you or eat more meat just to spite you.
If she meant the latter, I agree. I don't think I've ever gotten someone else to become Vegetarian, but the approach that seems to produce most.... "respect" I guess is when I:
a) Make an effort to point out that I will have a hard time eating at a particular restaurant or event because of few vegetarian options. I say this as matter-of-fact-ly as I can. When people go "wait what?" I say "yeah I'm vegetarian" without attaching any particular judgment to it.
b) when/if people ask "why," I focus almost entirely on reasons to cut back on meat that are [i]entirely in humanity's best interest.[/i] Most people are vaguely aware that there are "health reasons". And in fact, a lot of people say with hopeful looks "for health reasons, right?" because I don't sound judgy, and they have assumptions that the health-vegetarians are cool whereas the ethical-vegetarians are judgmental jerks. What people DON'T usually realize how bad the meat industry is for humanity as a whole (by way of the environment).
c) when I get to the ethical concerns, I focus specifically on factory farming. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about the absolute moral weight of animals who are killed humanely for food, but letting people feel like there's SOME way to ethically eat meat makes it feel less like I'm attacking them (even if that ethical way will almost never be relevant to the food that they'll have access to).
People SHOULDN'T need more reason than "animals are raised in cages, given growth hormones to the point where they can barely walk, left to sit in their own feces and then killed." But the magnitude of that reason is such that most people can't process it. So it's pretty convenient that there's plenty of other good reasons to help open people up to the idea.
This is called leaving a line of retreat, and it's a very good strategic consideration within a disagreement.