It is immoral and ignorant, and it shows a blatent inability of people to do what is best for them and the ecosystem - despite any amount of educational opportunity.
Agreed, though I'd say our addiction to the comforts of modern living - the internal combustion engine, electricity, plastics, and air-conditioning in particular - is a far more egregious assault on the ecosystem than meat-consumption in and of itself. Where meat - or fresh fruit, for that matter - consumption relies on such is where the damage is done, not in pulling a trout out of a local stream or raising chickens in your backyard.
In fact, the single greatest injury we as a species have inflicted upon nature has been overpopulation. This overpopulation is the direct result of our ancestors switch from a relatively meat-intensive hunter/gatherer diet, which constricted our capacity for population growth, to a grain-based agricultural one, which has not only facilitated, but encouraged rapid population expansion to provide the labor pool that agriculture demands. The switch to agriculture sparked a vicious cycle of land clearance (read: habitat destruction) for increased grain-production which led to population growth which demanded yet more land clearance, and so on. The great forests of Europe, and the animal inhabitants therein, were not lost to grazing land for fast-food hamburgers; they were lost to the cultivation of wheat or rye or barley.
Add to the above the "green revolution" of the 20th Century, with its emphasis on monoculture, and even more environmental degradation has come about in the quest to produce ever more grain. Monoculture requires intensive use of pesticides and fertilizers, reduces biodiversity, and relies heavily upon irrigation which can lead to salinization of farmland, destruction of riverine habitats, and depletion of underground aquifers. Until very recently, grain-consumption has done more environmental harm and, has quite possibly driven more species to extinction indirectly than has meat-consumption.
Now that we've reached our current population levels, what's to be done? Barring the traditional remedy - population crash due to plague/famine - or a radically inhumane program of purposeful population reduction/extermination, we need to modify both our food-consumption and our food-production behavior. This does not mean simply forswearing meat. It means returning to polyculture to produce our grains, our fruits, our vegetables. It means eating what's available LOCALLY and IN SEASON - there is no virtue in eating tofu if it has to be trucked in from a thousand miles away when there is a, hopefully organic, meat source nearby. It means eating less resource intensive protein souces, whether vegetarian or not. It means getting used to food sources that First Worlders find repulsive such as grasshoppers, termites, insect grubs and larvae - in other words, a primate's natural protein foods - that are rapidly replenishable with minimal resources. Most importantly, as consumers, it means to be willing to spend the money necessary to make environmentally sound food production, animal and otherwise, financially viable.
Third world family farms that use animals as food storage (capital) and insurance (against drought and personal disasters) are different. In that case, there is a survival need and a limit to the viability of long term sustainable development. A mixed short-term/long-term strategy is more reasonable when actualy starving to death is a possible consequence of plans. Using meat for sustinance is short-term planning (efficienct use of resources and eco-degredation).
Contrary to the assumptions of many First Worlders, Third World peasants are not ignorant. Many have well developed food production techniques that have sustained them for generations upon generations. All involve exploiting some animal resources. The apparent precariousness of such systems has less to due with their inherent weaknesses than with the way we in the First World have come to assume food production to be guaranteed because of our own unsustainable practices. Masai cowherds and Karen swidden-agriculturalists require few, if any, outside inputs, particularly petroleum products, to maintain themselves. Can the same be said of a vegan in London or Los Angeles?
Fishing/hunting/gathering/animal husbandry can indeed be long-term strategies, just as grain production can be a seriously short-term one. Most swidden (slash-and-burn) agriculture is highly unstable do to the eventuality of running out of new forest to clear. (The Karen mentioned above being an exception because they maintain an ingenious system of field-rotation rather than moving on to new areas when the old become infertile). Maintaining the family herd - be it goats, sheep, or cattle - on the other hand is often a multi-generational endeavor. Furthermore, in arid, low-fertility grasslands, pastoralism has a lower ecological footprint than either a resource- and infrasture-intense attempt to bring agriculture to such an area would have or settling such pastoralists in more urban settings just so they can partake of "cruelty-free" nourishment.
And then there is the perpetuation of the acceptance of cruelty in factory farms.
Eating is one's first violent act everyday (excluding psychos who may do violent stuff before breakfast). It is our moral obligation to reduce the violence.
The horror that is factory-farming has nothing to due with meat-eating itself. Small-scale, localized meat production does not necessarily involve the same deplorable disregard for animal welfare, the same environmental impact, or the same misallocation of limited resources as do giant feedlots or slaughterhouses. I've even read some old hippie's system for a self-sustaining catfish farm involving nothing more than two 55-gallon drums, earthworms, compost, and a steady water supply: one barrel is used as your compost heap, sped along by the assistance of the earthworms; the compost then goes to your garden while the worms are fed to the catfish in the other barrel. The author claimed such a sytem could even be set up on urban rooftops.
As another example, my uncle in Pennsylvania raises heirloom turkeys for the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons. Not only are they free-range and organically fed, they are capable of natural reproduction - i.e., copulation - unlike factory-farmed species that must be artificially inseminated. This makes my uncle's birds smaller and more expensive, limits the number available, and makes them taste somewhat different from your standard store bought turkey, but it allows the turkeys to lead as normal a life as possible (at least until November). Also, heirloom farming keeps several species of bird alive that might otherwise be extinct if their wasn't a viable commercial market for their meat: Eat abird! Save a bird!
As for the violence of eating, it is an inescapable fact of life for all heterotrophic organisms - carnivore, omnivore, or herbivore. Excepting pure frugivores and folivores, to eat, something must die. The apparent horror and injustice of a dead animal on our plate has less to do with any inherent cruelty or bloodthirstiness than the fact that, in modern societies, we have separted ourselves from the food-chain - that we are no longer at risk of being stalked, killed, and eaten by a big cat and, that most of us never come into contact with the animals that are consumed, so some of us project more empathy upon them than do those who actually rear them.
The point is that while our (that is, we rich modern urbanites') current dietary (and other) habits definitely have to be reexamined for their sustainability, and one's choice of sustenance does have a moral component, oversimplifying the predicament to simply "meat bad, meatless good" does not even begin to address the full range of practical and moral ramifacations that our status as heterotrophic organisms and masters of our environment entails. Further, by couching such legitimate concerns in simplistic, near Manichean parameters, many who do eat meat simply turn off from the conversation, thus closing the door on the potential to make real progress on an issue of true import.
