If it eats, it's alive.

Life lives on life, it's a closed system, you can't live without killing something, whether it's a tomato or a steer. And the farmer kills insects and other animals to keep the tomato alive and uneaten until it's time to kill the tomato.

Besides in this closed system, the carnivores and omnivores keep the herbivores from killing the planet.

For an example, look at the Marine Iguanas in the Galapagos Islands. They were once land iguanas but with no predator to control their numbers they eventually over bred, with sheer numbers they ate all their food on the island.

In order to live, they started jumping in the water to eat seaweed. It wasn't their choice food, but it beat starving to death. The water is cold, and they are cold blooded animals so after eating they have to bask in the sun to regain their body temperature and stay alive.

Well they ate and ate deeper and deeper and now only the iguanas who can swim deep into the sea, exist with a very low body temperature, and recover in the sun can survive.

If you can't dive deeper than the next iguana without freezing to death, you die. If you come up too soon because you are freezing and the food is out of reach you starve to death. If you can't warm your body up fast enough you die.

This is what happens when you have no predators. With no predators the herbivores would eat the plants, reproduce, eat more, reproduce more, until all the food for herbivores was gone, and they they would all starve to death.

Plus the beef I eat allows those cows to live. If we didn't eat animal crops, they would not be farmed, and never have a life to begin with. Not many people raise steers for pets. In the meantime, the cows graze in the pastures, protected from most predators, eating their fill, getting 'free' medical care, and live a contented life until the walk around a corner one day and they don't know what hit them.

I don't eat animals that I believe have been tortured first. I feel sorry for those lobsters in tanks with their claws taped before they die. I don't eat them. I don't eat animals that are dropped live into boiling water. I don't eat veal that has been held motionless for months so they can have more meat on them before being sold. I don't eat cage grown fowl. OK, I may be a wimp-guy for that, but I feel if you are going to kill an animal to eat, you shouldn't torture the animal first.

Bob