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Ha ha ha ha, I have to say, I find this thread rather fun. Not eat anything with a face? Not consume conscious beings? Did you know that for every step you take, you crush more than two hundred tiny creatures? That an average person will swallow hundreds of insects during his/her lifetime, without even being aware of it? Humans are ANIMALS, animals with a sense of abstracts. Animals kills each other for food, and they always have, and they alway will. Sympathy doesn't make the food chain go around - animals eating each other makes the world go round. Plants, you say? Plants are living beings, just like animals. They don't have a consicousness, but they pulsate with life, they grow, they spread, they die, they get eaten, they eat. Or if the 'consciousness' part is so imprtant, what about eating braindead animals? Is it okay to kill a vegetable patient in a hospital, because he's braindead and not sentinent like us? What about eggs, then? They're not even pollinated and has no living creature growing inside them. Animal cruelty is wrong, and the way some farms treats their animals is abominable, but then, why not buy ecological meat? Or let's look at it from another direction. If everyone stopped eating meat... What about the cows the pigs, the hens? They would die out completely, because they aren't fit to live in the wild, and if nobody can profit from raising them, then why should anyone bother?

Instead, why not cherish this beautiful circle of life? In the wild, it's "Eat or be eaten". Ohh, cats, they're cute, aren't they? There are hundreds of thousands of cats in America, and they kill millions of birds, rats, insects and other smaller creatures every year. So it's okay to breed cats that slaughters animals for fun, but not okay to raise animals for food?

Edit --> I laughed at the beginning not to insult anyone, but because I felt there were some truly younthful naive posts. Nothing wrong that that, of course, it just felt refreshing, since I'm used to hanging with more, eh, disillusioned and unethical crowds. And many of you make good points, of course. I apologize in advance if I insulted anyone.

So it's the ability to reason or to feel that dictates the worth of a living creature? If you follow that reasoning, then... Vegetable patients? Vegetabilised patients? What do you call it? Well, you get my point... should be okay to use in human experiments, since they can't feel, think or communicate? Of course I realize we can't prevent harming or killing. All animals kill each other for various reasons. But refusing to eat one living creature simply because it has a face and a brain, while mercilessly consuming other living beings just because they cannot think, that's childish. And plants do have a nervous system - they can register if they loose a part of their mass, and they can react to their environment. Many plants actively seek out sunlight, and can lean towards bright areas, and then lean the other way another day. Not to mention plants that reacts when you touch them, or plants that react to the sun cycle, 'hiding' during night time and 'blooming' during daylight. They are seeded, they grow, they absorb nutrients, they spread their pollen, they grow old, they die and return to the earth. I'm not saying you're not supposed to eat them because of that; I'm saying they're the same as any living creature. That's why I said it was childish not to eat creatures with a face. Merely trying to educate today's youth and show them for what reasons they should, and should not, become vegetarians.
Nervous system, yes. Ability to register pain, no. But I still don't think that's the right way to judge a life's worth.

I eat meat. All meat. Any meat. Hell, if I was at a restaurant in some third world country and they served dog I would try it. I'd even try human if it was possible. We have canines for eating meat. We are meant to do it, always have been, always will. If someone makes the personal choice to be a vegetarian, that's fine, long as they keep their PETA pamphlets out of my face.