There's a book -- the name of which I can't remember -- that argues that vegetarians kill more animals that meat-eaters do, simply because mass farming practices anhillilate hundreds of thousands of rodents and birds that live in the fields. So if you're shopping at Whole Foods worrying about killing animals, you really haven't thought things through. The "best practice," I suppose, would be to independently raise all of your food and live off the land, but we can't all be Grizzly Adams.
I watched an Anthony Bourdain show where he goes to Canada and is invited to an Inuit home to hunt, shoot, and eat a seal. The whole extended family sat there on their modern kitchen floor, which was covered in a tarp, digging into raw seal flesh that they just pulled off the ice. Somehow, that seems to be a more honest way of eating than what we are accustomed to.
There aren't many perfect solutions in an imperfect world, and zealously sticking to the letter of logical law causes more harm than compassion.
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