Animals are not products. They are living creatures. They have intelligence and sentience. If you ever ate a human and thought it tasted good, would you actively kill more humans to satisfy that taste?
I respect vegan's decisions, but it would be lovely if they respected our decisions too. What I don't like is that a small part of the vegan group is actively forcing their opinions in the face of meat eaters.
I see an overlap with religious extremists. A lot of religious people are very respectable, have noble thoughts and respect other's opinions. However, a small group who cannot accept another opinion can ruin the percention of the total group.
Vegan's respect your decisions too. It's true. The "preachy vegan" is usually a response to the "preachy meat eater". You're also going to get a distorted message via the internet where things like intonation, sarcasms, and subtleties are not apparent.
Secondly, there are some radical fallacies here. First and foremost is the idea that because your ideas are challenged means that the person(s) challenging them is somehow "wrong". If you truly accepted the opinions of others, as you claim, you'd also accept their opinions on how to actively pursue their chosen opinion.
Next, just replace "vegan" with "non-murder" and your sentence reads like this : "I respect non-murderer's decisions, but it would be lovely if they respected our decisions too. What I don't like is that a small part of the non-murder group is actively forcing their opinions in the face of murderes." Sound ridiculous? (Note: I'm not trying to say you're a murderer, I'm just using a less socially acceptable example to point out the logical fallacy with an extendable analogy.)
Finally, your ability to "not accept the opinion" of a "small group who cannot accept another opinion" is a large part of the irony here.
We aren't talking about whether or not eating one thing is wrong; we're talking about willingly taking the life of another being for our own self-interest... ie greed.
But as you say:
I treat both animals and humans the way I would like to be treated. However, I like to eat meat, so I do eat meat.
I'm going to assume you don't allow someone to enslave, torture, and murder another human on your behalf for the sake of your own cannibalistic exploits. Just an assumption though... unless you're a psychopath.
