Can meat eaters be true animal lovers?
I like animals. I hate seeing any sort of cruelty towards them but also understand why a mahoot or a jockey, for example, need to hit their ride with a stick sometimes. There's a line, it's not black and white, but commonsense tells you roughly where it is, but I eat their meat. My demand created the supply, or slaughter, of that animal; without that demand, the animal wouldn't have been killed.
Some questions to ponder:
Can you eat the meat of only certain species and still be an animal lover?
Why do people think it's OK to eat cow, but not dog or cat?
Are some animal species higher than others?
Do you feel animals and humans are the same spiritual/evolution level?
Is there a hierarchy of living things?
I sincerely want to be vegetarian. I feel guilty about eating animals but 40 plus years of eating sausages and burgers is a difficult habit to break. I eat far less meat now than before but I'm still not clean. I even avoid killing ants and mosquitos now which is a habit I've developed from the wife's Buddhist beliefs. The more I kill, the more they seem to bother me!
'I love animals as I eat one every day' is an old joke that some of the less sensitve members of this forum may utter so I have preempted to negate.