8 with slight reservations.
I do believe that the commercially raised meat we buy in the store is not healthy or good for the environment, but cannot afford to buy local grass-fed nor do we have any way to raise our own (we live in a small townhouse with no yard).
That being said.
Too many people forget that huge tracts of land on earth (especially in the western U.S.) are better environmentally suited to raising large grazing animals than they are to raising vegetables. It is no more environmentally conscious (in my opinion, but it is an educated opinion) to use fossil fuels to ship vegetables hundreds if not thousands of miles, or raise vegetables in modern heavily irrigated fields in arid areas (and, in AZ, air conditioned greenhouses in summer), than it is to eat meat.
If it is not morally wrong for a cougar to kill and eat a deer (or, for that matter, a rabbit to kill and eat a plant), I do not see how it can be morally wrong for me to eat meat or a plant. I agree that the way modern livestock is raised and killed is morally questionable. I hope to be able to divorce ourselves from that system in the future.
