Vegetarianism 

The choice of a vegetarian diet is generally made for one - or more - of four reasons:

Peer pressure - In contemporary western societies, young people, especially females adopt a vegetarian diet in emulation of their peers, justifying it in terms of love of animals or, possibly, through reasoning that somehow eating less animal fat will help them lose some human body fat.

For ecological, sustainability or environmental reasons - There is a widespread belief that because meats, dairy food etc. is further up the food chain it is, for that very reason, better for the environment if we eat down the food chain, where the amount of energy, water, pesticides and nutrients embodied in the food is less.  The reasoning continues that this will enable more people to live on the planet  (Yet more!?).  Only we in the last fifty years or so have had the knowledge of global population levels and recently introduced intensive and unnatural farming practices; such knowledge was not possibly part of the rationale for dietary composition in the Paleolithic.  So this is a distinctly un-Paleo thoughtway.

For humanitarian or spiritual reasons - A concern for the welfare of animals, both when alive and in domestication and in the process of slaughter and butchering.  Choosing to include or exclude certain foods on the basis of personal squeamishness or spiritual beliefs is about as rational as selecting a pharmaceutical on the basis of its colour: both choices would be using criteria from an unrelated realm of discourse.  It's what philosophers call a non sequitur.

•  One could, logically, take a stand against the killing or domestication of (non-human) animals by,
    for example, refusing to wear wool or leather, refusing to eat fish, eggs, meat or by ostracizing
    people, businesses or governments who support these things. Certainly there is a clear difference
    between eating meat from grainfed beef raised in feedlots and eating an occasional egg taken from
    a free-range hen or eating the flesh of roadkill.  There are many farmers - in the organic movement
    particularly - who farm by the 'contract of good husbandry' which is the foundation of a set of
    inter-species relationships that has endured for millennia.

For health reasons - Often based on a belief that animal fats have more saturated fat, that saturated fat and cholesterol both lead to coronary heart disease.
 

Monocultural crop production destroys healthy soils 
Ray Audette comments: 'People seem to think there is something noble about being a vegetarian.  But vegetarians don't understand what the role of predators is: to prevent disease.  Once people understand how the environment works, they would understand they are not saving animals by not eating them.  They are causing more animals to die through [monocultural crop] agriculture, which sterilizes the land and kills off wildlife.' (article by Rebecca Sherman)

Soil health depends upon manure
Plants, insects, animals, fungi and bacteria live together in a complex system of food chains and nutrient recycling. The health of crops depends upon a supply of manure from grazing animals, generally mediated through bacterial and chemical action in the soil. When this complex system is interrupted, soil quality declines.

Mixed farming can be less energy-intensive than crop production
Although the bizarre distortions of meat production such as battery hens, feedlot pigs and cattle and farmed fish are energy and chemically intensive and pollution-producing, mixed organic agriculture is not.  The animals involved contribute to the well-being of the ecology of their system. Mixed organic agriculture is labour-intensive (that is it 'creates jobs' - and can sustain them indefinitely) but it is rewarding for the individuals, families and communities who practice it.

Mixed farming can be less pesticide-, fungicide- and herbicides-intensive than crop production
Well-managed grassland is rarely sprayed with pesticides, fungicides or herbicides yet virtually all vegetable and arable systems receive an average of ten sprayings annually through from the seed stage to the final storage of the produce. 

Crops produced in developing countries often contain dangerous levels of agricultural chemicals
Many of the cash crops exported from the third world to the West contain pesticides banned in the consuming countries. The workers who produced them have been exposed to dangerous levels of these chemicals.  Often the chemicals have been produced by companies operating or based in the West).

Becoming a vegetarian is a negative protest
It is akin to washing your hands of the issue.  By contrast, choosing your meat carefully, as a conscientious omnivore, and insisting on a product from extensive high-welfare farming, is a positive vote for restoring the values of the contract of good husbandry and improving the welfare of farm animals. (From The Ecologist)

Tamir Katz writes (in the US context): 'The common argument is that eating a vegetarian diet saves animals, as well as the environment, since the cattle used to feed us consume many times more grains than humans do.  By not eating cattle, we will help protect the environment.  However, the problem isn't with eating cattle.  The problem lies with the fact that most cattle [in the US] are fattened with large amounts of grain and soybeans instead of following a natural diet of grasses.  If all beef farmers raised their cattle on grass by letting them graze in the pastures, there would be no need for all the grain to feed them and, in addition, the meat would be healthier and richer in omega-3 fatty acids ... if this actually happened, vegetarian diets would be causing more environmental damage because humans would be the only ones eating grains and soybeans, both ecologically disastrous crops.  If humans ate pasture-fed meat, fish, fruits and vegetables and fewer grains, the environment would be better off.  So rather than attack meat eating, attention should go the method by which the beef cattle are raised.  You might wonder, what about the poor cattle?  Even if they were pasture fed, they would still be killed and eaten.  Well, the fact is that producing enough grain to feed human beings who eat no meat would result in the deaths of many more animals, as well as the reduced of animals as a result of turning wilderness areas into cornfields or rice paddies.'

Meat production requires more water than crop production
It takes 13,500 litres of water (in feed and water) to a cow/heifer to produce each kg of steak.  One kg of wheat, by contrast takes around 1000 litres of water. A typical meat-eating US diet requires around 5,400 litres a day, whereas a vegetarian diet which had the same nutritional value required around 2,600 litres daily (figures from Frank Rijsberman).  These average figures obscure vast differences, however, between kangaroo meat and any other wild game (which requires water, but does not extract that water from any other human or natural system) and feedlot cattle, pigs or poultry which require massive inputs of water.  Sheep meat (in Australia) is predominantly grass-fed (except in drought) and lies between the two.

People who kill their own meat develop a compassion for life
The most moral Australians are those who slaughter their own meat, says Dr Tim Flannery, in a new book, Country, which calls for kangaroos to be reintroduced into some areas where they have become extinct. Dr Flannery, the director of the South Australian Museum, said people who killed their own meat developed understanding, courage and compassion for life fundamental to human decency - values 'those of us who receive our meat in plastic trays have little opportunity to achieve'. The sanitization of society from the origins of our food and other resources was exactly why Australians were so disconnected from the environment, he said. 'We must also be willing to face the difficult decisions that are inherent in our role as the most powerful force in the environment. That is why I think people who kill their own meat, in as humane a way as possible, are the most moral of us all. It is as if we are inhabitants of a great feedlot - albeit an urban one - which robs us of control over our lives, in particular our consumption of energy, water, food and material goods. Worse, it compromises our morality. The link between morality and meat-eating occurred to him in the late 1970s when he watched a farmer in western Queensland shoot and then slit the throat of a steer in order to get some steaks for a team of palaeontologists. 'Its end was, I suspect, significantly less painful and traumatic than the slaughterhouse-bound majority, for the creature went from calm grazing to the stillness of death in a few seconds, avoiding the round-up, transportation by road and queuing before the slaughterer at an abattoir'.

References:
The Ecologist, October 2004, published a debate between a vegetarian and a farmer who practised the 'contract of good husbandry'.  Some sentences of their debate have been copied into the above (www.theecologist.org)
Tim Flannery, quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, 30 October 2004
Rebecca Sherman, Neander-Guy, from the Dallas Observer, 6-12 July 1995
Tamir Katz, TBK Fitness Program, 2003, available from Tamir's site
Frank Rijsberman, at the International Crop Science Conference, Canberra Times, 29 September 2004

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Page last up-dated on 31 October 2004