I've been a strict vegetarian for close to 5 years. While I support any reduction in meat consumption, grading the edibility of animals by our perception of their intelligence is Nazism.
You might want to develop your comment instead of just using words that are mostly used for blind trolling ("nazism").
Wanting to exterminate all the jews and maintain the superiority of some concept of an Aryan race is nazism. Grading the edibility of animals by our perception of their intelligence might be right or might be wrong depending on your moral/ethical framework, but I'm not sure there is any consistent worldview in which it actually is nazism.
In other words, your comment doesn't help the vegetarian cause, and maybe being a bit more thoughtful is a small price to pay to turn that around.
There are many lines of argument to support meat consumption (all of which are easily refuted). Justifying it via a genetic hierarchy is one of the sickest.
As a vegetarian you do the same thing. You kill living things to eat them, you simply choose to kill living things that don't have a nervous system. That is, you kill living things that you perceive are unable to appreciate that they are alive. Although plants do transmit electro-chemical signals across their regions, which could be argued as a rudimentary nervous system. They also get damaged and heal, they get sick, grow, reproduce, and respond to interactions with the environment.
We're not talking about whether or not killing is wrong, but rather where on the gradient of developed nervous system-like behavior is it ethically okay to kill something. Many people have chosen a higher point on the gradient than you have, but that by no means implies that it's okay to kill anything along the full spectrum. You've simply chosen a lower cut off point than others.
Either direction is entirely arbitrary. There is no objective basis to claim it's morally better to kill plants instead of animals. These moving lines are being made-up as people go along, and it's almost strictly an issue that exists in the very wealthy first world (ie it's invented by people with nothing better to do, who believe they're superior to the rest of the planet). The best that can be said is: vegans have arbitrarily created a personal moral line, wherein they are ok with killing plants but not animals. Anything else is just subjective argumentation.
And the obvious reason why vegans and others do what they can mentally to avoid facing the plant vs animal hypocrisy, is because if you take that to its logical conclusion, you end up with nutjobs that claim it's as evil to kill an ant as a human baby.
So is asserting superiority on the basis of not eating meat.
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes for this. Nazism is not all about racial cleansing and gas chambers; it has a strong social darwinist component in general. The vegetarian/vegan group know they are better people for having made the decision to stop eating meat. There is no gray area: they are right and everyone else is wrong, as illustrated by the parent comment.
"Hitler's diet was primarily vegetarian throughout the latter part of his life; however, he didn't adopt a vegetarian diet for moral reasons, but because he suffered from gastric problems."
"Today, it is acknowledged by historians that Hitler - at least during the war - followed a vegetarian diet.[14][15] At social events he sometimes gave graphic accounts of the slaughter of animals in an effort to make his dinner guests shun meat.[12] An antivivisectionist, Hitler may have followed his selective diet out of a profound concern for animals."
"In the BBC series The Nazis: A Warning from History, an eyewitness account tells of Hitler watching movies (which he did very often). If ever a scene showed (even fictional) cruelty to or death of an animal, Hitler would cover his eyes and look away until someone alerted him the scene was over. The documentary also commented on the German animal welfare laws that the Nazis introduced, which were unparalleled at the time."
Wanting to exterminate all the jews and maintain the superiority of some concept of an Aryan race is nazism. Grading the edibility of animals by our perception of their intelligence might be right or might be wrong depending on your moral/ethical framework, but I'm not sure there is any consistent worldview in which it actually is nazism.
In other words, your comment doesn't help the vegetarian cause, and maybe being a bit more thoughtful is a small price to pay to turn that around.