I've been a 'vegetarian' ever since my late teens. I use the term carefully because people's definition seems to vary wildly. For me, my not eating meat came about purely for ethical reasons and I accepted that wearing leather, drinking milk and eating eggs were merely a convenient place to draw my personal line in the sand. I always felt that living in the privileged west, there was little actual need to eat meat anyway. Being a lacto-ovo-veggie is really rather jolly easy.
Problem is, it's a bit crap.
Sure, it's a better position than just troughing your way through lots of mass produced cheap meat (like Julian, I think I'd eat just about anything rather than a fast food fried chicken dinner). But so much of what we eat contains milk and eggs that are procured in such a way as to inflict the most shocking amounts of suffering on the creatures that produce them that I'm wondering if it's not just as bad as eating the animal anyway.
So I'm cutting back on my milk consumption enormously and only buying it from the most ethical source I can manage. We used to have our own home-laid eggs until some fox killed all our chooks and I've not bought any eggs since we lost them (although if I do, it'll be the ones from a reputable source).
Here's the bit that's going of piss off all the vegans and veggies: I'm beginning to think that from both an environmental and animal welfare point of view the protein in my diet could be sourced less from dairy and poultry products and less from soy beans (which often come with their own environmental issues) and more from wild animals.
Consider this; rabbit, wood pigeon and squirrels live wild and in abundance in our countryside. They are all pest species and all can be freely killed under general licence. They have been born and have lived entirely wild and will all die anyway, most in ways involving much more suffering than a bullet to the head.
Although I can't deny that I really don't like the idea of eating this sort of food (meat just doesn't appeal to me like, say, cheese does) when it comes to wild food, I now have a growing ethical dilemma on my hands.
Whether it's a rabbit or whether it's a deer, it's much the same issue, I think. Why should I not kill them and eat them?