>I fail to see the moral value of veganism, yes. Minimizing animal
>foods in your diet is probably a good health move, but I see no moral
>reason not to follow the example of our cat, and chomp away.
The strongest moral argument for vegetarianism/veganism is in the waste involved in meat production and livestock maintenance, since all the energy we derive from the consumption of meat comes indirectly from the food produced to feed the livestock in the first place, minus a lot of waste in the intermediary process. If we just ate vegetarian, there would be more and cheaper food worldwide.
The immorality of killing livestock is a little more problematic, since we are then avoiding killing animals who would never have lived but for the desire to breed them to be eaten. It's kind of a "to be or not to be" dilemma, whether tis better to have lived and be eaten, or not to have lived at all.
In that sense, the murder of field mice and others accidentally killed during crop production is far worse morally, since those animals were happily living before the evil crops were cultivated and murder ensued.
-- Nathan Newman