I don't think your friend is funny, actually I think he is an idiot and, probably, unconsciously nazi, (Hitler was vegetarian AND sent disabled in extermination camps). And maybe mentally disabled, so if I were him, I wouldn't joke about such things with hungry non vegetarians. One never knows.
Please don't take it personally, nothing against you Niko or vegetarians, but I heard better arguments in favour of vegetarianism.
BTW what has to do your friend's opinion and behavior with the subject of this thread ?
edit: and your post might have offended some of the fellow members with disabled relative.
and the organissimo gig at the steak house is gone...
this is a counter argument against arguments like "i eat it because it can't do maths" or "i eat it because it can't talk"
(to me these experiments show that most of these arguments (and you really do hear them when you ask people why it is ok for them to eat meat and do other not so nice things to animals) are very thin (not that i didn't think so before) and there i see the connection to the subject of this thread)
my (and my friend's i guess) position is that it's not ok to kill other animals (human or not human, disabled or not), no matter whether you want to eat or just exterminate them... for us the question whether it is ok to eat disabled people doesn't come up... (obviously it's not ok, i'd say)
if you ask me why i eat plants, i can only say, it's because i am an inconsequential bastard (the same thing i was saying when i was still eating meat); edit to add: put differently i don't have a convinving argument for another place where one should draw the line between who one should eat and who not; i just think that 1) if one doesn't know what's right it's better to draw the line in a more conservative way (talked to a chinese colleague recently who says she can't eat dog anymore now that she has lived here for several years and has seen the personal relationships people have with their dogs; similar for horses...) 2) people who say the line belongs between humans and animals (or between humans plus some animals and the other animals) don't have convincing arguments although many of them think what they are doing is the obvious thing to do
unconsciously nazi... who isn't?
You might have specified your intention better, because from your post it wasn't clear that you were moving towards vegetarianism. Actually I didn't know you're one of 'that thing'
I could buy some of your arguments, actually pigs are much clever then koalas, and we protect koalas, though I bet that some koalas are much clever (and much cute) then a lot of people I personally know.
Usually I made general considerations about enviromental and how animals are treated when I chose what to eat.
About the line between humans and animals we should enter in a very though philosophic playground.
About nazi...no, I am not. I am consciously dumb and it required me a long and costly therapy to be aware of it.