The ends don't always justify the means. Question: is the right thing always ethical? Are there times when the "right thing" is unethical?

Of course humans are preternatural, if we were truly equal with nature than we would not have developed the ability to reason.

All of the great apes can reason. So can other mammals like Cetaceans.

it is in this ability that we have gained our independance from the norm, and taken our place with the other preternatural things, massive physical phenomena, like meteorites that cause massive dieoffs.

Wait, what?

if the rest of nature can not reson to the same extent as humans, than that makes us above nature.

Well, it doesn't make us "above nature" any more than birds being able to see the Earth's magnetic field makes them above nature.

I could go on, but realistically, your case is a rather vacuous one.

What exactly is a "higher order"?

I mean organisms that qualify as complex and not simple life: bacteria or archaea, and exist in higher taxanmic classifications like Aves and Mammalia.

If you're saying as predators, let's see how well you fare in a pin with a leopard (or even in the wild, with a leopard).

How humans (apparently how I) compete directly against particular predators has no bearing on whether or not humans are also predators. I could put a cheetah in a cage with a male silverback gorilla and the cheetah would lose, too. So what? Does the cheetah suddenly stop being a predator?

If you're talking about intelligence, why if we are so "high" in the order, are we still eating meat?

The question is moot: our intelligence has nothing to do with why we still eat meat.

There are plenty of healthy alternatives that cost much less in the way of work required, resources needed, associated pain, environmental impact, etc.

Only because they're not "mainstream". If everyone or even most people, for example, lived on a vegetable dominant diet and not a meat dominant diet, there would still be a need to have an industry that can produce the necessary quantities for people to survive on that diet. That means: farms, trucks, fuel, processing factories, machinery, increasingly more land for produce and a much larger labor force. You'd just be switching one for the other; it doesn't come "carbon-imprint" free. And to be honest with you, we are killing life either way. I don't buy into this whole humane bullshit. The whole pain angle is like saying it's better to shoot someone in the head than stab them in the throat - the latter unethical and the former morally acceptable because it's less painful. Humans kill life to survive. I don't give a flying fuck how much or little pain the life I kill and eat encounters; at the end of the day I'm still killing. Or someone is killing on my behalf. I don't put a hierarchy on killing or compartmentalize my ethical judgment. Killing is unethical. But I'm going to eat meat and vegetables.

Animals, like cheetahs, don't have a sense of morals... Humans do, and yet it seems to make little difference.

Which is not the point. The point is what moral judgment humans ascribe to other animal behavior, we recognize that cheetahs are doing what cheetahs do. Whether or not they have morals is immaterial. Humans are doing what humans do. We have bodies that have evolved to ingest and digest meats, vegetables and grains. So we eat these things. To say "killing painfully is unethical" is as meaningful a judgment as saying "cheetahs choking their prey to death is unethical". It's just what we do.

We have moral choice, many morally acceptable options that are just as good if not batter tasting, and we have the ability, physically, to choose... and you say that meat is perfectly acceptable?

Yes, I do say killing and eating organisms that have meat is perfectly fine.

How do you feel about cannibalism?

How I feel about cannibalism is irrelevant.

In other words, "it's natural."

Well, that's not the point at all. The peripheral point is that higher order animals will cause undesired pain in sentient beings simply by living. The more substantive point is that you don't believe that anything that causes undesired pain to sentient beings is wrong. What you're really arguing isn't about pain in and of itself, it's about painful killing. And humans painfully killing, at that. Because clearly, I can tag an elephant in a preserve and it would cause undesired pain to a sentient being, and you probably wouldn't argue that I was doing something wrong. So your initial sentiment is what I am contending. It is in fact not the case that you "...believe that anything which causes undesired pain to a sentient being is wrong."

You believe in specific conditions and not the very general statement you made at the start.

It's wrong to kill humans, even painlessly, because if we don't condemn murder then we will not be able to function as a society.

You're going to have to flesh out this argument for me. How does not condemning murder result in a non-functioning society? What do you mean by a functioning society? Is your definition universal?

However there is a second aspect of morality at work here: Pain is bad and it should therefore be minimized.

Why is pain bad? Is all pain bad? Should all pain be minimized? Does minimizing pain make the act of killing the animal more "good"? And if it does, why does it make it more "good"?

Predators are not behaving immorally because they lack the intellectual capacity for morals.

Humans are predators, so are many of the other great apes. And like humans, many apes have the intellectual capacity to be moral and this morality has been documented.

As far as I'm concerned, so far you're trying to impress upon the debate a bit of special pleading on behalf of humans, when humans are animals, we are predators, like many other apes, have a moral compass and still behave true to our biological roots. What is immoral about treating other animals in the way other animals treat other animals? But to the major question itself. Do we have a moral obligation to not eat meat simply because we can live on other foods?

I wouldn't call it "murder", but I do believe that anything which causes undesired pain to a sentient being is wrong.

Meh, we're higher order animals. It's what we do. All predators do it: cause undesired pain to their prey, which are usually other sentient beings.

Killing an animal painlessly would be morally acceptable

Why is it morally acceptable to kill at all?

In fact, due to the atrocious conditions maintained in the factory farming industry, the entire lives of millions of sentient beings are filled with suffering.

So?

Why don't people get that?

Is a cheetah immoral for choking their prey to death or sometimes eating them alive? Do you yell at the discovery channel animals for doing what they do?

I disagree with Noble Truth #3. True suffering comes from physical or emotional pain.

"Pain" is not synonymous with suffering. The word "suffering" is used to highlight a metaphysical point of the self-degenerating nature of yearning or "desire".

It is human nature to compete and competition by definition must cause some degree of harm to the losers.

Speaking of "a nature" is a philosophically easy thing to do - and permits us to talk about behavior axiomatically without having to question the verity of our claims. But whether or not it allows us to talk about things as they are is another question altogether. People do compete; it doesn't mean that it is in our nature to compete any more than smoking cigarettes is in our nature just because people do it. Behavior is a contingency, resulting from the development of an overarching vocabulary. So is the notion of "competition" a part of this greater vocabulary. But that's it.

The fact that you nor anyone else has to compete and can consciously choose not to compete suggests that on the one hand it is a contingent behavior and on the other hand can be abstained from such that you are not doing harm. But, even the latter isn't necessarily a part of the consideration of the suggestion to do no harm or that competition does cause harm.