...always butting in where you're not wanted seems to be a pattern for you...I am having a discussion with Nathan .

You can't outrun a bad diet my brutha.

It's not "perceived discomfort". Watch a documentary on the horrific conditions of farmed animals. They go through hell on Earth. And they have sentience... nervous systems capable of feeling pain just as we do. And we torture them in the hundreds of billions.

Actually, the pain and suffering that an animal goes through in the average "sadistic" torturing, isn't even as bad as what many farmed animals go through.

...do rabbits and squirrels and birds have sentience ?

Yes. We have the same amount of evidence that a rabbit or a squirrel is sentient, as any single human does that all other humans around him or her are sentient.

Are you against eating animals in general, or just certain farming practices? Is it OK to eat wild or free-range animals?

...yet you eat farmed vegetation as a matter of course ; how do you handle the obvious emotional conflict this must cause you ?

I'm not okay with the practice of eating animals period in a world where we have the option not to at no expense to ourselves, and not only at no expense to ourselves, but at a reduced expense. It takes like 10 times less clean water per calorie of food produced to produce vegan food than animal products.

More ethical practices would be an improvement, but not the solution. The ultimate fate of these animals is still that we kill them for pleasure, which is unacceptable.

By the way, animal products labelled "free-range" are anything but. That's a stupid marketing gimmick. They are still treated horribly, they are by no means [always, or even usually] on an actual free range.

Is this another one of those gotchas that end in you informing me that some plastic parts in my computer contain animal byproducts?

I reduce the suffering I cause to animals as far as is possible and practical. My guess is that if I say I eat vegetables without qualms and then you tell me they were fertilized with manure you think it means I have no room to speak.

We must eat something to survive. The suffering and harm caused by factory farming is orders of magnitude greater than from vegetable farming.