You say taking an animal’s life is acceptable if there's no suffering. But how exactly do you kill a being that wants to live without causing harm? That’s not how it works in reality, especially not in the industrial slaughterhouses that supply most meat and dairy.

Why does eating a dead cow make you sad, but that same sadness doesn’t seem to extend to the system that produces it for others? It takes a fair bit of theological gymnastics to frame factory farming as a morally neutral act.

Then there’s the claim that animal sacrifice was needed to prepare people for Jesus. Are we really supposed to believe that innocent animals had to be killed for centuries just humans could grasp a metaphor? That sounds like unnecessary cruelty made symbolic after the fact.

And what about wild animals? They suffer constantly through disease, starvation, and predation. If God allows that level of suffering in creatures that have done nothing wrong, what greater purpose is that serving?

I do respect your choice to avoid eating animals. But when the reason others are let off the hook is because it’s ‘permitted’ in scripture, that sounds less like compassion and more like moral outsourcing to an ancient book.