Yeah that's right, it works. Now I want to taste some kittens if they are same as fish.

in the name of the necromancer school any thing you didn't eat of the animal belongs to us.
Hey one bone may not be much but it adds up.
We can make a undead minion with just a few bones.

I'm not vegetarian and I dislike PETA, but you should watch the documentary "Earthlings", narrated by Joaquim Phoenix. Look it up on google, it's pretty easy to find and watch online. I swore myself to never watch it again, but it was a good way to realize how humans can be cruel.

The nutrients plants use often come from the decomposing organic matter so quite often things die for them as well. Energy isn't free, it always comes from somewhere

I have a T shirt laying around here somewhere, on the front in big bold letters it says:
P.E.T.A.
and in small print at the bottom
"People Eating Tasty Animals"
on the back there's a cartoon of some guy, burger on one hand, thumbs up on the other, it cracks me up every time i see his goofy face.
I know what i'm wearing to work tomorrow.

Well, we had the Wiesenhof scandal here.
Isaac Bashevis Singer says:

I think it's important you make a difference between big meat corporations and local butchers. For meat corporations, cutting corners is the way to go and, especially in the US, this is done to the detriment of the animals. Where I live (Belgium) I can rely on my local meat to be procured without needless suffering. As a child, I visited many farms to see animals get killed and they did it swiftly and efficiently. There's also a lot of checking and routine investigations to prevent abuse and maltreatment of animals in larger companies here.
In the end, if there was a cheap alternative that was just as nutritious and versatile - and most of all tasty - for cooking, I'd go for it but there isn't. I've checked out a dozen alternatives and it's nearly always a case of being more expensive AND tasting a lot worse. I've spent a small fortune on vegetarian food that tasted like crap (and let me tell you I'm not even very fussy). If they can't even get decent food in supermarkets, what chance do they have of "converting" meat eaters with this crap? Oh, and Quorn sucks and is hilariously overpriced.

Godwin! Godwin!
Evolution implies that omnivorous lifeforms tend to be ruthless and selfish in their desire to survive, its an asset that must be tempered with intelligence if a species is worthy of survival. Humans are in the very centre of that sliding scale. We are capable of brutality and beauty, stupidity and genius, selfishness and selflessness all in equal measure.
I try to maintain a measured approach but there is little doubt that I'm on the darker side of the scale. I am a ruthless pragmatist with distinctly selfish tendencies and my discipline and understanding of my nature is the thing that permits me to act in civilised society. That said, I refuse to compromise my nutrition or the extremely meagre enjoyment I scrape out of the wreckage of my life for the sake of a non-sentient that would be killed anyway even if I decided to stop eating meat. I love animals much more than I do people but I'm still going to have steak for tea and whistle to my budgie and rub my cat's face afterwards.
The short summation of my beliefs: If you want me to stop indirectly killing animals for food, hurry the fuck up and invent the star trek replicator.

So you think that animals would be killed if everyone stops eating them?

A flawed analogy and one I have seen before (and commented on, on other forums).
Believe it or not, but murdering is not actually part of our genetic make up. Violence is (for domination, territory control, etc.), but not murder. So no, that's not the same. On top of that, many animals hunt for food. Add to that the fact that animals killing animals is often even a lot more gruesome and you may just as well say "well, we'll stop all animals from killing other animals and feed them plants!". It's just as silly.
You could use the argument that, because we're more advanced and we have alternatives, there's no reason to kill animals anymore and that would be a valid reason but you need to realise that these alternatives have only been available for a few decades. In the past, people have survived by barely eating meat as well due to poverty but people didn't live past 50, were constantly undernourished and had all kinds of deficients. Heck, even if poor parts of the worlds, they still eat insects to get their nutrients because plants can't provide those.
Like I said above, give me a healthy alternative that doesn't taste like crap and doesn't cost an arm and a leg and I'll consider it. It's ridiculous to hear them go "well producing a pound of beef takes so much water & food, you could feed a whole family for a year with that!" only for them to charge twice for their crappy substitutes while it didn't take that much water or food to make. Something doesn't fit there - and I bet it's "greed".

Binary arguments are irrelevant. Would DRM vanish if everyone stopped pirating games? Would every game be on PC if DRM was removed?
There's absolutely no way other than slughtering everyone else on the planet to ensure that everyone does something.
In a magic fantasy future with noone eating meat, it's unlikely that animals would be killed but the odds of that happening to a level that really makes an appreciable difference are probably lower than a supermodel with a genius level IQ showing up on my doorstep proclaiming her undying love for me.

That's a good point! I guess I always forget that because I'm thinking realistically: Nobody will have anything of their money when they die. But if any of the millions of near-death experiences is true, they will have from living a life that tries to minimize the pain in this world. That's why I believe in love, even though I'm often a hateful person.
Now end of discussion for me, we both have our views and none will change. I know that kind of talk. :-)

The ones we have alive right now surely would be. You think we'd keep 15 million pigs as pets in Belgium? (yes we have that many)
I think it might actually do more harm since having no need for certain animals anymore might well see them head for extinction, ironically. If you don't mind a species going extinct due to us no longer needing to them for food, I guess it's an improvement. And then there's such a thing as crowd control where hunters take down animals to control the population. Rabbits used to be rare 10 years ago but now they're a pest again so you're free to shoot them again. Of course, if you can't eat animals out of cruelty, surely shooting them (which is worse than how they kill them in slaughter houses) would be out of the question as well.
Are PETA so stupid they think animals won't stop breeding? With their natural predators removed by us (because they were often dangerous to humans as well) you'd see an unchecked population growth that would .... destroy crops and remove the only food supply we'd have left. Good going PETA. You can't f**k with the food chain like that.
Really, people need to think things through. It's so easy to make a superficial claim but to think of the consequences, that's one step too far for organizations like PETA.

i remember shopping in the 80s, salad was cheap as hell because it was icky rabbit food rather than a fashionable healthy alternative

Well there are those crazy cat ladies that have heaps of cats, you'd just need a pig version