Why I'm becoming a vegetarian

[Viking]

Just because they're inferior doesn't mean that they deserve to be treated badly.

Don't take things out of their context.

Why is it necessary to treat them with respect, yet this respect does not carry over into not eating them?

They react to pain stimuli, and given that they could possibly could experience pain in a similar fashion to humans, it would be unwise from a moral perspective to not treat them with respect. To kill them for their meat is a moral question of a different nature.

Of course, killing is brutal. Whether or not animals experience great pain before they die, I don't know as I have yet to be butchered at a slaughterhouse. Yet causing pain at one point for a specific purpose is different from mistreating animals purposelessly over time. One could draw a parallel to giving someone really painful medical treatment in order to save his/her live. The difference here lies in the purpose, obviously.

What still makes this parallel relevant, is the fact that possibly animals do not understand the concept of purpose, or intent. Perhaps they do not understand that the pain they feel at death, if any, is a part of their murder. In this case, it is irrelevant to them whether the pain they feel is part of medical treatment or part of their murder: they live in the present only (more or less), and feel pain right now - and that's it.

The only potential cruel part here, is then the pain. If it does not matter to the animals what the cause of the pain is, then it can in various ways be justified to kill them for their meat. The simplest and most generic way is to say that to cause pain to an animal for any other intent than malice is compatible with respectful treatment. Another way is to say that they will experiences pain sooner or later in life anyway, such that by murdering them - we save them from this pain, be it from future illness, a stressful death from a heart attack or brutal treatment by a predator (important as always, of course: living in the present only, depriving them of a longer life does not really count).