Elaine, you state that Dominionism (encompassing seemingly all forms of hierarchy and/or exploitation based upon race, class, gender, species, etc) "IS the central issue" of your article because humans' socially-accepted treatment of non-human animals serves as the basis for rationalizing hierarchical treatment of other humans. (If I have mischaracterized your position, please let me know.)

If, as you argue, humans rationalize their abuse of other humans "by relegating the exploited human to animals status," and further that the status of animals is morally unacceptable, then I presume that you are arguing that both human and non-human animals should be given equally valued and protected status. If so, the logical continuation of this proposition is that the killing of a non-human animal is the equivalent of the killing of a human animal, which would thus define all hunters and slaughterhouse workers as murders (and meat-eaters as complicit in those murders). But further, it would logically also have to define the killing of any animal (human or non-human) by any other animal as constituting murder.

This doesn't work, does it? For in formulating such definitions, we have condemned the most basic, natural cycles of life on this planet as being "wrong."

Furthermore, this formulation seems to create an arbitrary hierarchy between plants and animals. Thus, abuse and exploitation would not be eliminated. Instead, the bar for what/whom qualifies as a "potential victim" would merely be shifted to draw the line at the sometimes-hazy distinction between fauna and flora.

Somewhere in there, we have to be able to make distinctions between species. And we must find distinctions between the taking of life versus "abuse" and/or "exploitation."

Challenging "Dominionism" asks us not simply to see animals as beings capable of suffering. Its solution is not simple; you can't just stop eating animals. Vegetarianism, for all its merits, is not "The Solution" to Dominionism. There are societies where vegetarianism has long been commonplace, and yet brutal, rigid, codified hierarchies persist in these same societies.

Elaine argues that the "practice of meat eating... [is] a form of domination (abuse of power) over the animals."

This statement is problematic in several ways:
1)It tends to demonize meat-eating persons and societies, even when their lifestyle is ecologically sustainable to a much greater degree that is our own;
2)It makes a moral judgment about an ecological issue, even though nature is amoral.
3)It maintains an artificial distinction between humans and all other animals, implying that humans aren't animals, themselves.

Ultimately, I feel that the central issue is not whether a person eats meat, but whether our societal methods of food production (and most everything else about how we live) are ecologically sustainable over the long-run. Choices about food production (like others) need to include bioregional issues among a multiplicity of factors (which may shift in importance from region to region).

Clearly, factory farms, like Corporate Agriculture in general, are NOT sustainable in the long-run. Neither are they safe or efficient; their products and methods are dangerous, and their massive costs are subsidized and externalized.

We need to be clear and precise in what we are talking about, even if that tends to make things much more complex (because things tend to BE much more complex). This leads to difficult realities, such as that it is more sustainable to drink a glass of cow-milk from the organic family-run farm on the outskirts of town than it is to drink a glass of rasberry-kiwi juice made from the frozen concentrate of food grown literally on the other side of the planet.

If issues of "what is natural" or "how species X evolved" are to be taken into consideration in a discussion of whether or not humans should eat non-human animal meat, then the argument is easily made that Homo (humans) have evolved over millions of years to include meat and other animal products as part of their regular diet.

We, homo, have been using fire (thus, cooking food to some extent) for a bit less than a million years... long, long before the appearance of Cro-Magnon, modern humans. While we've had "cooking," we've evolved considerably, but this doesn't seem to have moved us in a "plant-based diet" direction.

The one BIG change that has allowed us to really consider a shift towards a plant-based diet is the Agricultural Revolution. And yet, some pro-vegetarian theorists argue that the AgRev was one of the primary causes (along with animal husbandry) of Dominionism. As such, (animal rights-based) Vegetarianism finds itself hand-in-hand with its avowed enemy, Dominionism -- the kernel of each springing from the same source.