Holier-that-thou Foodies

It's the end of hunting season (actually bow is starting back up) so the "I hate hunting" crowd has surfaced once again. Apparently these people are actually air ferns and can subsist only on the moisture in the air, and emit only life giving oxygen as a byproduct of their respiration. But I'm going to assume that plants don't have facebook (yet).
So here's the quick-and-dirty: meat comes from animals (shocking, I know). For thousands and thousands of years a select group of people in a village (though sometimes an entire village might participate, depending on size and the difficulty of the method) would go out every day to look for animals. Were they curious about the critters around them? Did they all have biology degrees and were cataloging the fauna? No, they were looking for food. And they weren't looking to find out what those critters were eating, these people wanted to eat the critter! Fast forward to animal domestication, then to the more modern era. This is still happening, except we have delineated the boundaries of the habitat and have stocked said habitat with animals that we find useful-- e.g. cows. These cows provide food products (milk) and additional cows. They also provide meat. Getting the meat from the cow requires that the cow no longer be alive.
Those who are anti-hunting but are also munching on a roast beef sandwich are either impossibly ignorant or practiced at the art of self-deception.

Without linking the the article in question (use your Google skills), I will reference Steven Davis' work out of Oregon State U. His stated goal was to determine whether there are more animals killed per acre for plant harvest than are killed every year for human consumption. His initial findings were that approx 0.3 billion animal lives could be spared if Americans only ate meat (chickens account for a whopping 8 billion animal deaths, a logical conclusion would be that eating only cows would result in even fewer animal deaths). His findings were, not surprisingly, controversial and after some modifications to his method, the data showed that vegetarianism was slightly better than all-meat from the "fewest deaths so people can live" perspective.
But here's my point: even for vegetarians, death is required for life. Animals die directly from harvest practices, or die during the relocation after their home has been destroyed. If anyone thinks that the little animals can just move to another area, I encourage you to come out to Pullman to experience a region with farmland as far as the eye can see. Now, when it's harvest time, how far do you think the field mouse needs to go to find another food source? If he survives the machines (which run two, three, or more abreast, with blade systems that are twenty feet long) will he survive the hawk on the phone pole waiting to pounce? If he manages to survive both of those, how long until he starves to death?
The only way to get around it is to join a food co-op in which the vegetables are all organic (no pesticides to chase all of those insects across the highway to die on my windshield before otherwise dying from neurotoxins) and hand picked (no machinery to squash animal dens).
I'm out of time on this one, but hopefully at least one anti-hunter is sitting slightly lower on their perch. All animal life must extinguish other life to continue, and this is most true for humans.