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One thing I hate about this whole debate (I havn't read this entire thread, but I mean veg. vs. meat debates in general) is the black-or-white views portrayed. The problem is not that we eat meat, it's that we eat way too much of it. When it comes to my meat-eating friends they eat meat or fish for pretty much every meal (except breakfast) and tone down the vegetables. My family does at home as well. That's good from neither a health, environmental or a humanitarian view.
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Most people do eat too much meat, but not all meat is equally bad for the individual or the environment. Wild rabbit (Jack and Cottontail varieties, to be specific), for instance, is a wonderfully healthy food; and if you harvest it from the wild in a responsible manner (generally, this means legal), it helps keep the environment healthy as well.
The problem, however, is that most people who eat rabbit refuse to hunt it themselves; not because doing so is too difficult, time consuming, or expensive.... but because they get all blubbery when it comes time to kill the rabbit.
So, perhaps we should invent a rule: if you are unwilling to kill an animal yourself, don't eat the meat.
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I am more understanding of how people would make the choice to kill animals to survive when people don't have access to other foods (though I still don't think it makes killing the animals a *good* thing). But when the killing is not necessary for a person's survival, then killing animals for food seems like pure hedonism to me. I don't mind hedonism at all (I'm certainly hedonistic in many ways)...but I am troubled when it causes others to experience unnecessarily pain and suffering or an end to their lives.
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What I find most troubling here is that you're attributing human characteristics to animals; in particular a class of animals which are not self aware. So, really, why should one care whether that animal meets it's end by being hit by a truck, getting devoured by something higher on the food chain, or peacefully in a field... when it makes no difference to the animal in question?