Eating Animals

I've been reading a book called "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer. I don't know or not if I read all of it.. I had to keep skipping bits..but I think I read most of it... I have read "enough" of it, that much I do know. It was horrifying to say the least..... I will forever be haunted by some of the things I read in there. I was going to include some paragraphs from the book in this post but I can't. They are the stuff of nightmares. I'm not sorry I read the book which, incidentally, my daughter gave me to read.... I want to know.. I NEED to know the truth about what happens to the animals we eat... it's just that once I know these things they never leave me.. I keep thinking about them and I feel really really bad. Some weren't even things I don't know already but just reading about them again and then added to them, "new stories" of horrendous abuse and torture just made it worse and worse. I'm not a vegetarian but I feel I should be. I have had many tries at being vegetarian and and 8 month period a couple of years ago, where I managed to eat only vegan food. I have still to work out what it is that causes me to return to meat-eating. It's not simply that I enjoy meat or that I am habituated to eating meat. There are many conflicts and problems with being vegetarian/vegan... or are there??? I'm just ALLOWING them to be problems,I think. I KNOW there are thousands, millions even, of people who never eat meat or animal products... why do I not join them once and for all? I know that I would find it hard not purchasing it to cook for my son who absolutely loves chicken. I know that I find it really hard to believe that I could or should feed my dogs or my cat a meatless diet( there are vegetarian foods available that have been certified suitable for them, but I have qualms about whether this is really fair..), I wouldn't like to " force" people to eat vegan food when I invite them knowing that they expect to eat steak...but then I am faced with the fact that I am putting all this things ahead of the reality that animals really suffer because we won't stop using them for our our own purposes.....I'm putting human pleasure ahead of the suffering of animals.. that's the terrible truth!!! And then there's the reality that eating animals wouldn't stop just because I decided not to eat them anymore.. the killing and the torture and the bad conditions would continue, because a lot of humans just don't care.. they don't see anything wrong with it, they make money from it, they want to keep it cheap etc etc... and some people even enjoy hurting animals and other people).... I can't stop murder or crime or pollution either but I don't have to join in! I think often people kid themselves that what they do really really makes any difference.. I'm quite the pessimist a lot of the time... but even if it doesn't make that much difference, we should still do what's right, just for its own sake..I think that is what I CAN do and I will at least TRY.....