Vegetarianism

I like the taste of meat.  I also like animals and would not choose for any animal to suffer.  This is a conflict that has been fighting itself out in my brain recently.  Sadness that cows and pigs have to die, but NOM what a delicious cheeseburger... I'm just confused now.  I have always held these two opposing views but have always pushed it to the back burner unwilling to consider giving up meat.  As many of you know my boyfriend has skirting the vegetarian line for years, but funnily enough he was not the one who finally got me actually thinking about it (despite his many desperate tries).  It was actually a fictional book series in which talking Animals exist alongside normal animals (note the capitalization differentiation).  Some Animals had speech and consciousness and other animals didn't seem to.  

It's just a small dumb fictional thing but it got me thinking, don't all animals in real life have consciousness? I mean I kind of think a dog knows its a dog, it may not be able to solve mathematical problems but it can make decisions and preferences and most importantly to this topic suffer and feel pain.  And because of that we don't eat dogs... but wait, doesn't the same apply to pigs? and cows? they are also able to make decisions and have emotions and suffer and feel pain as far as I know.  And if you keep going down that road where do you draw the line for animals just brainless enough to justify eating? That line seems like it would be arbitrarily placed because we don't actually know whats going on in an animal's mind.  If you don't know if it had consciousness or not, best to stay safe and avoid it all together (which funnily enough was discussed in the book series).  

BUT I do love a good cheeseburger, all juicy and cheesy with delicious toppings mmm. And I'm always treading the anemic line so I have always needed more iron and protein than most people, so giving up meat might actually be unhealthy.  And I rarely eat it anyway.  I dislike cooking it because I'm scared of getting the temperature wrong and giving someone salmonella so I rarely cook it and really only eat it when I go out which is once a week, and even then not every time.

See my dilemma? Is giving up meat a future possibility? I don't think I can ban cheeseburgers from my diet yet, but I will definitely think hard before ordering to decide if the deliciousness is worth it.  I think I'm going to start small.  I'm going to completely stop cooking it (which doesn't take much effort as I rarely do anyway).  I'm also going to start with cutting out pork.  This will be easy because I only eat bacon and that can be substituted with turkey bacon which I happen to like better anyway

Beef might be in the future, but that will  take a lot of will power so we'll see.  Poultry would be last and I will probably never give up seafood.  But I think this is a start nonetheless.  I don't care who else joins or disagrees because this is about how I feel about the issue, you all can make your own decisions, I won't judge.