I also eat meat, but candidly I can't justify it. I think the only way you could argue it's permissible is by supposing animals aren't proper subjects of moral consideration (e.g., they don't suffer or their suffering doesn't matter, or it's consistent to treat them as means rather than ends in themselves). But that's a difficult sell, and even if we grant it, there's also the harms inflicted on people by widespread production of meat -- e.g., the environmental impact or undue consumption of resources compared to other kinds of food production.

There's plenty of room to try and doubt these considerations, but there's at least a plausible case for vegetarianism. And what's the countervailing consideration? I can't really come up with anything more serious than "I like eating meat."

Life demands death. Life demands nourishment from other living organisms. It is not a matter of justification it just is a fact of life. It is sad but still it must be done. If an animal continued to decimate your garden (which is filled with living organisms) to the point of killing your chance to survive. You could die or kill the animal. Would you eat the animal or use it as compost? Death can be viewed as a cruel master no one can claim to avoid, or another part of the life process, the next step so to speak..

is them having feelings make them similar to humans? Also how can you identify feelings in them? How about mountains, plants, water? Do you view animals to have feelings because they can move around and interact?

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Our desire to see animals as like humans is a discourse of power - it comes from a yearning for absolution for our guilt for what we frame for ourselves as our exploitativeness - but it is common enough to find that claims of human-like animals are ultimately fraudulent (such as Koko the gorilla) to deconstruct the relationship between the Bambi-fication of animals in culture and the hard consequentialism of calculating animal suffering. The former is not a result of the latter.

Furthermore culturally we don’t just see that animals are like people, we rather see that they are like children. And there have been enough experiments on animals-as-children or children-as-animals that have ended catastrophically or have had to be stopped because the observed outcomes were so drastically different than what was anticipated that we should not trust this impulse when we encounter it in our thinking.

And in fact observing the correlation of human political purity movements, we find correlation between ideological vegetarians/vegans, anti-vaxxers, religious and new age purity movements and ultimately cults and theocratic fascism.

So I think we should see the movement to subordinate human dietary habits - which are economic and behavioral systems within systems and are certainly not entirely consciously controlled - under a social concern for animals-as-children - and in turn under the authority of a political movement, especially one that seeks to use the state to further its ends - as totalitarian rather than utilitarian.

Animals of course cannot liberate themselves, though that doesn’t stop broad artistic and cultural fantasizing that they can, which should further suggest that claims that this movement is scientific to the exclusion of power discourse are not credible.

The moral mandate that people at large need to be ethically perfected - and in particular that you are causing social ills by not willing yourself to be perfect and should be ashamed of it - does not serve ethical ends but is a means of domination and exploitation and is an enemy of an open society.

Finding yourself in the situation where you eat animals, I can understand attempting to foster an ethically motivated desire to reduce it or change how or how much you do it, but it is okay or even preferable for the difficulty of doing this, the seldomness with which it sticks, and how you then go about from there to inform your understanding of your own situation, to hold more sway with you than the social pressure to be either morally pure and perfect or ashamed of yourself.

If you want to stop eating meat, go for it, but just practically speaking it doesn’t take all that often so if it doesn’t take for you don’t be too surprised and don’t try to propagandize too disingenuously for it.

Coming from a vegetarian philosopher, I feel the answer boils down to what you think contains consciousness and what does not. Also, showing resentment to the corporations practicing industrial farming is always good. We are the consumers, we have the power for change even if the companies don’t want us to realize it.