are vegetarians more ethical by not eating meat?

[littleendian]

Yes, we can choose to eat either plants or animals but plants are living organisms, too. Just cuz it can't yelp when you pluck an apple doesn't mean it's not made of organic, living materials. You start the argument that eating animals is unethical then you slide down the slippery slope to the point that you eventually reach the point where you'll have to starve to death because life comes from death via consumption.

Don't compare "killing" an apple to killing a pig, the former we can do in the comfort of our living room, the other is something so repulsive and contrary to what we feel is right, our innate ethics, that we hide the act away behind fences and walls and pay other people to do it for us and to print pretty pictures on the packaging to never remind us of what was necessary for our pitiful few minutes of taste.

While they live, treat them well, and when you go to kill them [because they're gonna die anyway eventually]

You are gonna die anyway, does it really follow from that that it is ethically justified to kill you now?

do it quickly and cleanly and don't make them suffer. There's no contradiction here unless you're just trying to split hairs, which is just petty and argumentative for the sake of being petty and argumentative.

I believe if we were talking about your life or your death you would not talk about "splitting hairs", and I'm sure you wouldn't want to be killed "quickly and clean" or otherwise, period. Why is it so hard to accept that all living beings might feel the same urge to stay alive? Any cow or pig has as much or as little right to be alive as you or I, brain size don't enter into it. The viewpoint of the homo egocentricus is a residue of Christianity and we as atheists should set out to overcome it. We took away the geocentric universe, then we took away the superiority of the white man, then that of man over woman, now we are taking away the arbitrary distinction between man and other animals. It's only logical.

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Human beings are omnivores* and so it is not unethical to eat meat.

(*our teeth are a mixture of sharp teeth (at front) for tearing and ripping flesh, and grinding teeth (back/sides) for chewing grains/veg etc).

Category error. Being an omnivor is a biological characteristic, not an ethical one. From the phyiscal ability to rape and kill doesn't follow that it is ethical to do so.

However, this does not excuse us from the duty to treat animals in a humane fashion, which we should do always.

"Human killing" is an oxymoron.

I respect other peoples life choices, but personally I think it would suck to be a vegetarian / vegan! But - each to their own.

We're not talking about what is convenient, we're talking about what is right. As a self-identified catholic, your own God told you "Thou shalt not kill", and by your own standards it is blasphemy to your own God to re-interpret Her words as only applying to humans.