are vegetarians more ethical by not eating meat?

[Sal]

But I'm also realistic. Nature is nasty. The amount of suffering of animal-on-animal behavior is just abysmal. Not to mention the very nature of some animals that have their own taxonomy: parasites. Parasites cause untold suffering.

This is not a justification. Other's cruelty can never excuse our own.

Then people that buy factory meat from a grocery store are excused. They didn't kill the animals that constitutes those meat products.

Man is not primarily part of nature anymore, he/she is most importantly part of a culture today. This culture is subject to the rules society gives itself, it is not based on the rules of nature, a good example is rape, which is a fact of nature but outlawed by society.

Animals have culture, albeit a primitive one.

So, let's not delude ourselves, there's enough of suffering to go around - if only idiots like PETA would realize this, or do they think they can lessen suffering in how nature is?

We can minimize the suffering we ourself cause, yes we can.

A pipe-dream, if I ever saw one. Very unrealistic. Problem is that we cannot control how others behave, is why I think it's a pipe-dream.

I'd argue that free range animals have a better life than what occurs outside the fences with occurrence of natural predators ripping them apart.

I'd rather live free and in danger than a prisoner without great hopes or fears, my destiny set from the word go, to be killed in prime of life (old animals don't taste well).

That's anthropomorphizing on a grand scale. Animals don't know they're prisoners in the same sense humans know it. Dogs, for instance, don't call us master - they only act the way they act, because of how they've been selected for in their evolution.