are vegetarians more ethical by not eating meat?

[littleendian]

Humans are different. Other animals don't have the intelligence and awareness that we have. They can feel pain and suffer, but it's not like a person suffering.

That's what you want to believe, but neuroscience tells us that animals show the same neuro-activity when painful stimuli arrive in the brain than humans do. Until you show where the difference is, this argument merely shows what you want to believe.

They only know "I'm hungry", "I'm tired", "I'm horny", and "That hurts." They don't think.
They don't know they even exist. They're just there, reacting to their reflexes and instincts. Nothing else.

Again, this is simply a prejudiced assertion based on no evidence what so ever. Its the same kind of thinking that brought people to all kinds of wrong actions, like slavery ("blacks are simply inferior" is basically what you're today saying about animals).

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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.

The moral realm doesn't only extend to our own direct physical actions but also to the actions we condone or support with our choices of consumption. Paying someone else to kill is no more moral than killing yourself. Stalin was responsible for the people who died in his gulags even though, as far as I know, he never killed anyone himself.

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.

No, not a pipe dream. You can either go around raping and pillaging or you can join a charitable organization and help others in need, you must see that there is a difference in the amount of suffering caused. We control how others behave by our example, its completely intuitive, we follow those whose actions we admire, we imitate them and we change. It's easy to say "but I'm only one person, what difference does my action make", but even if only you yourself change this does make a difference for your own actions and it will affect others actions eventually. Many of the good changes in history came about not by revolution but by individuals taking baby steps.

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.

This argument can easily be turned around: A human prisoner of war for example can endure his prison stay because he has reason and knows that he will be free after the war. An animal has no such capacity, therefore its suffering will be greater since it cannot follow its instincts and move freely.