are vegetarians more ethical by not eating meat?

[Angrboda]

no, i say ones own life is always more valuable to oneself, if you are human or cow, same difference. What one does to prolong it in the face of Death is outside the moral realm.

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Plus it is necessary for the animals to eat these plants to survive, anything that one does if the alternative is death can never be unethical.

Very true, but there is a strong ethical difference between self-defense or the necessity for suvival and killing simply because one enjoys eating meat, which is exactly what is happening.

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Anyone can and may do anything to keep him/herself alive, this is neither ethical nor unethical, its outside the scope of ethics or morality. Ethics start where we have a free choice that doesn't involve our own death or physical integrity.

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I'm wondering why, rationally, ethics starts there, and not before? There may be other problems with this, but it seems that you are saying it is okay to be immoral if my being immoral preserves something which I value (at some arbitrary level). (Or, perhaps more charitably, ethics is irrelevant with respect to certain value choices. They seem fundamentally equivalent, and fundamentally wrong. What value or reason was appealed to in order to determine which choices are neither moral or immoral? More significantly, why does a certain choice or act have no moral significance if my life is at stake, but the same choice have moral significance if it is not? To me, you seem to have simply anchored a sign in the middle of an ethical sea and said, "Here there be dragons.")

To me there is no reason to suppose a significant difference in suffering when comparing larger mammals and even with other animals I say their death is too high a price to pay for my dinner. And when I say price I really believe that I as the perpetrator pay myself, not just the animal.

Please be clear that what is at issue is not whether there is any difference between the suffering of a cow and that of a human, but whether the moral value of the suffering of a cow is different from the moral value of the suffering of a human. The fact that they are similar on non-moral dimensions is not relevant until you have established that their similarity on that non-moral dimension implies moral parity. You have given no rational reason for doing so, and you seem perilously close to things like Hume's is/ought fallacy and Moore's naturalistic fallacy. I will ask a related question which may help clarify matters: why does pain have any moral significance at all, rationally? (And, I'm hoping I don't have to point out the obvious, such as that there are significant differences between cows and humans on non-moral dimensions; whether those differences on non-moral dimensions matter or not cannot be known until you provide a rational basis for why the similarities between cows and humans have moral relevance. Only then can we determine whether the differences between them do not also have moral relevance.)

(ETA: We also seem to be circling back to Rhythm's earlier point that if the suffering of cows is what is the relevant property, then you are against us causing them unneeded suffering, not against us killing them; the two are easily separable things.)

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But ask yourself if it is not just your wish to keep the comfortable status quo that makes you and everyone else here so eager to see a difference in humans, is that rational?

Regardless of what my views are and whether or not I hold them rationally, neither has any bearing on the validity and rationality of your ethics. Please keep your red herrings and implied ad hominems to a minimum.