[Wade]

----- A compelling hypothetical; not to judge but to offer thought expansion:

I'm an omnivore.
My intellect lets me know many benefits to eating meat. Taste pleasue, high brain energy, better adaptation in case of an extreme environmental condition...

My intellect also allows me to use emotion to empathize with my prey(even if the meat is from a store or restaurant). Sapience and consciousness are just words created that stress our extreme intelligence level above the other life forms that we share this planet with...

Assume a scenario where an alien race of an extreme intelligence level above ours that we share this universe with comes to our humble planet. They too are omnivores and have found us to be a tasty food item. They process us in a very quick and painless way. Indeed, we may not even know the scope of this process or even that it happens; even at the point of death. I doubt many of our food life forms(animals) know what will happen to them as they go about their business in the fields and buildings and water.

This is the nature of things. Even life forms of equal or nearly equal levels of intelligence routinely eat each other. Many have evolved it to a necessity.

If we became aware that these aliens were eating us our number one desire would be that they stop eating us. We also might want them to go away and stop the food processes and infrusructure that they built up around us. We would not care so much how quick and painless the death process was when compared to the process as a whole. Most of the aliens might not even care if they could even be aware of our complaints.
Our food life forms complain in their various ways moments before their death. Cows, pigs, and chickens struggling and screaming in a processing building; fish and other life forms struggling and communicating in various ways in nets and boats.
The aliens would use their own extreme intellect above ours to measure their benefits and emotion. The majority of them would probably continue to consume us as a tasty food item.

Hopefully any aliens that we meet will have advanced enough evolutionary or technologically to direct energy consumption; or simply not find us to be a tasty food item. Hopefully we will have advanced to a level of intelligence, technology, and evolution higher than our competitors when we meet(possibly to direct energy consumption).

When we leave this solar system to colonize others we will find new life forms of lesser intelligence. We will probably find many of them to be tasty food items that we process in a quick and painless way.

These are some things I some times consider that make me think about being a vegitarian. In the end though I am an omnivore.

-Wade