The recent New York Times article by Natalie Angier discusses the book "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer offers a not so new but refreshing view of carnivores and vegitarians/vegans.  The so-called moral dilemma of higher consciousness, murdering what we eat, and how to avoid the suffering of the object to be eaten.  

As I learned years ago, plants indeed respond to all stimuli - tactile, auditory, weather, chemicals, insects et al. This is basic biology. One of the strongest portrayals of this truth is the book by Tompkins and Bird and the movie "The Secret Life of Plants". Another great book on the macro world is "The Lives of the Cell" by Lewis Thomas. This is a fascinating book on biology, as are his other books.

Some humans have difficulty eating animals with faces, perhaps they see themselves in each cow, each chicken, each fish.  There's something primal about our response to the visual array of two eyes/nose/mouth formula. It's ingrained in our biology. But as every farmer knows, one must kill to survive.  Comedian Steven Wright once joked: I'm a vegetarian. Not because I love animals but because I hate plants."