To take a life: the ethics of eating meat

Like many of his surprisingly moderate opinions, Gary Snyder's point of view on eating meat is not what you would expect from his "surface persona." Given his intense affiliations with Buddhism, environmentalism and counterculture movements, I thought certainly he would be a vegetarian. His true stance on the matter is far more nuanced.

Perhaps it comes from living in Santa Cruz, where vegetarianism and veganism are often present in their most extreme forms, but I was very impressed with Snyder's realistic view on the matter. He describes the time he spent keeping chickens in such a way: "We maintained the flock, the ecology, and the economy by eating excess young roosters and, at the other end of the cycle, by the stewing an occasional elderly hen" (66). He goes on to point out that such management is one of the necessities of peasant life worldwide, for anything else would simply be uneconomical. And for those living in poverty, that is not possible. There is also something to be said about the fact that the chickens he raised lived far better lives than those raised in commercial farms, where animals are reduced to meat before they are killed. This brings up a point which strikes close to home for me. I come from a family of hunters, fishers and farmers. I have had innumerable conversations with meat-eaters who cringe to hear that I have killed animals and gutted them myself. If vegetarians object on moral grounds, so be it, but to hear meat eaters call me a coldblooded for killing a deer, well, that is hypocrisy, or worse. Predation is a natural part of the ecosystem. In my family lake in Wisconsin, we purposefully catch the mid-size bass and panfish, since they are horribly overpopulated. We practice catch and release with the large fish, while removing their competition, in effort to keep the balance. Deer hunting, also, is encouraged by the DNR, as the natural predators of deer have been all but driven extinct. Thus countless deer succumb to starvation and disease as a result of overpopulation. This method of meat-eating be grittier, but it is both more ethical (you are not supporting cruel factory farms), and more eco-friendly.

Snyder goes on to point out that it is only the middle and upper classes in first-world societies who have the option to choose vegetarianism. Among the poor in many parts of the world, vegetarianism is a necessity, something you do when the family buffalo has been sold and have no money but for rice and fish sauce. I find it doubly ironic that those who are often the most outspoken and militant anti-meat campaigners are the people who come from very priviledged backgrounds, and besides perhaps reading a few extremist theoretical texts, have had no contact with the true meat-eating proletariat of the world.

Question: I have heard that studies have been done which explore the feasibility of worldwide vegetarianism, crop-growing, phasing out of meat products, etc. I have found none. To me, the concept sounds absurd. Can anyone educate me?