Do we really need to kill animals??

[Mummelmann]

"Would we like if aliens came and thought of us as nothing but animals and started doing the same to us as we do to pretty much every animal?"

That right there pretty much says it all.

Eating meat is made out to be something evil that modern man does out of spite when the truth is that we've been doing for tens of thousands of years and it is actually the very thing that made us what we are (meat and fire in combination laid the foundation for modern man to evolve and develop).
There are also plenty of animals who eat other animals and there are even animals who simply anjoy killing (such as bears and panthers), its not more or less natural for us to kill animals and feed on them.

By assuming that meat eating is unbecoming of us since we should be above it (I assume that this is some morality issue), then by the same idealistic train of thought, you should turn off the internet and sell your PC and other gadgets to help the poor and needy of the world, a concern far more pressing and real than meat eating.

Everything we do is natural, from eating meat to posting on video game forums. It is the culmination of our long and ardous development process since we came down from the tree dwelling ancestors that were too dumb and inefficent for either.