Can a vegetarian and a person who eats meat work as a couple?

@BlueVeins I can see why you'd say that, [i]if[/i] someone takes the position that buying and consuming dairy products while abstaining from eating meat gives them some sort of moral "high ground".

There is no question, that the dairy industry is a least as cruel to animals as the meat industry is.

@Piper It's certainly true that the dairy industry is similarly cruel, but I'd argue that it's a lot suffering-efficient anyway, so to speak because a smaller number of animals can provide more calories. We've got 32.2 million cows in the US being slaughtered per year versus 121 million hogs and 241.7 million turkeys. I don't think it can be sensibly argued that we consume that much more meat than dairy to account for that gap. That said, I still oppose dairy production -- and perhaps much more importantly, egg production -- for obvious reasons.

@BlueVeins Okay, then. I was, am, speaking as someone who stopped eating meat over half my lifetime ago, but still has not succeeded in resisting certain dairy products, sometimes. I [i]know[/i] that the factory farming dairy industry is at least as cruel, as is most all production of eggs.

The only "suffering-efficient" I can remotely understand, is in an individual or industry at least attempting to [i]lessen[/i] suffering by their choices and actions.

@Piper Well, you've definitely got a point about the eggs. I don't think I could try and make hundreds of millions of chickens getting thrown into the macerator seem any less evil than regular old killin' for pork.