Nature is not on the brink of collapse because of 8 billion people and human overpopulation is a scaremongering tactic that should have died 30 years ago. It's hard to continue reading your comment with such easily falsifiable information in your first paragraph. The Earth and nature will be totally fine in the end.

The reality is animals provide a way of consuming resources efficiently that, sure, can be consumed by eating other plant based things but it's not as efficient as eating flesh.

For me, emotional arguments about why I shouldn't eat animals don't sway me very much because of the undeniable fact that we're the apex predator on Earth. I reject any moral argument that we're supposed to respect nature and other species because of our intelligence.

I don't believe we have a responsibility to other species and if we can get by in the world by enslaving all the animals and killing the rest that we can't I'm perfectly fine with that. We're just as natural as everything else on the Earth and I think it's weird to place ourselves outside the scope of nature or what's natural because we're more intelligent than everything else.