Yes it was partly toung in cheek. These were good people who acted on principle.
However... I was young and it took me too long to see the hypocrisy of their thinking. They would happily feed the chickens but I would be the person who killed them... their angel of death. I wasn't even properly shown how to kill a chicken.
One day I was present when a pig was slaughtered a process which was overseen by a vet. That animal certainly knew it was going to die and did not like the idea. I was only 19, and was somewhat badly affected by the experience. For a while I even became a vegetarian but developed health issues as a result.
In the long run what I took from the idea was that meat has a cost. Life is not sacred but it is certainly precious. For that knowing it was worth it.
The cause or mutability the attribute has nothing to do with the reasonableness of ascribing a certain prior probability to the attribute.
Also, many hundreds of millions of people in the world are born into families that raise them as vegetarians, is that so dissimilar from being born with a certain skin tone?
Most vegetarians decide to choose that diet after contemplating the suffering of the animals involved. Or had you never thought to ask why someone would be vegetarian?