Letters of Note has a delightful piece from EB White, the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, explaining why he wrote the latter:

A farm is a peculiar problem for a man who likes animals, because the fate of most livestock is that they are murdered by their benefactors. The creatures may live serenely but they end violently, and the odor of doom hangs about them always. I have kept several pigs, starting them in spring as weanlings and carrying trays to them all through summer and fall. The relationship bothered me. Day by day I became better acquainted with my pig, and he with me, and the fact that the whole adventure pointed toward an eventual piece of double-dealing on my part lent an eerie quality to the thing.

...

Anyway, the theme of "Charlotte's Web" is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.

It's a fantastically mature and compassionate view of the relationship between the farmer and the farmed. Not a vegetarian perspective, but far more positive than my excerpt suggests. Go read the whole thing to get a sense of White's joy in the natural world and his respect for spiders.