This question I ask sincerely.
There are other equally ethical considerations: global warming, land use, energy/water use, etc. I feel that any one of these should give most people pause.
This chain of thought also doesn't go anywhere, unless you want to end up a hermit of some sort, because pretty much every logistic chain is contaminated.
> There are other equally ethical considerations: global warming, land use, energy/water use, etc. I feel that any one of these should give most people pause.
Hmm. I'd say global warming et. al. is not even in the same universe ethics-wise compared to animal farming.
Arguing that consumers aren't responsible for the method of production seems bizarre to me. Would you knowingly take cartel money as payment without any moral qualms?
It seems more bizarre to hold specifically consumers responsible to me. They're generally many levels removed from the source, and, in addition to that, a lot of consumers have very low power. Nor have I heard of many successful boycotts. I didn't get the impression that consumers are terribly influential on the logistics chains they use, they're just a convenient scapegoat so we don't have to actually blame the actual creators of those chains.
There are plenty of ranges of products I've never used. They still exist. Not using certain products would have a negative influence on me, which is OK, if I felt like this also had a negative influence on the logistic chain. But it didn't, and won't. The scale is just all wrong. Politicians and businessmen are who actually have influence, or sometimes sociological effects, and one can't trivially choose to be a part of a sociological effect, and most of them are not ethics driven.
The thing that will make a difference is things like regulations.
> Would you knowingly take cartel money as payment without any moral qualms?
I'm not familiar with situations where one would take cartel money in the first place, and I'm not comfortable saying that something I bought at some point didn't, somehow, involve cartel money.
But I imagine there are groups of people who buy something of the sort, drugs, maybe, and the logistical chain is, again, not caused by them, and they should worry about other things. Like not being addicted to drugs.
Immediacy is an interesting beast. I can see some lamb chops in the freezer and not really connect them to the fluffy bundle of cuteness gamboling across the pasture that I might see out on a walk that same day.
On the other hand, I'll tear up at the idea that anyone might ever, in even a minor capacity, be cruel to creatures that I hold close to my heart. I would straight up murder anyone that wished ill on my family, and all manner of beast falls under that umbrella.
I know, rationally, that this simply isn't consistent. But from the human perspective... I guess the distinctly human perspective, it's entirely ... not consistent... comfortable.
Work in progress, at least for me.
If you want to operate a permaculture, which seems to be one of the most environmentally friendly and ethical ways of producing food, animals are often a part of that system, and sustainably too.
Factory farming and industrialised monoculture agriculture is another matter entirely that can't be legislated out of existence fast enough.
In my case, I simply recognize that I do not have sufficient self-discipline to remain fully healthy on a vegetarian (let alone vegan) diet. And that I'd rather be a hypocrite than sick or dead.
And even acknowledging that, one can take measures to minimize one's impact. I consume a lot of eggs for protein and vitamins, and almost never prepare meat at home, though I'll eat it at other people's homes, restaurants, etc. I pay a little extra for pasture-raised eggs in the hope that those chickens have slightly less awful lives than the ones packed head to toe in barns. I eat dairy substitutes instead of actual dairy for many purposes (though not almond milk, which I dislike and is absolutely terrible for the environment).
As soon as lab-grown meat becomes a viable substitute (within, say, double the price), I'll gladly switch to that.
If you ask millions or billions of people to completely change their lives and eliminate something that they find pleasurable, all but a tiny percentage will either reject the idea outright or find they don't have the willpower to change. Willpower is hard; everyone has a finite amount of it in a given day; and we have to apply it constantly to a thousand other temptations of modern life.
If you ask people to cut back a bit on things and make some compromises, you're more likely to get cooperation. And 50% of the population cutting their meat consumption even by 20% gets you a lot further than 5% eliminating it from their diet entirely.
The thing is, we became somehow gross/decadent in how we live, too many animals living in dark tiny space only to be butchered en masse to be wasted by unhappy consumers (30% waste was often quoted for the last years). This is where we cross a line between ~moral animal eating and "cruelty".
If you don't eat meat because of ethical & environmental reasons, but still consume fish I ask you to take a good long look into the impact we've had on global fisheries.
The moral problem, though, is it takes more chicken deaths to get an equal amount of meat as almost any other farm animal. One cow gives you as much meat as a few hundred chickens, so you're killing hundreds more chickens each year to feed a family than if you fed them beef.
So if you are eating meat (I do) and you want to try being ethical about it, total environmental harm and total death numbers are generally on polar opposite sides. Justifying regular animal consumption in any environmental or ethical sense is pretty much impossible, unless people start eating exclusively overpopulated invasive species--but cannibalism generally isn't socially acceptable. :)
My issue is most people overlook the impact we've had on fisheries. It's much harder for fish populations to get back to where they need to be without massive regulation. Which is extremely hard on a global scale considering the economical impact it can have on some areas. The PBS documentary "Fish on my Plate" (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-fish-on-my-plate...) goes over this a bit in various ways, but one story they highlight is how Peru fixed their anchovy problem.
Never mind the issue of byproduct waste when it comes to line & trolling boats. Raising chickens & cows have an impact, but byproduct kill has an entire ecosystem impact.
>How can you be against cruelty to animals and still regularly consume meat?
How can you be against slave labor of children and still regularly wear clothing made in sweatshops?
It's easy, it's a cost-benefit trade-off. It is simply too expensive. People understand that animals are treated horribly and every time I see such a video I immediately stop eating meat for a week or so and then it slowly creeps back. The biological alternatives are just too expensive right now. IF there is lab grown meat that tastes the same and costs the same I'll happily stop eating the other type of meat.
The point is, people are fully aware that clothing by HM/Nike/Primark is made by slave labor but there is so much working against us.
First of all, ads. Ads work, that's a fact. Second, the fact that there is a market (we buy and sell clothing in stores) further occupies our attention and leads to min/maxing of cost/benefit in the store (making us forget that the clothing is created by slave labor by children). Third, there is the whole substitution bias "if I won't buy it, someone else will!" which is a bullshit argument.
The fact is that humans are really kind of stupid and every time we walk in a store so much shit is thrown at us that we completely forget about 99% of the important things in life and just shop for bargains ... everytime I'm in the Primark I have to remind myself that there are children suffering for this, yet I still bought two shorts for $8 each and have worn them quite often.
Sorry for the long rant. Just my two cents.
I'm curious what your source is for saying a vegetarian diet isn't optimal. Most studies I've seen (including large and long studies) claim the opposite. Here's a list: [1]
I agree it's like sweatshops. I didn't want to draw the comparison to slavery because I think the ethical question stands on its own, but maybe you're right to point out that it's the same driving impulse.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarian_nutrition#Health_ef...
I haven't seen many (any?) studies that effectively isolate vegetarian diet in humans from confounding factors as mentioned in the first paragraph of the wikipedia link you provided.
I've yet to meet a vegetarian who sits on the couch all day, smoking, eating fries, chips and candy, drinking beer and watching TV. I've met plenty of others who fall fairly close to that stereotype and I'll readily admit that if I looked only at "vegetarian vs not", I'd conclude that vegetarian was more optimal. By the same token, I'd probably conclude that merely owning hiking boots or a kayak or soccer cleats was a life quality and quantity extender.
It's very sad that people are still selling these diets without disclosing the very important health risks they pose or the care that must be taken when on them.
[1]https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/7-nutrients-you-cant-ge...
I understand your sentiment but there's a reason people enjoy eating meat, it feels pleasureable in our mouth because it is rich in nutrients and rare in nature. In nature you don't eat meat every day like we do in our current society.
Just like donuts and candy tastes nice is because there's a lot of sugar and fat in them, things that are scarce in nature.
>I'm curious what your source is for saying a vegetarian diet isn't optimal. Most studies I've seen (including large and long studies) claim the opposite. Here's a list: [1]
If you actually read through the Wikipedia I am not really convinced
> (...) although this is at least partly due to lifestyle factors beyond diet, such as a low prevalence of smoking, and the generally high socioeconomic status
>(...) and other lifestyle factors associated with a vegetarian diet may contribute to the positive health outcomes that have been identified among vegetarians.[11]
The point Wikipedia tries to make is clear.
What I'm trying to argue is that there are nutrients in meat that you are unable to get anywhere else than from meat. Yes, I fully realize that we can synthesize these things artificially but you still need them. As with most things in life, the optimum is somewhere in between. One could eat no meat at all, one end of the scale, one could eat only meat, the other end of the scale with the optimum probably somewhere in between.
>How can you be against cruelty to animals and still regularly consume meat?
Sincere answer: I don't see how this is the slightest bit different from "how can you be against rampant pollution but still use a computer" or "how can you be against torture but still support a police force" or "how can you be against war crimes but still support going to war" or any of an endless number of scenarios where unpleasant choices must be made but harm reduction can still be practiced. I think you've either set up a false dichotomy and argument from perfection, or you're engaging in circular definitions by saying "cruelty" is literally "any consumption of meat" as opposed to most people seeing a line between wanton cruelty and merely raising something to kill it in a more humane way.
>There are other equally ethical considerations: global warming, land use, energy/water use, etc. I feel that any one of these should give most people pause.
I don't consider a single one of those ethical considerations inherent to meat, they're market failures that we should working on correcting themselves (and preferably as part of a larger framework addressing the same issues everywhere). Global warming could have been entirely prevented with a proper carbon pricing scheme and could still be heavily reduced with one (though some sort of tax is now needed as well to deal with previous externalities). The "value" of land use and resource use is highly subjective, so long as we're pricing in the costs properly it should be up to individuals how they want to spend their extra income. Meat could well be a luxury, but we have lots of luxuries and I strongly dislike the game of "my luxury is more moral then yours!" which is inevitably an argument on a foundation of sand and makes everyone rightly angry to no purpose.
Maybe you honestly don't mean it that way, and I don't wish to attack your character and would certainly be interested in reading your replies as well. But over the years I've found lines of questioning like yours to often be weak self-justification to come up with "rational arguments" about something where really the person just feels it's yucky and doesn't like it themselves. But "ban this because I think it's yucky" doesn't generally work except for dictators, so they post hoc find something else, but rather then simply trying to deal with the actual objective problems they find as reasons they loop that back to arguing against what they find yucky. I'm not saying that makes someone a bad person either! Humans do that sort of reasoning a lot, finding justifications for how they really wanted to act anyway, I know I fall into that trap with some regularity and possibly always will. But I still think it's worth trying to step back and consider what problem you're really trying to solve and being honest about that.
Oppose "cruelty"? This will probably be the hardest because it gets into highly subjective arguments, but there is some level here that basically everyone can agree on even at cost so find that and require it. Oppose carbon (or equivalent) release? Support putting a price on that equivalent to the cost of removing it industrially plus margin. Worried about pollution? Require water leaving farms to have equivalent levels of contaminants as water entering (including rain). Etc.
But if you take all that and then come up with "all of you should stop eating meat" people, formally or not, will have a sense you're talking BS and hear "I don't like what you like conform to me" because there are other solutions to the stated goals.
Are you implying all meat consumption equates cruelty to animals? Or are you referring specifically to consumption of meat produced cruelly, e.g. by factory farms?
I don't really know how to answer you. If all animals were free ranging and we only ate the ones that died of old age, we'd probably need so many more animals / land / energy to satisfy current demand that we'd all be dead for an absolute lack of trees.
If you have some chickens in your backyard that you treat well (you may say that's subjective, but I say the bar is so low, let's not quibble here) and you take their eggs? I'm ok with that.
*This includes both the meat industry and the farming industry producing food for the animals.
There are various ways to obtain meat for consumption, people hunt wild game, people raise livestock on their land, is this cruel according to you?
Because those are two separate questions. I eat meat from animals I raised and killed. I know there was no cruelty involved. I do not eat meat from stores or restaurants since they will almost certainly have involved cruelty.
>There are other equally ethical considerations: global warming, land use, energy/water use, etc. I feel that any one of these should give most people pause.
None of those considerations actually are arguments in favor of veganism. They are red herrings vegans use to try to get support from people who care about the environment. All of the environmental arguments put forth for veganism are deliberately misleading and dishonest.
This is all covered in The Matrix.
What does one have to do with the other? Most livestock live rather comfortable lives compared to their wild counterparts. Less disease, less parasites and of course less predators.
> This question I ask sincerely.
I doubt it. Your question is as absurd as a plant lover asking how you can be against cruelty and eat vegetation? Vegetation is life. The fruit you eat is actually a plant's ovaries and uterus. How disgusting and cruel is that? Or ask a vegan why they have cats and dogs as pets. They are carnivores that eat meat. How can you be against cruelty and own pets?
> There are other equally ethical considerations: global warming, land use, energy/water use, etc. I feel that any one of these should give most people pause.
Then why are you using a computer or smartphone? Do you wear clothes? It's made from cheap labor on the other side of the world? Do you drive a car or use public transportion? What about heat or the AC? Is your home cooled or heated? Why aren't so considerate?
Other than to feel superior and virtue signal, there is no good reason not to eat meat. It's true that we eat too much meat, but we are omnivores. That's the diet we are meant to eat. Veganism is a poor and unnatural diet for humans. I was a vegan for a few months. I know the scam.
Humans are part of nature. It is natural for humans to consume meat. That's why prey animals and livestock exist.