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> Meat is a rich source of protein and energy. We don't need any more justification than that to want to eat other animals.

Jonathan Swift argued the same in A Modest Proposal[1]:

> I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

Swift also argued that eating the babies of the poor also helps prevent famine and breaks the cycle of poverty. Clearly this has more advantages than eating chickens or cows!

> At the end of the day- many animals eat other animals' meat. Why is it any different for humans to do the same?

Animals also rape each other, kill each other over mates and territory, and occasionally commit cannibalism. By your logic, why shouldn’t humans do the same?

> Even a chicken is large enough to feed two people. Larger animals can feed a family for several days.

Depends on the chicken. Almost all male chicks are killed within 3 days of hatching, usually by tossing them into a shredder.[2] I doubt one of them is very filling.

1. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

Swift's text was satire.

Also: cannibalism, rape, murder etc are illegal in pretty much every territory. What is your point?

Also also: a chicken thrown to the shredder is not eaten, yes.

Can you please explain what you mean without colorful metaphors and attempts at humour? I enjoy those as the next person but they don't help me understand what you mean. If I make an assumption about what you mean and I reply to the assumption in the same way, with metaphors and similes, and you make an assumptiona bout what that meant and reply accordingly, we'll lose the plot very, very quickly.

>> At the end of the day- many animals eat other animals' meat. Why is it any different for humans to do the same?

It's a question of moral agency. Generally animals are not held to any kind of moral standard at all - no one thinks a dog that bites a child is "evil", just dangerous. You'd be more likely to blame the owner for not training/controlling it properly.

I assure you that I still think of the dog that bit me twenty years ago as the true incarnation of all evil. Bastard mutt! It just jumped out of nowhere and bit me in the leg. The fuck?

Now, I think the point you're making is that, in terms of moral agency humans are special, so special that we 're not allowed to eat other animals, even though other animals do it (and they'll eat us if given the chance).

Well, I have to say that I've heard the same claim on both sides of the issue. For example, in the past people have claimed that animals don't have a soul, and in modern times, that they don't feel pain (or don't experience it as humans do) or have emotions (or human emotions) and that, therefore, it's fine to treat them anyway we please. In fact, I believe that this special moral agency of humans is used to justify animal experimentation, at least to some degree.

Obviously, I don't think that this idea of special human moral powers holds any water. We're animals like the rest. We 're part of the same food chain, where living things feed off each other. Why should we be treated differently than all those other living things? They can eat us, and each other, we can eat them.

> Your comment makes it sound as if eating meat is some kind of indulgence, like eating sweets.

Really, it is. It doesn't make a lot of sense to eat meat from an efficiency point of view, or from the sense of impact on the climate.

>Meat is a rich source of protein and energy. We don't need any more justification than that to want to eat other animals.

I don't see how the second sentence follows from the first.

> At the end of the day- many animals eat other animals' meat. Why is it any different for humans to do the same?

Humans plus livestock make up 96% of the biomass of mammals on the planet. Domesticated poultry is 60% of the birds. That makes us a special case in terms of impact, to put it mildly.

From an animal welfare point of view, it's also different to kill a wild animal for food compared to shutting it in a cage and pumping it full of hormones and antibiotics for a few months before killing it.

The major driver of climate change is energy production and transport. We can reduce our impact by limiting those first, before we get to the food we eat. Everybody doesn't need to have their personal automobile or fly everywhere in jets that consume tons of fossil fuels at a time. Everybody doesn't need to go around with a portable computer in their pants. But everybody does need food to eat. Why would we first limit a fundamental need, before unnecessary technologies?

>> I don't see how the second sentence follows from the first.

It follows because we need protein and energy.

>> That makes us a special case in terms of impact, to put it mildly.

That makes us a special case in the way we find meat to eat.

But why are we a special case when it comes to eating meat?

> The major driver of climate change is energy production and transport. We can reduce our impact by limiting those first, before we get to the food we eat.

It's not logical to say we need to tackle the biggest problems first before tackling the smaller problems. Tackling the easier problems first, or tackling as many problems as we can simultaneously makes more sense.

It's also wrong to imply that food is not a major contributor to climate change. It's hard to compare (because of methane emissions v CO2 emissions, food is transported on vehicles etc.) but it looks like food production is similar in impact to transport.

> Why would we first limit a fundamental need

Eating food is a fundamental need, but not eating meat.

Well, changing the way people eat is much harder than changing their use of technology. It's not just that it's a larger problem- it's also harder, like you say.

Of course farming uses transport, just as everything else does. But the emissions from transporting food come from transport vehicles. I don't see how these must be assigned to farming. If we reduce transport emissions, we'll reduce all transport emissions, including those from transporting food. If we only reduce emissions from farming we'll still have to deal with transport emissions.

In any case, going by the graphs on this wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Anthropogenic_g...

- It really looks like a clear majority of total emissions is from energy production, transport and industry.

I used to avoid eating meat for ethical reasons for a period of about 12 years. I compensated by eating lots of carbs, and gained about 20Kg. After that I decided to lose weight using protein based diet and now I am much better, close to my ideal weight.

I'd say avoiding meat could have some health risks.