I feel you. I stopped eating meat for 40 years for the same reason. But... they are on the same food chain we are, and they’d eat us in a heartbeat, right?
Herbivorous ruminants like cows would never eat you, and would generally never harm you unless provoked. Breeding intelligent lifeforms in a bespoke way to murder them for cash — whatever the reason or creature involved — is diabolically evil. If you do this for a living, you’re a merchant of death in my book.
The circle of life is far more complicated than herbivores/carnivores and many animals will happily grab a meaty snack if opportunity arises.
The scary part is that droughts are getting more common.
> Unlike most great apes today, whose diet is primarily plant based, we can thank the incredible nutrient density in meat and our incredible hunting and tool creating ability for prefrontal cortex development.
Complete and utter speculation.
> We were pack hunters, forging tools and strategies capable of taking down mammoths. Call it 'diabolicaly evil' if you want, but this is simply nature and survival.
Subsistence hunting amongst early human tribes is not comparable to modern day factory farming in any conceivable way.
B12 doesn’t come from eating plants OR animals: it comes from bacteria, and ironically that bacteria is in such short supply on factory farms that the animals need to be injected with synthetic B12.
> I don't personally believe highly processed plant alternatives such as Beyond meat are a long term option if you're even vaguely interested in your own health.
I eat raw soybeans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. I’d recommend watching the documentary Forks Over Knives [1] if you care about your personal health, and the documentary Dominion [2], if you’d like to see what really happens on factory farms.
[2] B12 sources up until it was possible to synthesize in the 60s were exclusively from animal products. Also, if you're even vaguely predisposed to anemia, you will likely struggle getting enough hema-available iron from plant sources without supplementation.
Glad you are able to live off of entirely soybeans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. For a lot of people, this isn't sustainable. Would love to see your bloods, discuss athletic performance and energy.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/diet-and-primate-....
[2] https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminB12-HealthProfessio....
> prefrontal cortex development
I think hunting might be one of the most ethical ways consume meat.
I have a problem with factory farming because I feel like the amount of suffering involved is disproportionately high compared to other methods.
I also have a problem with the negative environmental externalities of big agriculture.
I am asking the fundamental question. I will agree completely that large scale food production has some real problems with animal treatment. I'm not defending or commenting on that. I'm just trying to understand the moral judgements associated with consuming another animal, as is done at just about all levels of the food chain in the natural world. Our digestive systems, our teeth, our nutritional requirements are all tuned to omnivorous consumption. Why is it wrong to exercise our natural nutritional choices, plant and animal, that have resulted from millions of years of evolution?
As much as I respect the intelligence of those animals, what a remarkably low bar to measure ourselves against. May as well justify manslaughter and rape as while we're at it. Drawing a line that arbitrarily suits certain primal desires and justifying it by pointing at animals is how we move backward, not forward.
Also, it's a hell of a difference between the wolf, who has to kill in order to survive, and the man, who just has to choose something else to eat in the supermarket or restaurant. Justifying ones choice by comparing oneself to a wolf is incredibly flawed. No one here would bat an eye if, for whatever reason, people have to hunt and kill in order to sustain themselves, like some tribes probably still do. We wouldn't call them evil for it. What can be called evil on the other hand, is the systematic raising, torturing, and killing of billions of animals every year. Because it's needless. We could easily survive without it, but we choose not to, because bacon. I get it, it's delicious. But at some point it becomes very questionable, and I'm even setting aside the sustainability aspect.
It's cheesy, but the with great power comes great responsibility quote kind of holds up the way I see it. We pretty much dominate every other species, but we shouldn't pick and choose traits of other species in order to win arguments. We aren't wolves, we aren't dolphins. We have the capabilities to make the choice and don't kill and still survive. All it takes is changing ones habits a bit. We also have the capabilities to understand and decide that rape is wrong, and most people don't do it. Can you imagine what it would sound like if an accused rapist would point to dolphins as defense?
I'm not trying to set a standard for you. All I want to say is that pointing at other animals to justify our behavior is flawed and something we should be above as a species as a whole.
Humans give themselves incredible characteristics compared to other animals, it's like they are miles ahead of every animal when it comes to self awareness, emotion, rational thought, it's like evolution in their case made a giant leap and not an incremental step like it is for everyone.
Why are then humans comparing themselves to obligate carnivores like lions, tigers to justify their actions? Why are they looking at their natural bodies to justify the actions? How come when it comes to taking a life of another animal for sustenance, sustenance that can be achieved without the kill, they do not want to lift themselves up and draw a line between nature and themselves?
There are many things that come naturally yet we do not want to mimic that.
Didn't that leap in evolution come from being able to control our food supply to the point where we were able to consume energy at such an efficient rate that we evolved emotion, rational thought, society, etc?
It could be argued that now we've achieved that we should be looking at the next stage of evolution, which may be mulch made into fake meat loaded with salt and preservatives, or even growing laboratory meat; but surely the reason we're here and having this discussion at all is because of our domestication and consumption of animals. It seems a circular argument to say that's immoral.
Are we really evolved enough to move past that? We are certainly domesticating ourselves as every generation goes by, we see that from the massive decline in human-to-human violence over many millennia, and so a reduction in violence toward animals could also be seen in that evolutionary sense. I'm not convinced we're at a point where we're ready to 100% wean ourselves off animals for food. It certainly comes with its own set of problems.
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I think you missed the entire point of the comment you're replying to. It specifically mentions breeding and slaughtering animals, this has nothing to do with wolves or hunters
> Is the wolf diabolically evil?
Do wolves have a sense of good and evil ?
Do wolves talk about the ethical and moral implications of breeding and slaughtering millions of animals every single day ?
> Our digestive systems, our teeth, our nutritional requirements are all tuned to omnivorous consumption. Why is it wrong to exercise our natural nutritional choices, plant and animal, that have resulted from millions of years of evolution?
A lot of people in the west eat meat two or three times a day, sometimes from multiple animals during the same meal, we didn't evolve to do that at all. We didn't evolve to sit all day in front of a computer, but here I am. We didn't evolve to use cars but we almost all do. Using evolution as an argument for anything usually is a very poor choice....
I personally have no issue with the idea of killing to eat, the problem is everything else in the process. We don't have to treat amimals like we do, we don't have to eat so much meat every single day
I think looking at how things in the animal kingdom work and using that as a justification for our actions is a very low bar. We have the cognitive and emotional ability to understand that things like murder/rape/etc. are wrong do we not? If you just take a small step from that and recognize the sentience of animals, it doesn't seem too unreasonable to afford them the same respect.
PS: I think the idea of good/evil is pretty reductionist to begin with, but I understand it's a common way of looking at things
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evil
We wrote these things down so that we describe them to each other. The concepts already existed. We didn't invent evil, we defined it but it was already there. We've also used arguments like this to separate ourselves from what consider be lesser, to distance us from our actions. This is mental gymnastics though.
Whatever you have to do to feel ok about eating a chicken is fine but pretending we have some better sense of self than anything else feels like hubris. If our position in the world is truly better because we can articulate out feelings and we're smarter, why don't we eat dogs and mutes and the mentally handicapped?
> why don't we eat dogs and mutes and the mentally handicapped?
This is exactly the kind of point you would have to bite the bullet on if you were to be logically consistent and made arguments for meat eating being ok because you believe animals are intellectually/morally inferior. If you believe a cow is ok to eat because they are not as smart then you would have to be ok (being logically consistent) with eating anything that is not as smart as you such as the mentally handicapped.
[1]: generalizing obviously
It often takes several attempts to kill the cow, even with a bullet to the head. Their throats are often slit while they are alive. There is pleeenty of footage of exactly this in Dominion. I suggest you watch it.
And even today, most people in the world likely still participate occasionally in the slaughter of animals, as this is still routine in all rural areas of the world, even in the US and Europe.
Speak for yourself. When I hear vegans try to act like I'm a horrible person on par with people that murder humans like someone did elsewhere in this thread, I don't feel guilty. I simply thing its a ridiculous thing for them to say.
I'm going to leave it at that because unlike that person I don't feel the need to say inflammatory things to someone that has made different choices about what they want to eat.
I'm all for ensuring that animals are treated as well as possible and for regulating the industry to ensure that happens. When I hear about people doing abusive things to livestock I get as mad as any vegan. It should be severely punished.
I can also get behind the idea that we should eat less meat. Its healthier and I can easily see the point that eating a large amount of meat for every single meal like a lot of Americans do it needlessly gratuitous.
Some of my favorite meals are vegetarian meals, but I mean like chickpea or lentil curry and stuff like that. Fake/simulated/lab grown/artificial food is going to be a hard pass for me until it gets good enough to be indistinguishable from the real thing.
A statement like:
"Have you thought of eating meat one day less per week?"
"benefits the climate because..."
"Have you thought of buying your meat from <insert local farm with good animal welfare>"
"benefits the animal because..."
"you're the same as a murderer"
You can find YouTube videos of cows eating chickens.