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> consumption of all meat unethical

Eating meat is something natural, which be benefited from through our evolution, and which I think cannot be unethical in absolute terms. I think the term 'ethical' is being abused a lot these days. People do have opinions and beliefs and are free to decide that they do not want to eat meat as an personal ethical stance.

The rights and wrongs of industrial meat production and high consumption can indeed be discussed.

> We didn't eat dogs but considered pigs and cows different? Why?

As a species we do eat dogs and many other animals. Herbivores are much better suited for breeding and cultural (that includes religion) constructs mean that some animals are taboo (pigs and cows are both taboo in some societies as well).

It all comes down to energy. Each time energy gets converted as it goes through the food chain, most of it is lost. We simply can't afford to eat things that ate things that ate things that ate things; there's not enough energy left after all that.

You should go vegan. I can help if, if you’re interested and want to try it, or don’t know where to start.

Because you’re right, about everything you said. And you obviously wrestle with a lot of the ethical inconsistencies with eating animals.

Let me just say this, though: you lose nothing by trying to be vegan for a month or two. If you hate it, you hate it. But if you find you enjoy it, it could change your life!

When I was wrestling with the same questions and feelings as you, I ended up trying to be vegan so I could sleep easier at night and haven’t looked back 6 years later, healthier and happier than ever, with no real special access to food or crazy changes to my life.

Just food for thought.

Go ahead and go vegan... you can tell your kids you were decades ahead of most of your peers. Even if you don't particularly care what future generations think of you, the environment, or your personal health, going vegan can still be fun if you have enough buffer in your life to turn it into a hobby!

I will suggest some tasks to get started... what is the best vegan ice cream in your area? Ready to level up? What is the tastiest edible mushroom you can find in your city? If you've been going to a traditional grocery store for omnivores, you may have only ever been exposed to three different ages or strains of Agaricus bisporus (white vs. brown little mushrooms are just different strains... "Portobello" is just a bigger/older Agaricus bisporus). There's literally an entire Kingdom of life that the mainstream western food production system hasn't been making available for you to eat. Imagine if your grocery store only had one shelf labeled "Plants" that just had three colors of potato!

>>>And they'll ask us uncomfortable questions we won't have good answers for. Didn't you know about the health risks at the amounts you were consuming?

Yup. Didn't care. Bacon-wrapped filet mignon tastes THAT good. Some things are worth the risk. Like driving too fast, riding motorcycles, or skydiving.

>>>Didn't you know about the carbon footprint?

Same answer here...

>>>Most importantly, didn't you have ample evidence of consciousness, personality, and sentience in every way that is reasonable to us?

And here too.

>>>We didn't eat dogs but considered pigs and cows different? Why?

I actually HAVE eaten dog. It's a specialty delicacy in Korea.

I think most of the world isn't anywhere close to taking the conscientious Western approach to animal flesh.

Not today.

I guess I should have been more clear I'm speaking about the Western World.

In 50 years, consumption of animal meat will be like caviar+cigarettes+segregated bathrooms are today in the Western World.

The rest of the world? Too many variables, depends a lot on climate change.

There won't be a "Western World" in 50 years.

I think it's a lot more likely that in 50 years, per capita animal consumption will be higher than today, simply because the subgroups that tend to favor vegetarianism are shrinking as a share of the overall global population (and tend not to have as many children), whereas global income is increasing.

Certainly global meat consumption has been on the rise, going from 150 Billion kilograms in 1990, to more than 350 billion kilograms today (https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/26/1023636/sustaina...)

In terms of per-capita consumption, it has increased by 20kg per person since 1960. (source: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production)

There is no reason to expect this trend to reverse. I do think that in North America, per capita meat consumption will decline a bit since in the U.S. we really eat too much of everything and there will be more pressure to switch to more humane meat production that is more expensive per kilogram. I think this is a positive development, but humanely raised beef is not that much more expensive - maybe 20% more expensive, so not at all "caviar".

Pro-tip: Check out butcherbox and other services for free range beef, chicken, and pork. Lots of services like this are springing up.

OTOH, world population will level out soon, and may even start shrinking, so total meat consumption in 50 years may be lower than today. Per-capita consumption will be higher. I don't see vegetarians increasing as a share of global population, the majority of the world loves to eat meat and will continue to do so.

In terms of climate change, this promotes more beef consumption because beef is the best way to turn a large portion of the earth's dry arable land into food production (at least unless humans evolve to eat grass and shrub). A large part of the planet simply doesn't have the fresh water supply to support growth of food crops, and this is where cattle graze. If you believe the earth is going to get drier, then this means the global diet will shift even more towards beef consumption as farms that used to grow corn exhaust water tables and revert back to pasture.

This will continue to be the case as the earth warms, and such warming will advantage beef over other forms of food production more dependent on wet areas with steady rains.

It's interesting to note that despite the best efforts of the animal rights movement and the increased numbers of people choosing vegetarian or vegan options in recent years (so it seems, I've read many articles that say so) meat production and consumption has continued to increase steadily over the years:

https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#meat-production

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-meat-consumption-pe...

Looks like the US is trending down in consumption for the last ~7 or so years of available data plotted; nice!

It'd be interesting to see data from beyond 2013 included in that chart, though. Thanks for sharing!

You know the argument is good when every response is “I don’t care”.

So many horrific things have continued in this world because of people saying exactly that.

The "everybody must care because I do" mindset is vastly more annoying and infinitely more destructive.

How so? The fight for animal liberation is the same as any other rights movement. It’s easy to see how those aren’t very destructive.

Also, you misunderstand: you shouldn’t care because I do. You should care because it’s right. Whether or not I personally believe it is irrelevant to anyone else’s moral obligations.

yikes.

Bacon-wrapped filet mignon is worth sacrificing the only planet we have? You don't care about your carbon emissions at all? We are introducing such big amounts of greenhouse gasses just from our consumerism lifestyle and the convenience of it all is big enough to just "[not] care". And then you brag about having eating dogs like this post couldn't get any worse. When this is the mindset and opinion of average people, which I'm pretty sure it is then we're at a loss for fixing this mess we're in.

>>>You don't care about your carbon emissions at all? We are introducing such big amounts of greenhouse gasses just from our consumerism lifestyle and the convenience of it all is big enough to just "[not] care".

Who determines what types of energy consumption are just, and which are immoral and wrong? How much electricity and natural resources are burnt up in popular endeavors such as alcohol and marijuana production?

https://insidesources.com/resources-innovation-institute-how... https://emagazine.com/environmental-impact-of-alcohol/

We've got "climate activists" that fly in private jets to conferences just to chide the rest of us about "consumerism". Meanwhile I'm maintaining my physical fitness with an Army-surplus ammo can full of dirt, stuffed in a 30-year old backpack. I've had the same rugged Android phone for over 5 years. My two cars were manufactured in 2007 and 1994. Back when I still lived in the US, 2 of my 3 firearms were Communist surplus weapons from the ~1970s (SKSes). I wear mostly custom tailored shirts that I had made 9 years ago. I'm confident that my overall carbon footprint for the past 10 years or so is reasonably small. So No I don't stress out over said footprint. I just live frugally and buy stuff that lasts. I happen to like driving things with internal combustion engines and I like the taste of cow flesh.

Maybe there will come a time when climate change forces us all to no-shit fight each other for competition of scarce habitable land and food resources. If the planet melts....I'll fight to survive and thrive. If we are forced into Fallout-style vaults, I'll fight to survive and thrive. I'll teach my kids the same. My assessment is that I, and those I care about, have a higher probability of coming out on top in such a cataclysm than the people who tell me not to eat meat.

Climate alarmists/Polliver: "You lived your life for progress. You want to die for some chickens?" Omnivores/Clegane: "Someone is." https://youtu.be/LeYwkeX6xNI

If you want people to "care", be careful what you wish for. We could drastically reduce our human carbon emissions by feeding all the first-world vegans to pigs, and improve our signal-to-noise ratio on the Internet as well. /sarc

>>>And then you brag about having eating dogs like this post couldn't get any worse.

It's not a "brag", just a statement of factual reality: some major developed economies eat dog. It should cause people to reflect on their own positions. Who is "we" in the statement "we don't eat dog"? Isn't the whole point to reflect on the human integration with the ecosystem as a whole? In which case, global mores are important to consider.

> If you want people to "care", be careful what you wish for. We could drastically reduce our human carbon emissions by feeding all the first-world vegans to pigs, and improve our signal-to-noise ratio on the Internet as well. /sarc

Why is this marked as sarcasm? The greatest personal contribution to the reduction of carbon gas emissions that a person can possibly make is to stop breathing, although that's true for non-vegans as well.

Meanwhile, almost 75% of greenhouse gas emissions come from power production and so from burning fossil fuels:

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

It's burning fossil fuels that's causing climate change, not eating cows and certainly not eating pigs and chickens (who are the most widely consumed meat animals). We've had farming for more than 10 thousand years but the greenhouse effect causing climate change started only in the last couple hundred years, along with the Industrial Revolution. Why? Because the carbon gasses released by farming are part of the carbon cycle that circulates carbon gasses between the atmosphere and the biosphere, and that is relatively stable and has never caused a greenhouse effect in the billion years of life on the planet. While burning fossil fuels releases carbon gasses at rates and amounts that the natural mechanisms in the environment that normally bind carbon can't cope with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_carbon_cycle

The idea that eating cows causes climate change is the dirty lie of vegan propaganda, spread by people who, in truth, don't know anything about the environment and don't really care about the environment or climate change and only care about whether other people eat meat. It is a lie because it's false and it's a dirty lie because it's obscuring the real cause of climate change. And it's the dirtiest of dirty lies because it tells people that they can save the environment if they have a soy burger now and then, rather than giving up on their cars (hear that OP?) not buying a new iphone twice a year, not flying to their Instagrammable holiday destinations, not stuffing their houses with useless houseould appliances and generally stopping their incredibly wasteful use of energy produced by the burning of fossil fuels.

Totally agree

Not saying it’s good/bad but I see this as inevitable given the tendency of increasing sensitivity of society