Meat Is More Than Murder
June 20th, 2010
Email this article to a friend
“We are like you; the thought pressed into his mind. We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again. We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams. How were we to know? We could live with you in peace. Believe us, believe us, believe us.”
- The Formic hive queen, Ender’s Game
Eating animals is wrong. If you think that statement is hypocritical coming from a meat eater, you would be correct (I’ll come back to that later). But that doesn’t make it any less true.
I certainly don’t expect to convert anyone to veganism with this post, but I hope to at least lead some people to the unavoidable conclusion that eating animals is wrong, even if they choose not to act on it. If someone has a convincing argument for the opposing side, I’d love to hear it (no sarcasm meant there).
For a long time I never understood why vegetarians had such a moral objection to eating meat. Sure, it would be great if we were powered by wind or sunlight. But since we’re not, some other life forms have to be on the losing end of the food chain, right? Does it make that much of a difference who eats whom?
Granted, the rules for what animals are OK to eat don’t exactly make sense. Pigs, for example, are smarter than dogs, more affectionate than cats, and cuter than horses. Why don’t we put them on the same pedestal? Who decides these things? I don’t even know all the rules. Is it OK to eat snakes? Dolphins? Hippos? Gazelles? Giraffes? Lions, and tigers, and bears? Oh my!
But let’s say we all agreed on which animals were most expendable. We’ve identified some species that are delicious, sanitary, have the right number of legs, and are cute enough, but not too cute. What then, is the problem with these crazy vegetarians?
Photo by Create For Animal Rights
When I looked into it, I quickly saw that the issue (for me, at least) isn’t whether meat is murder. Of course it’s murder, but I’d have no problem if it were only that.
The real problem is that meat is torture. More specifically, raising animals for food in the way we do is torture. Our demand for animal products has just grown far beyond our ability to supply them humanely. We no longer just kill the animals; we do things to them that I doubt you would be willing to do personally.
I’m not going to go into a lot of details here, but the video Cruelty to Animals: Mechanized Madness gives a good look at how animals are raised for food. It’s pretty graphic. For a much milder and more entertaining version, watch the two cartoon movies at The Meatrix.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
- Lord Acton
People seem to be hardwired with an “us vs. them” mentality. What happens when one group is bigger, stronger, or technologically superior to another? They trample the rights of the weaker group, or even consider it to at their disposal. That torturing a weaker group is wrong seems to be a lesson the human race needs to keep relearning.
Manifest destiny, the belief that the European settlers were under a divine mandate to conquer North America, fueled them to do unspeakable things to the poorly armed Native Americans. Ditto for African American slaves, as well as the many examples of slavery in other countries. The Holocaust, women’s rights, gay rights, there always seems to be another group to discriminate against, despite the lessons of the past.
And for God’s sake, this is just a matter of accepting that people are people. We’ve got a long way to go before everyone acknowledges that animals are entitled to basic dignity as well.
Murder and torture become much easier with distance. It’s not too hard to send a drone to kill people without remorse. It’s a lot harder to pull the trigger yourself. And it’s even harder to actually twist a knife into them.
Would you be able to go Jack the Ripper on a little piglet while it squeals in pain? (See the Cruelty to Animals video above.) Probably not, but we have no problem paying thugs to do our dirty work for us. There’s so much distance between us and the animals, it’s easy to ignore what goes on.
You only like your sausage because you don’t have to watch it being made. And if you wouldn’t be willing to make it yourself, you have to admit that it’s wrong.
“Marge, kids, the things I saw. It makes me never want to eat meat again. Just fish, chicken, burgers, veal on Fridays, deer, but only in season, and if necessary, the sweetest meat of all: human.”
- Homer Simpson
Now, to address some anticipated objections:
1. “But we’re supposed to eat meat.”
I do think that we evolved to eat meat. We also evolved to lose our teeth, our eyesight, and die in our twenties, but we’ve managed to make some improvements on that. Our bodies may have evolved without ethical considerations, but that doesn’t mean our brains can’t do better.
Anyway, we weren’t meant to eat nearly as much meat as we do. Many of our health problems are a direct consequence of dietary problems, one of which is excessive meat consumption. Our closest relative, the chimp, eats mainly plants.
2. “But you can’t get enough protein from a vegan diet.”
Tell that to a 400-pound gorilla as it munches on leaves, fruits, and shoots. Or a 110-ton vegan Argentinosaurus, the largest land animal that ever lived. Or any of the vegan athletes out there. Maybe there aren’t that many, but you can start with Carl Lewis.
3. “But vegans are at risk for a vitamin B12 deficiency.”
Isn’t it just a little ironic for someone to brag about their adequate intake of vitamin B12 while they march down the path to diabetes, heart disease, and cancer? I don’t happen to know where vegans can get B12 from, but this seems like a minor issue.
4. “But it doesn’t do any harm to consume animal products, if you’re not actually eating the flesh.”
It may not seem so, but it does. See this Undercover Investigation at Hy-Line Hatchery for the shocking impact of eating eggs. (Does it remind anyone else of when Itchy sent all the Scratchys from the cloning machine to the killing machine?) There are similar issues with drinking milk.
5. “But animals aren’t entitled to the same rights as people.”
No one’s saying that pigs should be able to vote. But since they’re smarter than three year old children, maybe we shouldn’t castrate them without anesthetics. Just sayin’.
6. “But where do you draw the line? You can’t end all animal abuse. Look, you just stepped on an ant.”
We can’t prevent all homicides either. That doesn’t mean we might as well declare open season. Don’t worry about where the line will ultimately be drawn, just start moving towards it. Currently, we’re far less compassionate to animals than their natural predators are. We have plenty of room before we reach the line.
7. “But I just like the taste of meat.”
I know. This sounds like the weakest reason, and yet it’s the one that stops everyone from making a change (along with other practical issues like wanting to fit in, or difficulty finding vegan alternatives in some situations).
I’ve gone vegetarian or vegan for several weeks at a time on a few occasions, but I’ve always come back to eating meat. It’s just too easy to forget what the animals go through, and too easy to remember that I like chicken burritos.
I know that eating animals is wrong, but this is a really tough habit to break. I just don’t feel enough of a repulsion enough of the time to want to make much of a change.
So why the hell am I writing this, and why don’t I get off my high horse? Because it’s not an all-or-nothing thing. Every little bit counts, and some changes are very easy to make.
I ditched milk with no problem at all. That’s a few more cows who won’t be injected with hormones and have their babies killed while they get sucked dry. I’m mostly off pork. That’s a few more pigs who won’t be crammed into disgusting cages and butchered alive. And I’ve cut way back on red meat in general. More cow friendliness.
If even these things are too much to give up now, what else can you try? Can you refuse to eat foie gras? You probably don’t eat it anyway, so it should be pretty easy to take a stand against it. There’s a big continuum here, so if you can’t jump to the other side, just take whatever steps you can.
Many people wonder, if there’s a god, then why does he let bad things happen? They think that if they were god, there would be no suffering. But guess what? Compared to animals, you are god. What will you do with that power?
June 20th, 2010 at 11:19 pm
Murder is not the problem!? OMG is this really Hunter Nuttall, that kind guy I’ve known for a few years now?
Just joking.
I guess you are on the right track. Keep going with less meat and dairy and more veggies. The day will come when you actually cannot stand the smell of the meat. And I’m not talking about the stinky Mc burger. Even the organic meat and poultry smell of … the animal.
I tweeted this a few days ago, but I accidentally ate some organic chicken the other day. My body smelled like chicken for two days and I could not do any psychic work during that time. It was horrible.
Some people argue plants have lives, too. Yes, but I don’t sense resistance from plants on my plate. In fact, many plants like to be eaten — that is their natural way to spread out.
Btw B12 is made by certain bacteria. When the soil was more nutritious, those bacteria were present on the plant skin. Some also say human can host those bacteria in our gut, too. Or we can eat nutritional yeast.
I think the real challenge is the availability of vegan foods at restaurants. And this is where consumer (us!) demand brings changes. Let’s keep asking for vegan foods. If plenty of people do this, stores will have to have them on their menu.
Akemi
June 20th, 2010 at 11:46 pm
What happens though when we acknowledge that plants too, while not in the same way as fauna, show signs of distress when threatened or attacked and even send signals to other plants in their range? Consciousness is a great unknown, we can’t categorically say that it is not cruel to kill a plant in the ways we do. If apes, pigs and dolphins have a level of cognitive ability that makes them special and comparable on some levels to humans then why is it ok for them to eat and in some of those species cases, kill fauna?
This whole vegan/vegetarian thing is just presented far to black and white, the arguments on either side are rarely based on reality, mostly on idealism.
June 21st, 2010 at 4:05 am
Life thrives on death. If you think eating plants takes you out of that system then you are fooling yourself.
I suppose you just like the fact that you can’t hear plants scream when you dismember them makes it ok right?
June 21st, 2010 at 5:33 am
@Dan.. the conciousness although present in plants is infinitesimally lesser than animals.. animals feel direct pain.
dolphins and apes DON’t raise meat and treat animals brutally like us. you might want to see the full video given in the article…
June 21st, 2010 at 7:15 am
To say it is infinitely lesser is completely arrogant at best you can say it is different and our understanding of that difference is minute.
I agree apes and dolphins don’t raise meat and that we do is where we do some really despicable stuff, we should do what we can to change those things. We can agree on that the difficulty comes when we try to agree how and how much (although I think you might be surprised how much we agree things should be changed).
That said, is it ok if we kill in order to eat un-farmed animals? And on that note we have the ability to kill that food in ways far less brutally than apes or dolphins do it. The truth is we kill (for the most part) far less brutally than most other species kill their food, yet for some vegans this isn’t good enough and this is the point where we depart reality and move into idealism.
If we can solve the human killing problem which I believe we can the only question remaining is the rearing of those animals. Right now they are treated like food from birth to death where they should be an animal until they are killed and then become food.
June 21st, 2010 at 8:23 am
I disagree with some of the wording you have used. “Eating animals is wrong” seems too broad, a simple counter might be a starving person eating the corpse of an animal that has died naturally/by accident (and you can include humans in the animal category, i.e. the stories of people stranded after plane crashes etc. and who resort to cannibalism to survive).
Your actual argument doesn’t really talk about the above however, it seems that your real statement is that the way we currently farm meat and animal products is abhorrent, and for the most part I agree, but there are farmers who treat their animals well – it’s not an all or nothing situation.
I think there are lots of good reasons to reduce our meat intake, and that there is a moral compulsion to treat animals with dignity not cruelty, but I do not agree that this leads to the statement “eating animals is wrong”.
June 21st, 2010 at 8:58 am
http://www.lierrekeith.com/vegmyth.htm
As a former vegan who thought it was healther and holier to be vegan/vegetarian (and it’s definitely NOT), I think it’s irresponsible to preach meat is murder and supposedly healthier for you. I think that the better idea is to treat animals well. Sustain their existence with respect and allow them to be what they are (free range chickens, grass-eating cows, etc instead of the disgusting factory farms) and then they sustain us. We are both given a chance to live.
I hope that you are as intellectually honest as some of us former vegans and read Keith’s work.
June 21st, 2010 at 11:28 am
In the wild, the predator hunts the prey. If the prey is faster, it survives. If the predator is faster, he gets to live another day. Even predators don’t kill everyday. They only kill to survive. Are we killing to survive? Is that animal getting a fair chance at life, when it is bred and tortured to death. If you do believe so, can you put your money where your mouth is and actually do that yourself? i.e. breed, torture and kill the animal you would like to eat all by your own self? We are breeding these animals just for consumption. If there is no consumption, there is no breeding.
I have been a carnivore for as long as I can remember and have eaten every single kind of meat that is prepared for consumption and many that would have you balking over during my travels across the world. It is hard to go to a restaurant and not find anything to eat. It is hard to eat vegetables when you have a craving to chew on some delicious meat. However I believe that once you make your choice, there’s always a way. I take a monthly shot of B12 and eat at restaurants that serve vegan cuisine, sometimes substituting mushrooms or cottage cheese dishes for meat (when I have that urge to chew).
This isn’t a question of life over death but one of compassion over cruelty. Make your choice and live by it!
June 21st, 2010 at 4:56 pm
I’m sorry. I don’t agree. You know, human beings are the only ones that question the morality of eating food. Animals eat humans. I guarantee that a hungry lioness isn’t going to think twice about chewing me up if I happen to be slower than that pack of antelopes on the African terrain.
Secondly, plants are living creatures. Just because we are not able to communicate with them or assess their level of pain as easily as we can other animals, does not indicate they lack intelligence, don’t feel pain or lack awareness. I think the fact that animals are more similar to us and have recognizable expressions than plants do is the reason there is such an industry of sympathy for them and zero compassion for plants. How would you feel about eating plants if science one day proved definitively that plants could feel pain? That they had thoughts and feelings? That they dreamed about being as tall as that tree next to them? Then what? Will there be a post about how it is unethical to eat plants?
I’m not saying that we should not be respectful of all living creatures. I think the way we treat animals in the farming system could be loads better. Personally, I try to buy free range and organic meat. But I feel that saying eating meat is wrong is, well, wrong. I feel it places certain animals in this “special” category of protection that is not extended to other forms of life. Do you squish a cockroach when you see one? Why is it right to kill a cockroach or a spider or an ant but not eat a piece of bacon?
I don’t understand posts like this. I really don’t. It’s one thing to feel personally convicted about eating meat and to avoid the practice. It’s something else entirely to try and convince others that your personal agenda is the correct path to take and somehow I’m wrong for wanting to eat chicken and eggs?
June 21st, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Jesus, wtf is so controversial about this? I’m not really hearing any reasons.
As for the “eating plants is just as bad” argument:
– There’s a world of difference between torturing an apple and torturing a pig, more than the difference between torturing a pig and torturing a human.
– You kill far less plants by eating them directly, than you do by eating them indirectly via animals.
– You don’t even need to kill a plant to eat the fruit. Plants actually want their fruit to be eaten; that’s how they spread their seeds.
– This falls under the category of objection #6 in the post. There’s no perfect solution, but that doesn’t mean we should give up entirely.
@ Akemi, now I’m wondering if I smell like chicken. It would be great if every restaurant had some good vegan alternatives, so at least people always had a choice.
@ Dan, yes, we do have the ability to kill animals less brutally than other predators. However, I’m not sure that we do. From Akemi’s post http://reallifespirituality.com/meat-eaters-vs-vegetarians:
“‘Human’ protocol calls for animals to be ‘stunned’ before they are slaughtered. . . When done properly, using working equipment, this renders the cow (or hog) unconscious. But time is money, and slaughterhouses operate at lightning speeds, some killing one animal every three seconds. Because thousands of frightened, struggling cows are not easy to stun, it is extremely common for a ‘stunner’ to miss his mark. . . (after a few pages, there are quotes of slaughterhouse workers admitting animal abuse. One says he has seen others take the stunner and ‘shove it up the hog’s ass’ or ‘in their ears, in their eyes, down their throat’. . .”
Is it too much to ask that we stop raping the pigs before we kill them? But with the exception of intentional abuse such as described above, I concede that the actual method of killing is a relatively small issue, compared to how we raise the animals.
@ James, regarding your statement that “‘eating animals is wrong’ seems too broad,” fair enough. I was simplifying in order to get the point across clearly without being too wishy-washy. There are exceptions to everything, and I certainly have no problem with your counter example.
@ nonamanuensis, I scanned your vegmyth.htm link, and it seems to support what I’m saying:
“I’ll state right now what I’ll be repeating later: everything they say about factory farming is true. It is cruel, wasteful, and destructive. Nothing in this book is meant to excuse or promote the practices of industrial food production on any level.”
Like I said, what I’m against is the way we raise animals for food, not so much the actual killing of animals. But I don’t know if we can get away from factory farming when there’s so much profit at stake. (I didn’t touch on the wasteful and destructive aspects, but I agree with those points too.)
The thing about the fence to protect animals from each other is pretty ridiculous!
@ Arwen, most of your points fall under the category of objection #6 in the post (in fact, I used an ant as an example). We can’t be totally peaceful, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try at all.
“I guarantee that a hungry lioness isn’t going to think twice about chewing me up if I happen to be slower than that pack of antelopes on the African terrain.” – I agree. That’s why I would shoot the lioness. But that doesn’t contradict the point of this post.
Actually, now you’ve got me thinking…would I support factory farming of “mean” animals, like velociraptors? Hmmm…
June 21st, 2010 at 11:09 pm
Hunter,
“Jesus, wtf is so controversial about this? I’m not really hearing any reasons.”
Haha, exactly. I was curious how you handle all those comments. The point of your article is eating meat is more than just killing animals — it involves torturing them. But the only way meat eaters can even attempt to justify their addiction is to focus on the thin line between killing animals and killing plants.
If you think calling them addicts is a bit of an exaggeration — well, don’t they sound like addicts? Have you never heard pot heads justify their habit? Their tones are similar.
June 21st, 2010 at 11:25 pm
Oh, and thank you for quoting from my article and linking to it. It’s actually from the popular book “The Skinny Bitch”.
The movie “Food Inc” is very educational, too, about big agribusinesses abusing animals and traditional small farmers. I highly recommend it.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that, by eating less meat (I didn’t even say quitting, just eating less meat, like Meatless Monday practice), we are saving the lives of starving children and adults in third world countries. Raising animals takes a lot of farm lands to grow their feed crops. The US now doesn’t have enough farm land to feed all its animals so we import feeds from countries like those in Africa. Those countries don’t have excess crops, but they grow export crops for cash rather than crops to feed their own people. Yes, stupid choice on their side, but as a result, they end up with some US$ and not enough foods for their people.
I read somewhere that, if we limit animal based foods only to special occasions, the world can produce enough foods for all its residents. Plus the North Americans would be more healthy by eating more vegetables. Win-win plan, don’t you think?
http://www.meatlessmonday.com/
June 21st, 2010 at 11:38 pm
I’ve been down the “eating meat is unhealthy” road before and it landed me flat on my back when I went to a vegan diet for a number of months hoping it was the best way of eating. I was dead wrong. We cant assume that one way of eating is best for all 6 billion people on Earth.
June 22nd, 2010 at 6:10 am
“Jesus, wtf is so controversial about this? I’m not really hearing any reasons.”
The main controversy for me is the judgment inherent in this post. A person who eats meat is a murderer. That’s what I’m getting out of it. Why aren’t we passing the same type of judgment on other animals that eat meat? Why aren’t we out in the wild lecturing them on the ethics of their diet? And I don’t buy that animals are more compassionate than humans when they kill. Animal on animal encounters are very violent. Like I said before, human beings are the only animals that question the morality of eating food. There are even some plants that eat animals (Venus Flytrap).
The second problem I have is that not all life is being valued the same way. Certain forms of life are being put under this veil of sympathy that don’t extend to all other forms of life. Why are some forms of life given more consideration than other forms of life? You claim that plants want to be eaten because that is how their seeds get scattered. Even if they want their fruit to be eaten doesn’t mean they want to be chopped down and turned into firewood, or floorboards, or pencils. And yet 4 billion trees are chopped down every year for human usage. Why is killing a tree justified but killing a pig is murder? A living thing is still being killed for the benefit of human beings.
I was thinking about this last night after I left my comment. I guess what gets me so riled up about this “Eating animals is murder” debate is that people who make these kinds of judgments have the luxury of choice. They can choose what they will and will not eat. They can choose to be “ethical”. There are millions of people in the world who aren’t so blessed. Sometimes what’s for dinner is what you can catch. It’s not a matter of eating animals because you feel like having a cheeseburger. Sometimes it’s a matter of life and death. When people throw out blanket judgments like that they are including people who don’t have the luxury of being able to be picky about what they eat.
I agree that the way animals are treated on industrial farms is not cool and it needs to change. But at the same time, why do I and other people who eat meat need to justify our reasons for doing so? Why are we being demonized for our food preferences? Why are we being made out to be this evil group of people when other people, vegetarians included, are just as guilty of decimating other life forms for their own personal gain?
June 22nd, 2010 at 10:50 pm
Very well written on such an important topic. I hope people found it compelling enough to change their lifestyles soom. I’ve been a veggie 10 years and it was the best decision I’ve ever made.
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:20 pm
@ Akemi, I saw something about Food Inc and thought it looked interesting. I’ll try to check it out.
@ Carla, I think Erica Douglass also said that she experienced health problems when attempting to go vegan. I don’t remember the details, but I can accept that some people have special conditions that make veganism not an option. However, they can probably do fine on a diet high in plants and low in animals. At any rate, this post isn’t really about the nutritional aspects of a vegan diet.
@ Arwen, thanks for coming back to comment again.
I didn’t see this post as judgmental at all, particularly as I eat meat myself. Since I do, you can call me a murderer, and that would be a perfectly accurate label. No judgment, just the definition. I’m not really opposed to killing animals, and not all murder is bad. Stepping on a spider is nothing compared to shooting an innocent person.
“Why aren’t we passing the same type of judgment on other animals that eat meat?”
Other animals that eat meat are murderers too. But that’s not a bad thing, just how it is. Some animals are just supposed to eat other animals – it’s what natural selection did to them.
“Why aren’t we out in the wild lecturing them on the ethics of their diet?”
For one thing, they don’t speak English, so we can’t lecture them. Also, they don’t have the ability to change. A shark has no choice but to be a carnivore. Also, other animals don’t have factory farms, which is really what I’m objecting to more than the actual killing.
“And I don’t buy that animals are more compassionate than humans when they kill. Animal on animal encounters are very violent.”
Yes, but they’re quick. I would much rather die in a brutal attack than after a lifetime of torture.
“Like I said before, human beings are the only animals that question the morality of eating food.”
Right, because we’re the most moral animals. This isn’t a bad thing.
“The second problem I have is that not all life is being valued the same way.”
If plants should be valued the same as animals, then I didn’t take my argument far enough. Shouldn’t I be saying that eating plants and animals are both wrong? Or if I was going to say that eating plants and animals are both OK, then I’d have to say that killing people is OK too, if they’re all valued equally.
We just can’t value all life forms the same. Everyone thinks it’s obvious that killing bacteria is fine but killing people is not. How do we decide what kind of killing is justified? I don’t know. Some combination of how much we have to gain by killing them, how much we have to lose by not killing them, how much they suffer, etc. The line will be blurry. But morality becomes clearer when you move away from the line on either side.
“There are millions of people in the world who aren’t so blessed. Sometimes what’s for dinner is what you can catch.”
Very true. But I’m not blaming these people for doing what they have to do. The people who don’t have a choice aren’t reading my blog anyway.
“I agree that the way animals are treated on industrial farms is not cool and it needs to change.”
OK, we agree on the most important thing then. I hope people who eat meat will try to support producers who raise their food humanely.
“But at the same time, why do I and other people who eat meat need to justify our reasons for doing so?”
You don’t need to justify it to me, but you do need to justify it to yourself. We should all be aware of the impact of the choices we make (not just food, but everything). If you can justify your choices to yourself, then it won’t bother you when someone has different opinions, no matter how judgmental they sound.
“Why are we being demonized for our food preferences? Why are we being made out to be this evil group of people when other people, vegetarians included, are just as guilty of decimating other life forms for their own personal gain?
I don’t think anyone is evil for eating meat. If someone said I was evil for doing so, I’d simply dismiss them as being wrong.
@ Andi, thanks for stopping by. I was wondering where all the veggies were!
June 23rd, 2010 at 12:55 am
I really think there is a big difference between murder and killing something to eat it.
I can see how you would call shooting birds or someone bashing a kittens head in with a rock would be murder, and I would agree with you that it is wrong. However, there is a big difference between killing something because you feel like it and killing it so you can get the sustenance you need to survive.
I think this kind of thinking comes from people who have never had a very strong connection with nature – and in this day and age its easy to see why they don’t. I think even having a garden that you eat out of really changes your perspective.
Also, the problem with that comic is that chimpanzees would have absolutely no problem with eating you if they needed to survive and they don’t have to justify it because they are “smarter” than we are.
July 2nd, 2010 at 3:12 pm
But that’s the thing Josh. We are no longer required to eat meat in order to survive. We do it because it tastes good and most of us have been conditioned since childhood to have meat at every meal. Are there some cultures out there that are required to eat meat? Yes. But walk into almost any grocery store in America and you can find alternatives that will sustain you just as easily. We have more alternatives than almost any other country, yet we also eat more meat than any other country.
Why do we kill pigs? Because bacon is addictive and we’ve had it at most of our morning meals. How can you have scrambled eggs without bacon and milk? That’s heresy!
Can we all afford to have free-range, locally harvested, organic meat at every meal? Probably not. So instead, we sustain ourselves on crappy fast food burgers and sandwiches. Lunch is too short so we heat up some frozen food in the microwave at the office.
It’s not the killing. It’s the torture. It’s not a farm, it’s a factory. We treat these animals like bottled water.
I’m not saying you’re a bad person for eating meat. You’ve been doing it a long time and you’re used to it. You can’t find a reason to not eat meat. However, to follow your own reasoning, if you had to kill another human being to survive would you do it? If you were in a group and you had to choose, who would you choose and why? Would you pick the biggest or the smallest? Would you pick the stupidest one or the weakest one? If you had no choice, would you kill a child to survive? Cannibalism is fairly common in the animal kingdom among carnivores. Are we not animals following our animal instincts?
Isn’t this how nature made us? Just savage unfeeling predators with the intelligence to create machines to do the killing for us. No right. No wrong. Just survival.
July 9th, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Thanks for the comment back. While I don’t agree, I do understand your point of view. To each his own opinion
July 21st, 2010 at 12:56 am
Who says it’s wrong? I see no inherent sense of morality in nature and I see no purpose in discussing a topic like this in terms of man-made moral structures. The truth, as I see it, is that there is no right or wrong, things simply are what they are-now what are you going to do about it?
I don’t like that animals are tortured but honestly I don’t care enough to do anything about it. It’s not my fight. It seems to me that if someone were to do something it should extend far beyond going vegan. It makes an impact but its effect is rather small. The practices of the industry itself are what needs to change and they’ll either need to be forced to do it by law or their profit margins will have to suffer because of what they do. That will require a movement, one that speaks to everybody and doesn’t just preach to the choir ala PETA.
Would it be possible to link the animals’ emotional suffering to disease in humans? And are the conditions within factory farms really sanitary enough to produce meat fit for consumption? There are environmental effects to consider, too; that’s something that actually has me concerned and may eventually raise this higher on my list of priorities. Those are the things you need to shine a light on if you want more people to hop on the bandwagon. Calling it wrong might make you morally superior but it won’t win you any arguments nor will it get the support of the number of people it would require to change things.
August 2nd, 2010 at 3:48 am
[...] & Interesting Links: Meat Is More Than Murder Meat Eaters vs Vegetarians How To Travel As A [...]
September 17th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Scenario: I’m hungry and I am hunting a deer. If the deer gets away, I starve to death. My body becomes food for scavengers, and my left over carcass is absorbed into the dirt in which plants will grow to become food for…the deer! If I kill the deer, I live, my children live, and the organisms and parasites that live in our bodies continue to live. When we poop the deer out, the poop is absorbed back into the earth where it becomes food for plants which becomes food for…deer! There is nothing wrong about any of this.
As for the ethics of raising animals for meat, this is what we have left ourselves with now that we have overpopulated the earth as a result of FARMS! 10 times more people can live on cultivated land than wild land, but once that threshold is reached (and it always is), we have to expand our territory. Which is what we have been doing for 10,000 years, but at the expense of the survival of thousands of species of animals, eco-diversity and a whole lot of other “wrong” things.
So what is more natural, to kill and eat animals, or to farm them out of existence?
September 18th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
We should be more concerned with the millions of kids starving in the US than worrying about animal consumption. I do only buy from local farms and markets. It’s worth extra price. I was raised on a ranch that put the animal’s welfare first. But in the end, we ate them. Peace.
October 16th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
You can’t murder an animal. The most you can do is kill it. Find a dictionary and use it. The use of such over the top statements takes away from some decent arguments. I almost didn’t bother reading beyond the title, since in my experience people who use such ridiculous language usually have no logical arguments, just a wish to guilt others into agreeing with them. People tend to stop listening when they’re compared to Jack the Ripper for enjoying a steak. Mmmm, steak!
April 10th, 2011 at 4:52 am
Killing voiceless animals for the sake of taste buds is criminal… it is total brutality.
…. converting your body into a deads’ place…. a graveyard. One will have to re-pay for these bad deeds.. there is no escape. let us love animals…. protect them , because we are stronger than them. half of the world economics will improve if all become vegetarians. It is in-human to eat or use flesh of other living creature… and enough reason to call any meat eater an animal.