Should you feel guilty for eating meat?

[Ryotknife]

uhh....vegetables and fruits are living things as well. If you wont eat meat for moral reasons, then you are saying that animals are more important than plants, to which i would respond that clearly humans are more important than animals and debunk the entire moral theory.

If you want to be a vegetarian for health reasons, by all means go for it. But to do it for moral reasons is laughable. Religious reasons is also okay.

As for me, getting rid of meat is not recommended as i am iron deficient. Plus i can not stand uncooked vegetables and im picky when it comes to fruit, so without meat im basically forced into sticking an IV in me for the rest of my life.

 

[Aerosteam]

I'm just going to respond to the title...

Er... We're omnivores, meaning we're destined to eat meat. And some other stuff.

We shouldn't feel guilty, the set of teeth we have are meant for plants and meat.

Edit: Okay, I read the OP and the only thing that I'm interested in was the second last paragraph.

We shouldn't eat meat because it involves killing living things? What if I ate an apple? I'm essentially murdering unborn apple trees.

That being said, the only meat I like eating is sea foods. Yes, believe it or not I hate bacon. Come at me(?)

 

[FamoFunk]

No way. If I felt an ounce of guilt I would probably be Vegan (as I'd feel bad about Dairy too)

But I love meat and don't plan on ever giving it up.

 

[Zhukov]

I try not to eat anything too cute though.
I won't eat rabbit (Ok, I did have rabbit pie as a kid but I didn't know what it was so that doesn't count) and I won't eat deer.
But thats just cause I'm a wussy bleeding heart type of girl.

If cute things are off the table (aargh, the pun, it burns), what kind of meat do you eat?

Or have you just never seen a calf, lamb or hatchling?

Lambs, calves and hatchlings are cute.
Sheep, cows and chickens are fugly.
I don't mind so much if they grow up to be ugly.

Ugly, eh?

I guess it's different for people who don't spend time around animals.

My family live in the country. They used to keep a couple of milking cows (well, they still do, I just don't live there any more). I wouldn't regard them as ugly animals.

One of them liked to chew on people's arms. Not hard enough to hurt. No idea why, she just did.

She was a cantankerous old beast. If she ran out of feed before we were done milking her, she'd promptly kick the bucket over.

This one time we killed, slaughter and ate her calf. A few days later the cow found the spot where where we'd bled the carcass. I guess she recognised the smell or something. There's a particular kind of short, relatively high-pitched "moo" that mother cows do to call their calfs back to them. That cow stood in that one spot and did that one particular moo continuously and almost without pause for several days and nights straight. When we tried to move her she got aggressive She only moved when she was nearly fainting from thirst.

Ugly.

 

[Phasmal]

Enjoy your steak.

I certainly do.
Like I said, I wont pretend I don't sometimes feel conflicted but fuck it meat is tasty.

 

[Dragonclaw]

I certainly don't feel guilty (and have steaks marrinating for when I get home ). I will draw the line at animals that are treated in an overly cruel way...veal and Foie Gras...but pretty much everything else is fine AFAIAC.

 

[joonsk]

Sometimes I think about becoming a vegetarian, but when I do that, I suddenly start thinking about bacon and/or chicken legs.

 

[NightHawk21]

You shouldn't feel guilty about eating meat. Its delicious and good for you. The only thing that's problematic is the way its harvested. Many species have been made extinct or endangered to make a quick buck. That said you can get the meat in a sustainable way, in which case there's no reason to feel guilty.

snip

Good job you probably just summoned daystar lol.

 

[MysticToast]

Who in their right mind would feel guilty about eating things we're supposed to eat?

 

[Erttheking]

I don't feel guilty about eating meat unless it's veal.

 

[Baron von Blitztank]

It's the guilt that makes it taste all the better in my opinion.
Some sentient creature was mewling it's last knowing it was never going to see its beloved children and/or parents again. It was slowly trying to remember the warmth it felt while being embraced by its loved ones, a feeble attempt to escape from the situation it was forced into by the greed of humanity. Finally, with a tear in its eye, its throat was slit, its blood drenched into its skin and its life was tragically cut short. It's this moment of agonizing pain and grief that makes meat all the sweeter!

Spoiler: I also see this as kind of appropriate

 

[Legion]

Only if killing the animal to obtain the meat involved unnecessary pain or cruelty. It is also wrong to drive an animal to extinction or to a dangerously low level by consuming it.

Beyond that, no, it's not wrong, it's perfectly natural to eat meat, and it's also good for you.

 

[Bocaj2000]

Animals think, feel, and have emotions. They can love, fear, and anger just like us. So, yes, we should feel guilty, but because of how sheltered humans are most of us don't. This thread should be more than evident of that.

 

[BeeGeenie]

Plants are alive too. It's impossible to live without killing something, so it might as well be something delicious.
Gratuitous cruelty to animals is bad.
I don't like the idea of catch-and-release fishing, but I love me some meat.

So try to make it quick and as painless as possible, but beyond that, dig in.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

No. I'm pretty sure a lion doesn't feel guilty over eating a zebra after hunting and killing it. Human beings are no different, we have the right to feed on other life too as it is the way of the Universe. Even herbivores are feeding on other life, plant life, but still life. Life feeds on other life, that is how the Universe works. Even you're vegetables are living things, or were living things. You just don't feel guilty about eating them because they don't walk around and make "mooing" noises, nor do they react to pain in any manner that you can recognize.

What is probably a bit amoral is those mass slaughter houses though.

 

[scw55]

Eating meat is never wrong.

How the animals are treated and what animals are processed for meat is the questions

I feel many extreme Vegetarians forget this.

 

[Frostbite3789]

Animals think, feel, and have emotions. They can love, fear, and anger just like us. So, yes, we should feel guilty, but because of how sheltered humans are most of us don't. This thread should be more than evident of that.

I'm sure lions oft think about these things when they take down an antelope.

I don't even begin to have the capacity to understand the sentiment that I should feel guilty for eating meat.

EDIT: And just for the humor. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=sponsor

 

[In Search of Username]

I did feel guilty about it, so I became a vegetarian. But there's no argument to be put across for either being a vegetarian or not - it just hinges on whether you feel sympathy for animals like you do for humans, there's no logic to whether you should or shouldn't really. So really, discussing it doesn't exactly help you decide; just do whatever you personally feel is right.

That said, it does really piss me off when people use the 'but it's NATURAL' excuse for anything. Everything that exists within the universe is fucking natural, by definition. You can't use it in an argument for the morality of an action. I know that, like I've said, there's no real logical argument you can make either way so people just fall back on 'we should do this because it is the normal thing to do' but my god it's annoying when people say that and think they're being clever.