Should you feel guilty for eating meat?

[MiriaJiyuu]

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(?)

Thanks for saving me typing out my point.

 

[gyroscopeboy]

Show me a crab that can comprehend trigonometry.

How about a crab that sings punk rock?

OT. I love meat, and i would happily kill creatures to get it in my mouth.

 

[acosn]

I forget who it was, but someone had a very good response to this a couple pages ago. He brought up the Naturalist Fallacy which has to do with the assumption that just because something's natural means that it's right.

That may apply to things like murder and theft.

We're talking about eating meat.

Humans require the vitamin B12. The only good source of it is from meat. Any supplement you take of it is guaranteed to come back to an animal byproduct.

The bigger issue I carry against vegans and vegetarians is the sheer difficulty with which to live that lifestyle in the United States. Your makeup is made from animal products. Your food is obviously. A lot more of your clothes come from animal products and byproducts than most people realize. Hell, you can't technically use paper currency because cow fat is an ingredient in the stuff they use to give it that crisp feeling.

Well, that and the obviously toxic effect mass-meat production has on the environment. The methane cows produce has a measurable and significant impact on the atmosphere, to say nothing of what they do to water quality.

And the flip side raises very real questions about what we do with these animals now that they're so entirely domesticated that they can't physically live without us to begin with.

The US eats too much meat- this much is indisputable. Your average human needs about an amount of meat equal to a deck of standard playing cards to actually get their daily allotment of protein. To say we should feel guilty about eating meat- or not even eat it at all is ludicrous. And yes, while animals do have brains, its fairly easy to say that there's no real function to them. While brains are still relative biological black boxes we can say that the difference of brain mass between a wild turkey and a farm raised turkey has measurable consequences.

 

[Soods]

1. Feeding the animals takes a lot of resources. (This atleast applies to cows & pigs).

More than it would take to give everybody a stable, healthy, complete diet without meat?

A lot more, in fact.

3. It's very hard to extract meat from the victim without killing the victim in the process.

And some plants can't be harvested without killing the victim either.

Killing non-animals isn't such a big deal, since they can't even think.

 

[Montezuma's Lawyer]

If animals dont want to be eaten, they must only say so.

 

[Vivi22]

The US eats too much meat- this much is indisputable. Your average human needs about an amount of meat equal to a deck of standard playing cards to actually get their daily allotment of protein.

No, actually, it's not indisputable. Nor is stating the bare minimum amount of meat required to not be deficient in protein or other nutrients and saying we don't NEED more than that completely true. We don't need a whole lot to avoid dying really soon. But if we're not getting much energy from meat, then we're likely getting it from carbs, particularly breads and grains. At which point, congratulations! You've now got a population that is obese and deficient in muscle mass.

Point is, to have a diet which will result in ideal health, we need more meat than many supposed experts (particularly the USDA) say we do.

 

[royohz]

Given that we don't need to eat meat, can we justify killing animals? I can justify killing them for research purposes - human lives are more important than animal lives. We are the scientists. We are the mathematicians. We are the musicians and the engineers and the architects and the philosophers. Show me a dog that can write a symphony. Show me a crab that can comprehend trigonometry. Show me a bear that can understand the process of nuclear fusion that occurs in a star. You can't. No animal, other than humans, can do or comprehend these things. We create order and beauty and form ideals. Animals cannot do that, or at least, cannot do it to nearly the same complexity. This debate we're having right now about guilt - no animal other than humans is even remotely capable of it. A bear doesn't even know the concept of "rights", a frog doesn't understand ethics or "values". Only humans do. Thus, we're more important.

I agree with you except on this chain of points. I don't think human lives are more important, per se. It is precisely because we are smarter than them that we need to question the morality of killing innocent animals. Self-defense? No problem, that's fine. But us western, "civilized" people must stop the immense greed. Like you said, a little meat isn't all bad, but around 80% (just a guess) of people in the western world don't realize just how bad their meat eating habits are. It's lazy thinking to continue not to question our meat consumption level.

 

[Rheinmetall]

I feel guilty at least.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

I forget who it was, but someone had a very good response to this a couple pages ago. He brought up the Naturalist Fallacy which has to do with the assumption that just because something's natural means that it's right.

That may apply to things like murder and theft.

We're talking about eating meat.

Humans require the vitamin B12. The only good source of it is from meat. Any supplement you take of it is guaranteed to come back to an animal byproduct.

The bigger issue I carry against vegans and vegetarians is the sheer difficulty with which to live that lifestyle in the United States. Your makeup is made from animal products. Your food is obviously. A lot more of your clothes come from animal products and byproducts than most people realize. Hell, you can't technically use paper currency because cow fat is an ingredient in the stuff they use to give it that crisp feeling.

Well, that and the obviously toxic effect mass-meat production has on the environment. The methane cows produce has a measurable and significant impact on the atmosphere, to say nothing of what they do to water quality.

And the flip side raises very real questions about what we do with these animals now that they're so entirely domesticated that they can't physically live without us to begin with.

The US eats too much meat- this much is indisputable. Your average human needs about an amount of meat equal to a deck of standard playing cards to actually get their daily allotment of protein. To say we should feel guilty about eating meat- or not even eat it at all is ludicrous. And yes, while animals do have brains, its fairly easy to say that there's no real function to them. While brains are still relative biological black boxes we can say that the difference of brain mass between a wild turkey and a farm raised turkey has measurable consequences.

Why would a logical fallacy not apply to a particular topic? It applies to any argument that states just because we're designed to do something means we should.

The argument you make about B12 is a completely different argument. Assuming you're not vegan, it's more than possible to get enough B12 from eggs and milk.

I agree with majority of the rest of your post up till the animal brains part. No real function? I would very much disagree with that. Animals experience pain, develop bonds (especially with their offspring), and have in many cases been shown capable of critical thinking. Making a blanket statement that animal brains are incomparable to ours is absurd. There's many animals that are incredibly intelligent. Have you seen the studies they've done on crows? Crows are pretty damn intelligent and are capable of a surprise degree of problem solving.

Of course there's a large amount of variation among animals, but just because they're not human doesn't make their brains have "no real function". You can say that your requisite intelligence of caring about something is different than someone else's, but since there's not an indisputable line to distinguish where this should be you can't blame people for caring more about less intelligent animals. Saying outright that no one should feel guilty is absurd, depending on how much importance you put on animal's lives I don't see any reason why it's wrong to feel guilty.

 

[Soods]

snip

For the first point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production

For the third point:
You are greatly underestimating animals' minds: some of them are almost smart as us (an example) [http://www.cracked.com/article_18930_6-amazingly-intelligent-animals-that-will-creep-you-out.html]. And even the dumber ones feel pain and sorrow.

 

[Soods]

snip

For the first point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production

Now show me the opposing statistics.

For the third point:
You are greatly underestimating animals' minds: some of them are almost smart as us (an example) [http://www.cracked.com/article_18930_6-amazingly-intelligent-animals-that-will-creep-you-out.html]. And even the dumber ones feel pain and sorrow.

You're overestimating animals' minds and learned behavior.

Opposing statistics as in "beneficial" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production#Beneficial_environmental_effects] for the environment? I think the free removal of weeds, handy fertilizer and biogas (renewable energy) don't outweigh the huge consumption of water, overgrazing, greenhouse gas emissions and water contamination. Also: plants are lower on the foodchain than animals. The lower we can get in the foodchain, the higher population we can sustain.

And human minds really don't differ in any big way from other animals' minds, do they?

 

[zarix2311]

I'm an animal, animals eat animals. My life has no more value than any of the other animals that I eat or those that eat each other. That philosophy works the other way around as well. So, to me, I have no reason to feel guilty for eating meat.

 

[Soods]

snip

We wouldn't need so much farmland, because we would not be feeding the cattle anymore. My point about the foodchain was that: by eating meat you eat more plants than by eating plants.
Yes, human minds in most cases are more advanced than other animals' but that doesn't change the fact that other animals have minds as well.

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

But lately I have been questioning if I should feel guilty for eating meat, seafood (anything that has a life).

Because plants aren't alive? Because what? They don't move and don't seem to communicate or interact in any meaningful way we can understand?

If you're going to categorize life in that way, does that mean that a mute, or a deaf. Or someone disabled to the point of immobility like Stephen Hawking is less human and less alive than others?

And if your response argument is that we know a mute or a deaf person or an immobile person or animal is intelligence because of the actions of other like animals that have no disabilities, then I must point out that you're ignoring plant intelligence. Plants can communicate with each other by releasing chemical stimuli, and are capable of perceiving many other stimuli to make them aware of their environments. They can detect orientation, inclination, temperature, light levels; they can even react to physical stimuli. They have adaptive defenses against pests, including preparing their defenses before pests arrive, by way of being warned by surrounding plants passing on trigger chemicals. They are capable of intelligent problem solving, and will change their basic architecture to better survive in an environment.

All of this of course ignored the fact that millions of field mice and other creatures are killed every year in agricultural harvest by the threshers alone, where they are ground up in tiny bits that are then baked into your bread or end up in tiny little bits on most agricultural products. Which doesn't even been to approach the other creatures that farmers kill yearly to protect their crops including the deaths of billions of insects.

Then you have to realize that everything dies eventually, and is then eaten by something else. If you don't eat the cow when it dies guess what, the bacteria, the microbes, the fly larvae will eat it until just the base components are left behind in the soil. Which is then consumed by plants. Which are eaten by vegetarians.

Basically:

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=grill

It is also wrong to drive an animal to extinction or to a dangerously low level by consuming it.

Why?

We wouldn't need so much farmland, because we would not be feeding the cattle anymore. My point about the foodchain was that: by eating meat you eat more plants than by eating plants.

By not killing the cattle, they will eat more plants than they are currently and thus have an even more negative effect on the environment. Unless your plan is to murder all cows everywhere so that they are no longer utilizing plant resources.