A Clarification of the Question
I would like to clarify the question or at least explain the
context of my thinking.
We often make a distinction between eating meat and eating
other animal products, such as milk or eggs.
We cannot justify any such distinction.
Animals used in the production of dairy products and eggs
are often kept alive longer than ‘meat’ animals; they are subjected to as
much if not more suffering; and they all end up in the same slaughterhouse as
do their ‘meat’ counterparts after which we consume them as ‘meat’ anyway.
Moreover, the dairy and egg industries involve immediate death as well. Male
calves become ‘veal’ because they cannot produce milk; male chicks are
suffocated or crushed because they cannot produce eggs.
There is as much suffering and death in a glass of milk or a
dish or ice cream or pancake as there is in a steak—perhaps more.
Therefore, I do not distinguish between meat and other
animal products. We cannot morally justify eating any of them.
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I don't buy my meat or eggs or dairy from a grocery store. I buy from a small, sustainable farmer that treats the animals better than they would be treated in the wild. No hormones, no antibiotics. Feed on what they feed on. Chickens range the farm, different place every day in the summer, chicken house is parked in the winter.
Cows eat grass. Not force fed grain.
Milk is raw and unprocessed.
This is how the animals we eat and milk and collect eggs from should be treated.
I can't see how anyone who has omnivore teeth and has evolved that way can have a problem. If you do, you have too much free time on your hands and probably should find more things to do than worry so much about the life your sustenance food leads that it interferes with your life and that of others.
If you were going to follow through your arguments about the feelings of the animals, you should carry that to plants. They react to their environments, just to a different extent than animals.
This is life people. Learn to deal with it. If you don't like factory food. Find a different source. Food was alive. You can't get around it.
The distinction between eating meat and eating eggs and dairy is justified as a conceptual distinction, and perhaps even as a factual distinction; but it certainly can't be justified as a moral distinction. Both contribute to the suffering of non-human animals and both treat non-human animals with a lack of respect.
I just wanted to clarify these different senses of justification in case anyone attempts to undermine the very important moral distinction that Gary is making and which is essential to his argument for veganism.
I'm fine with focusing just on the dietary aspect for the sake of this question, but focusing only on animal flesh totally misses the problems inherent in the "production" of dairy and eggs for human consumption. If we are going to focus on diet, we need to address the morally unjustifiable consumption of all animal products.
Well said.
I also have a problem with the question. I roll my eyes once again to see this title, "Should we eat meat?" The more we say things like "go vegetarian" and "meat is murder", objective approaches to abolishing the animal industry are put in a corner and called extreme, confusing people as to what is right and wrong when it comes to our use of animals.
A better question is "Is it morally justifiable to use animals as our property?". We seem to be way too focused on the "meat" a single product of the animal industry. But the animal industry is what we should be up against. The animal industry exploits living beings with their own interests in order to be used as property. This is why we have meat today. This is no longer an issue of survival or evolution.