Moral Argument: Meat Eating

Hello, and thank you for the welcome! I hope this debate will be interesting and stimulating for us both! 1. First off, your argument that 'necessity is not the only thing that makes something moral' is very weak. You used examples of inanimate objects (computers and airplanes) and compared them with 'using' (here meaning eating) animals. Eating an animal is VERY different from driving a vehicle. Sure, you may not 'need' to drive a car, but the car does not suffer or die if you drive it. In contrast, if you eat a pig, NO MATTER how "humanely" you kill it, it WILL suffer to produce the meat product that you do not need. (and humanely is in quotations because it is always judged by a human's definition) 2. "Vegetarianism may not necessarily be healthier because of the exclusion of meat from the diet" True! Vegetarianism may NOT be healthier in all aspects when compared to meat based diets. However, my argument focuses on necessity. If vegetarians often come out on top in health studies, then REGARDLESS of whatever other health measures they take to better their wellbeing, then it probably follows that: a vegetarian diet alone, without added health benefits, is at LEAST equally healthy as a meat based diet, and thus can support and sustain a healthy human being. (plus, most vegetarian/meat comparison studies take smoking, drinking, and exercise into account. A good example is the Seventh Day Adventist Health study, in which, after making allowances for said unhealthy habits, vegetarians still had the winning side. ) Also, you mentioned meat being a good source of certain nutrients. You used fish as an example , fish being rich in omega three fatty acids. But is that fish the ONLY source from which you could reap said nutrient? NO. Nuts and seeds supply ample amounts of this nutrient. And you do not have to kill a sentient being in order to get them. That is the main point: If you can get the nutrient WITHOUT killing, why kill? If you are killing just because ‘it tastes really good' you are being selfish, and causing other animals to suffer for mere taste preferences. 3. Your third point was a little difficult to make out, so if this is a correct response, tell me; I don't want to misunderstand your point! :) The assumption that you can eat them (animals) and still treat them well is WRONG. This is because, no matter how much love you bestowed on the animal while it lived, no matter how much you endeared yourself to the animal, and no matter how 'nice' the animal's living quarters were, you need to KILL it, end its life, to serve your own selfish purpose. (the selfish purpose being: eating the animal's flesh, even though you do not NEED it. ) Let me ask you a question. I'm not sure if you own a dog or not, but, saying you did. Lets' say you owned a yellow Labrador (to give you a mental picture) You loved and cared for that dog for, let's say, 2 years. 2 years is long enough for the dog to reach his adult weight and build. However, on his second birthday, you take him outside to the backyard and chain him up so that he can't escape. You deliver one quick, well aimed shot and he drops dead. You then take him inside and skin him, cook him, ect ect. You kill your dog and you eat him, even though there's a perfectly good can of black beans sitting in the cabinet behind you, from which you could easily reap protein without killing your dog. Would this situation be moral to you? Secondly, People who eat animals are morally responsible for the state in which they live. Whether or not they are aware of how they live. There would not BE factory farms, if meat did not need to be MASS PRODUCED to supply the equally massive demand. (hence the name 'factory farm') Simple law of economics: where there is a demand, there MUST be a supply, otherwise, the product would not be made on the scale that it is produced. Thus, when you stroll into the grocery store, and instead of selecting some lentils and breadcrumbs to make protein-packed veggie burgers, you instead choose a pack of raw ground beef, you are making an impact on how animals live. People often forget just how POWERFUL the consumer really is. If consumers slowly stopped eating meat, factory farms would start going out of business. Slowly, less and less animals would be mass produced. (here meaning genetically modified and aggressively bred through artificial insemination) Therefore, the entire meat system as we know it today would slowly die off as the demand dropped. This is the relationship between corporation and consumer. Even though the guy in the grocery store buying chicken legs for his weekend barbecue probably never struck or killed an animal in his life, he is morally responsible for the death of the animals he is eating, because his direct financial support of meat growers makes the meat (and, in conjunction, the cruelty and killing) possible. Factory farms couldn't do it without us. 4. As for your fourth point, I can't tell you how many times I've heard the argument "you think it's wrong to eat animals, but plants have feelings too! " Wrong! Plants may have sensitivities which we humans may not yet fully comprehend, but do plants have a central nervous system? Do veggies have brains? Does celery scream when it is cut open? (sure, there may be a survival-mechanism reaction in the plant, but the plant does not have a brain! It does not have a spinal cord! It does not have nerves! ) Does the said vegetable remember the pain of being sliced open, and reflect on it? No. Without a developed central nervous system (brain and spinal cord as the bare minimum) an organism CANNOT 'feel' the way an animal such as pigs, humans, dogs, chickens, cows, ect. ect. feels and responds to stimuli. :)