Debate: Vegetarianism vs Non vegetarianism
Side: Non vegetarianism

Yes it is. In the real world, you always run into problems now and then. What if the stunning fails for some reason? What if the bolt pistol fails to kill? Even if you have failure rates of just 1%, when you kill millions of animals a year, you're going to have a lot of pain being dealt out. What levels of distress does the animal feel as it is being herded and restrained for slaughter? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I do know that I can keep things simple and avoid a lot of tricky moral questions simply by avoiding meat.You're forgetting that I live around this, and have been for over a decade. Small farms and agricultural communities are not as rushed as cities are. These types of rituals are taken care of properly often as a matter of pride.However the crux of your argument rests on the assumption that you need a perfect solution that works every time. This is a perfect solution fallacy, and you should just accept that you can't have a perfect device or method, that there are tradeoffs, and that a failure rate of 1% is actually a good thing. It's better than 10%, or 50%.If you can't make tricky moral decisions and prefer not to think about them, maybe you're on the wrong kind of debate. The point of this kind of debate is to open that can of worms and look at it rationally, everyone who commits to a position in real ought to have looked into this moral problem from the outset. I personally find it an easy decision. Life is give and take, benefits and pitfalls. I don't live under the delusion that a perfect way to eat ought to exist, I accept that things die to sustain me, and I accept that where I live happens to have a higher quality of life for these animals.That seems to me to say, "the less saturated fat, the better."We can get everything we need from foods low in saturated fat. So why bother monitoring our intake? Again, we can keep things simple by avoiding meat.No, it says that you shouldn't eat past 10% for optimal health. You're reading into it due to your ignorance of how metabolism works. Saturated fat is a high energy source, and eating more than 10% is typically bad because your body won't use all of it, it will instead use the carbohydrates.Not quite, because a certain amount of carbohydrates are needed for a healthy diet, whereas zero meat is needed for a healthy diet.What is meat? Cholesterol, proteins, and lipids. Just like most types of high-energy foods. Your body requires all of these things for energy and metabolism, regardless of whether you get them from meat or nuts and legumes.Carbohydrates are a simple energy source, essentially a chain of sugars. Again, we need this for energy.Says who? Society decides what our laws are. Also I wouldn't call a tax "coercion", as people could still by meat relatively easily albeit at a slightly higher price. It would be more like nudging people in the right direction.Nudging is a form of coercion, it's just a matter of degrees. You're forcing people to live the way you think they ought to live, when it isn't your business to do so.This type of subject is very irritating on a personal level because people like you seem to think that a good society requires the government to operate as a parent or guardian, nudging everyone to conform to an increasingly long list of rules and regulations. Government exists to mediate the relationships between people and political agencies. Government is essentially the lubricant to keep relationships between people of different backgrounds working under a common rule set. It isn't your nanny.1) "Suffering is bad" is not a personal value, it's a universal truth.2) Their hospital bills increase my healthcare costs.Which are both irrelevant to the discussion. Being a citizen of a free society means that you need to learn to respect what it means. It means you make allowances for all the different lifestyles and morals of people, agreeing to a common ethic. You show a supreme disrespect for the type of society you live in by expecting it to be a tool for which you can enforce your lifestyle upon everyone.1) Negative feelings are inherently bad.2) Pain is a kind of negative feeling, therefore pain is bad.3) Pain let's us know when something is wrong.4) Knowing something is wrong allows us to avoid a greater amount of negative feelings.5) Therefore pain is less bad than not knowing something is wrong.Assuming that negative feelings are inherently bad is contentious. For example, anger can motivate justice, jealousy can motivate self-improvement, sadness can motivate a change of lifestyle.Pain can't be described as inherently bad either, as it motivates us to take different actions, it reminds us when we're sick, and it keeps us from straining our bodies. These are all good things. I believe you're conflating undesirability with badness. Pain is undesirable, that is why it can be good.We need smoke alarms; we don't need fire.Except, to extend your metaphor, if we removed fire we wouldn't have a valuable tool for life.In other words, without pain we wouldn't have one of the great motivators in our lives. Where would we be if we couldn't experience hardships on a personal level? What would we become if suffering became only a topic of discussion? Soft? Detached? Unprepared for difficulty?The majority of my existence lies between these two extremes. I did not by any means need to spend many nights along to be able to enjoy nights spent with another.I wasn't considering those listed emotions as particularly negative, but if you insist; I would like to point out that those nights spent alone make the night spent with someone meaningful, rather than casual and normal. Likewise, years spent together with someone at night, make nights spent with no one all the more painful. Either way you look at it, one causes the other to become noteworthy.