Eating Meat: Ethical Issues

Vegetarian culture would have you believe that simply not eating meat is the appropriate way to deal with ethical issues around animal cruelty and ecology. They have valid points, but the answer is not so simple:

If you choose not to eat industrial-raised meats, you are definitely saving animals from a cruel life and a cruel death. You are saving chickens from living virtually their entire lives in tight cages nor cows pumped full of hormones and antibiotics. However, what you are also doing is making it so that some animals are not raised at all. When the demand for such meats goes down, producers will simply raise fewer animals. Those animals will never have a life at all, cruel or otherwise. Would the animals really thank you for that? Hard to say.

You can eat sustainably raised meats. The problem is that the more animals raised on farms just translates into less land available as natural ecosystems. Maybe the chickens you ate were sustainably raised, but a small forest glen had to be cleared out to make room for them to live. Numerous animals in their natural habitat died off to make room for the livestock.

At this point in history, we are seeing the last remnants of widespread natural ecologies. What I mean is that human population is growing so densely over the earth that natural ecosystems will soon only exist in isolated pockets. Large-scale migrations of animals across hundreds of miles may actually cease to exist. When was the last time you saw tens of thousands of buffalo stampeding across the Midwestern plains? How many salmon waterways are still open today, compared to what their once were? You have animals like deer and raccoons who can slip in between the cracks and live between humans, but there is a great cost compared to what was once there.

I often opt for seafood at a restaurant. I prefer wild caught, since farm-raised fish are often worse for the ecology than wild caught. I figure that at least the animal lived a normal life and had a relatively normal death, for a fish. But I also know that the waters are being depleted. The more fishing that is done, the worse the oceans become. Many popular fish species are near extinction, and the ecology of the oceans hangs in the balance. Maybe this fish I am eating is a sustainable choice if you evaluate it as an individual animal, but the overall impact of the fishing industry brings suffering to untold millions of sea animals just to get me the few fish I eat. Am I saving animals from cruelty by eating this wild caught fish?

Eating meat is part of nature. Lions would die if they had to eat grass--they eat other animals. However, if the lions did not eat them, those prey animals would eventually overpopulate and die. The cycle of life and death is part of nature, and there is no way to escape it. If you could somehow disallow animals from killing each other, soon the lions would die of starvation and then their prey would fall on hard times, too. Perhaps an entire species of deer would die off due to overpopulation, rather than just a few being taken here and there by lions which keeps the whole species in check.

In our modern tree-hugging culture, we like to think that every living creature can live to full health and happiness all together in one loving ecology. That is not true: nature is a constant fight for survival, and one death only brings life to someone else. It's not pretty, but it is what it is.

The reputation of the Native Americans seems to fit the best: Take what you need, use what you have, and respectfully leave the rest.