If I understand correctly, this is the meat paradox: "the psychological conflict between people’s dietary preference for meat and their moral response to animal suffering"
How does living on a farm remove this issue? Does something about living on a farm make you not feel conflict about wanting to eat meat and at the same time not wanting to kill sentient beings?
I've never lived on a farm but I've seen pig and chicken slaughter in real life. Done by hand. I felt the same before as I did after, I feel that if I have the resources to choose to consume no sentient animal body parts, I have a moral obligation to not eat sentient animal body parts. Still, the ease of energy from meat compared to other foods makes me desire it, along with taste. This paradox is something that bugs me often.
1) Animals on family farms are actually treated pretty well. "Torture" is absolutely not the word for it, though it probably does apply to varieties of factory farming, in effect if not intent.
2) More animals die, in absolute numbers, from plowing fields and harvesting crops than are slaughtered for their meat, mostly because we choose large animals for their meat while small animals like to live in grain fields. The only way to conclude that vegetarianism is more ethical is to discount the lives of smaller, wild animals in comparison to their larger, meat-producing cousins, or else define having habitats and homes destroyed, starving to death, or being snagged on a thresher as more humane treatment than being stunned and having their throat slit after being fed and cared for until adulthood.
In general, living closer to nature shows that death and suffering is unavoidable. Certainly we should strive to minimize suffering, but interruption of a huge source of food for most of the human population is a bad way to go about it.
There is an ethical angle you missed: no animal wants to die, with or without torture. I am vegetarian mostly because I chose not to contribute to the death of any animal, if I have alternatives. Yes, death is unavoidable but it doesn't mean it should be encouraged.
And your point 2 is discounting the animals that died to produce the food that cows and such eat. Besides, personally not all animals are equal to me. When I drive I squash insects, and if I would hit a dog I would feel worse.
This is a man made concept. Morality in general is man made.
In nature there is a very clear symbiosis between predator and pray. A herbivore population can get out of control if not hunted by predators, and then destroy the environment. Of course, humans are not in any symbiosis, we just consume and produce waste in the process.
So if you want to talk about how we destroy the environment via CAFO operations, then that's a valid worry, but the morality of killing animals for food (something we've been doing since the dawn of men) is just religion.
This is the best reasoning I have seen as to why it is not morally wrong to eat meat. Point 2 specifically. I had not stopped to consider the impact of preparing farming land.
Thank you for your time to write that out.
I still personally feel that in my position in life, it would be unethical for me to consume meat. Seemingly the amount of animals killed by a plant farm would decrease as time goes on yet a slaughterhouse would continue at least linearly in its pace of killing animals. I do admit that in some way I believe that it is " more ethical is to discount the lives of smaller, wild animals in comparison to their larger, meat-producing cousins" and I know that this is an undefendable position.
Most crops are used to feed the animals that are later slaughtered. A tiny amount is directly consumed by humans. So you're not actually reducing the number of animals killed by eating them.
See, I grew up on a small farm. We raised chickens that my father would butcher. He'd string one up, slit its throat and it'd die instantly. After it was bled we'd pluck the feathers off and then cook it for supper. There wasn't anything particularly cruel about it, and I feel no moral qualms about eating chicken or any other meat for that matter. Maybe growing up on a farm taught me the reality of it which I see as normal.
Feelings of parents actions being intrinsically "good" morally seem like they would factor in as well. Or at least, I feel like if I saw my father slaughter animals I would accept it more.
I also completely understand that vegan lifestyles are very far removed from the requirements of homesteading or personal farming. It may be impossible to harvest a nutritionally dense enough food in the winter that isn't a living creature.
As a person living where anytime of the year I can buy produce from around the world, I have more freedom to choose what I eat.
I'm interested in your ability to not feel moral turmoil about killing sentient beings. Have you ever struggled with it?
My issues around eating meat are based on the lack of necessity I feel towards it. I don't need to eat meat to survive, my choice to eat meat is a choice to support (in my opinion) murder.
A predator has no choice but to hunt, an eagle cannot decide to stop eating prey and switch to plants, it seemingly lacks the ability for self reflection of it's actions.
Your last sentence "Maybe growing up on a farm taught me the reality of it which I see as normal." The reality you explained of chickens being slaughtered in an instant way is still something I see as unnecessary.
Not the guy you were replying to, but I've got an anecdote related to your question:
>I'm interested in your ability to not feel moral turmoil about killing sentient beings. Have you ever struggled with it?
I'm 33, grew up fishing with my grandfather but never went hunting until this last fall when I went deer hunting for the first time. My reason for the hunting trip was about 75% because I wanted to eat deer meat, and 25% to get to know myself better - to see if I could do it, basically. Going into it, I didn't know how I might react after killing a deer or whether I would feel conflicted.
I didn't really end up feeling conflicted at all about it. After taking the shot I was running on 100% pure adrenaline. The deer made it about 20 yards after being shot through the heart and lungs, and was dead when I got down from the treestand and located it. Beforehand I had sort of wondered if I'd feel sad, or grossed out, when skinning and butchering it - I didn't, but I felt a couple of other things. The first was hunger - once you peel the skin off and start cutting into the meat, it really, REALLY lights up the primitive parts of your brain that THIS IS FOOD, SO MUCH TASTY FOOD. The other thing I felt was in some way like I was actually a part of nature, like our ancestors who first made the leap from being prey to being themselves predators, rather than apart from nature.
Have I ever struggled with it? No, nature itself is violent where the only fittest and luckiest survive long enough to procreate. Death is the inevitable outcome of life. I doubt our chickens had any worse of a life than they would have out in the wild (if they weren't domesticated). I know factory farming exists but I don't care enough about it to give up the deliciousness of meat. We're omnivores by nature.
Interesting, I cannot relate to your lack of self-questioning your beliefs in this matter but I am positive I am similar about topics I feel strongly about in other areas.
While I feel it is delicious, I think there a multitude of things which are enjoyable, yet morally wrong.
Thank you for this exchange, I understand your position better and i hope I have helped to elucidate mine.
"... taught me the reality of it" is a bit of a downward-looking phrase. I think people understand the reality of it - that animals can be raised comfortably and killed in a way that looks gruesome but is humane, and animals can be made to suffer before and/or while they die, and both occur, the latter unfortunately in vast quantities. The question isn't that people don't know what's happening - it's that each person perhaps has a point on the spectrum I've illustrated where they are comfortable, a place where they might refuse to eat the meat (if they can even know the circumstances of a particular meal's origin), and a space in the middle where they are against the treatment of the animal, but not so much that they would not eat the meat. And of course, for some people there is no comfort zone - where even a comfortable life and painless killing is unacceptable.
The point is that I think the question is interesting, and I think you might be allowing yourself to dismiss it too easily in support of a personal identity you feel strongly about.
I don't mean to dismiss the idea. I think animals, farmed or not, should be treated humanely. My point is living or growing up on a farm where animals do get slaughtered can affect your perspective on the matter. I doubt a lot of people really do know the reality of it if their only knowledge of it is from the shock and horror perspective. I suspect culture also plays a role.
This is exactly it. When my grandmother had fried chicken growing up it was a result of "going to the back yard and shooting it (the chicken) between the eyes, plucking its feathers off, and frying it in fatback."
If today's fried chicken arrived on a plate the same way it did for my grandmother, I probably wouldn't have made the decision to eschew meat about 10 years ago.
I doubt you would shoot the chicken though, as that would basically blow its head off. More likely she would have just wrung its neck or chopped the head off.
In modern small-scale processing, they put the chicken upside-down in a cone and slit the neck to let the chicken bleed out.
But all farms are not even close to equal. Generally there are two categories of farms. There are small family-type farms where livestock live quite a good, cared-for life. Then there are enormous factory farms where an animals life is, in short, absolutely awful. The slight-of-hand moral reasoning I see all the time is that someone will use their mental picture of a small family farm to fill in for the reality that almost all of the meat/dairy/eggs they buy and eat came from a factory farm.
I have a hard time rationalising my meat eating, but then following through on that train of thought leads me to full on veganism, which is further than I want to go, so I don't.
How does living on a farm remove this issue? Does something about living on a farm make you not feel conflict about wanting to eat meat and at the same time not wanting to kill sentient beings?
I've never lived on a farm but I've seen pig and chicken slaughter in real life. Done by hand. I felt the same before as I did after, I feel that if I have the resources to choose to consume no sentient animal body parts, I have a moral obligation to not eat sentient animal body parts. Still, the ease of energy from meat compared to other foods makes me desire it, along with taste. This paradox is something that bugs me often.