[neuronic]

Environmental impact has been mentioned a few times but personally (!) I have reduced (not yet eliminated) my meat consumption mostly due to the fact that my short term unnecessary enjoyment is not justified in the face of the insane cruelty connected to mass animal farming. There is plenty of well-established documentation about this industry you can find online and subjectively I find it psychopathic.

I personally cannot consume meat from mass production anymore with a good conscience after hearing pigs scream in pain as their cage entered into the CO2 cloud used to kill them. The CO2 forms acid when coming into contact with their eyes, nose, lungs and mouths. You can kinda get a tiny hint of that feeling when you drink too much carbonated soda and burp up CO2 throw your nose by accident.

I hope it doesn't sound patronizing but that's MY reason to avoid meat, even more so than the terrible environmental impact. If you have ever spent time with pigs on a farm, they are eerily similar to dogs in some ways, so intelligent and funny. We would never subject dogs to the crazy amount of torture and violence just to eat them for 5 minutes out of no necessity at all and I believe it takes cognitive dissonance and plain ignorance to then just torture pigs for years and then kill them. Most of them never get to see the sun or run across a field of grass in the spring. Just death, disease, oozing wounds and death by acid-suffocation.

[uxcolumbo]

Yes - you raise some good points.

It's not really about health. In this day and age you can be healthy with or without consuming animal products.

It's really about cruelty towards sentient beings and is the biosphere destruction really worth having a strip of bacon or a steak?

Are culinary pleasures more important than not inflicting all this cruelty and damage?

Pigs pass the mirror test and can be compared to small 2-3 year children when it comes to intelligence.

Cows are such gentle and curious animals.

And yet we treat animals as inanimate objects.

As Carl Sagan said 'They are too much like us'

If we ever achieve a Star Trek like society - those future humans will look back at this time the same way we look back at the times when slavery was fully accepted by society.