Do you feel any guilt from eating meat?

We can get protien from other sources than meat. Even ill admit we dont HAVE to eat meat. I eat it because i enjoy it, if i disnt like it i just wouldnt eat it. Guilt would never come into it for me

Jester252 wrote: »

Evidence that we need it is biology. If we didn't need meat then why is it part of a human diet pool?

A better question would be - why does it taste so good?

Than answer is because we are hard wired to go for certain aspects of food fat being one.

This argument about evolution is spurious at best though - our diet in even the last few hundred years bears absolutely no resemblance to what people in Northern Europe would have evolved to eat. Take our sugar consumption which has grown massively.

I'm not supporting the don't eat meat side of this argument but many aspects of the world would be improved by eating a hell of a lot less of it. Then so would any number of things we consume.

annascott wrote: »

I was a vegetarian for about 15 years for purely ethical reasons. When I moved to the country and started to see actual animals in fields lambs, cows etc. it was the final straw and I stopped all meat except fish. (Maybe that made me pescatarian instead of vegetarian?) Eventually, I started eating meat (chicken, turkey, beef and pork) due to social pressures. However, I am thinking of giving it up again. I buy organic wherever possible and only eat free range eggs, but I still feel horrible about it. I have even started to feel bad about crab and lobster which were always my favourite food. Last summer I got two live lobsters straight from a fishing boat, but on the way home, guilt got to me and I drove back to the sea and set them free again!

Sorry but I have to address you're reasoning here - ethical grounds?

Cows / sheep in a field - thats where the ethically raised ones live eating grass. The non-ethiclly raised ones are in a feed pen somewhere being fed corn and anti-biotics.

Chicken - raised in some of the cruelest conditions imaginable - I suspect turkeys don't get a much better deal.

Crab and Lobster - You're aware lobsters are boiled alive I assume?

I know, I'm going to regret this, but...

annascott wrote: »

I was a vegetarian for about 15 years for purely ethical reasons. When I moved to the country and started to see actual animals in fields lambs, cows etc. it was the final straw and I stopped all meat except fish. (Maybe that made me pescatarian instead of vegetarian?) Eventually, I started eating meat (chicken, turkey, beef and pork) due to social pressures. However, I am thinking of giving it up again. I buy organic wherever possible and only eat free range eggs, but I still feel horrible about it. I have even started to feel bad about crab and lobster which were always my favourite food. Last summer I got two live lobsters straight from a fishing boat, but on the way home, guilt got to me and I drove back to the sea and set them free again!

This post is a good example of why I see much of the aversion to eating meat to be based on neurosis, rather than any rational choice.

Macha wrote: »

And do you think that morality is decided by the majority?

I think you'll find it pretty much is. Morality may be dictated and/or enforced by elite groups in society, but ultimately morality is what is believed to be right or wrong by the majority of that society.

I don't think anyone has suggested that vegetarianism (or veganism) is morally wrong, btw.

My basis for saying current levels of meat consumption in developed countries is wrong is because it is based on inhumane conditions for animals and is puts a huge strain on resources.

Heh. Walt Disney has a lot to answer for.

Finnbar01 wrote: »

AFAIK, cows need to be milked regularly, so cows would never be able to survive in the wild.

My understanding is that cows continue to produce milk because they continue to produce offspring (who are instead fed a substitute) and either slaughtered early on as veal, as adults or become dairy cows themselves. We could sterilize them, but then they'd stop producing milk.

Egg laying chickens produce eggs from about 20 weeks old and the quality begins to degrade from about 25 weeks. Typically they're slaughtered after a year as they are of little benefit as egg producers, despite the fact that they can live for several more years.

For the production of wool, slaughter is also required as a means of controlling animal numbers as sheep will birth between three to seven offspring per year. Sterilization could be an alternative solution however.

In all cases, without the slaughter for meat production purposes, the production of milk, wool and eggs would likely become prohibitively expensive. For example, the overheads for producing eggs would go from housing, feeding and caring for poultry that are productive for about six months of their one year life span (prior to slaughter), to housing, feeding and caring for poultry that are productive for about six months of their six year life span (prior to death by natural causes). Fancy paying €2 per egg in Tesco's?

Finally, given that all of these animals are domesticated - that is the product of thousands of years of selective breeding by humans - it is questionable that they would survive in the wild, not that there is much 'wild' left in the first place. Thus not farming them at all would likely doom them to extinction.

You can actually see this with horses; 120 years ago, horses would have been a common site on our streets - so common that in 1894, the Times grimly predicted that by 1950 every street in London would be buried in 9 feet of horse shìt. Then came the automobile and horse numbers declined drastically to a tiny fraction of what they were, the few remaining saved largely by our use of horses in sport, particularly racing, and spoilt middle-class girls.

Unfortunately pig racing never took off as a sport, so if we stopped eating them, they're more than likely to go the way of the Dodo, as beyond the products of slaughter (meat and hide), they have nothing to offer us.

So, if you do want us all to stop eating meat, then I would think about what the consequences of that may be.

Macha wrote: »

True but by modern standards, most people would find the truth about the meat industry very immoral, it's just the same industry does a very good job of keeping that sort of information out of the public domain.

Thank you for your opinion. I would not agree with it. There; we both have opinions.

Becuase the biological argument doesn't prove that we need to eat meat. There are no particular negative impacts from not eating meat, but I see a while host of them in the opposite direction. So I don't see the biological argument as particularly compelling either in terms of us 'needing' to eat meat, or in terms of somehow justifying any negative impacts (or even bothering to reduce consumptino/find more sustainable alternatives) because of that 'need'.

I have repeatedly said we eat too much meat. But this does not imply that the solution is to stop eating meat - that is a logical fallacy.

Like it or not, we do realistically need to eat animal products for a healthy diet, otherwise we're essentially forced to take supplements - and when you have to do that, only an idiot would not begin to question the validity of their beliefs.

And while these animal products can be limited to eggs, dairy products and the like, as the above response explains, it's quite difficult to get away from the uncomfortable realities that come with animal husbandry and farming.

No but the point is discussions on the philosophical level are not very interesting. I have no objection to eating meat per se, my issue is with the impacts of what meat we eat and how much we eat it.

I would completely agree with how much meat we eat, but what meat? I presume you mean encourage people to eat healthier and more ecologically friendly meats? If so, absolutely.

Cows are domesticated and so in that sense, yes, they wouldn't be able to survive in the wild.

So are pigs, poultry, sheep and pretty much all common farm livestock. What do you expect after ten thousand years of farming?

Macha wrote: »

Of course we both have opinions: we're having a debate about something on an internet forum. What are you trying to say?

Having an opinion does not make it true and if that's all we rely upon in debate then we're really not going to get anywhere as my unsubstantiated opinion is just as good as your unsubstantiated opinion.

But I can't agree with you that vegetarians have to take supplements.

I never said that. I stated that "we do realistically need to eat animal products for a healthy diet, otherwise we're essentially forced to take supplements" and last time I checked vegetarians do eat animal products such as eggs and cheese. Vegans, who do not, tend to fall into the situation where they have to take supplements.

Well, I don't see unprocessed meat as unhealthy, but it would be better if people went for quality over quantity rather than vice versa!

No argument there. We eat too much meat, as a society, and poor quality meat at that.

I see a difference between the forced impregnation of, say, Turkeys because they're not physically capable of doing so without human intervention any more, and keeping female animals pregnant throughout their adult life to ensure they lactate. That is something specific to the dairy industry.

Makes little difference, in that if we eat less meat it will result in a cull. If we stop eating meat, then this will in many cases result in the extinction of some domesticated species. Hardly improves their lot, which does weaken the 'moral argument'.