What is your excuse for killing animals?

[lionking]

Gee the moral high ground's getting mighty crowded nowadays. I'm supposed to feel guilty about driving a car, turning on my air conditioning, owning a large TV etc, etc.

Sorry I don't have an "excuse" for eating meat, I just do it.

 

[jiggeryqua]

My ancestors didn't spend thousands of years fighting their way to the top of the food chain just so that I could eat broccoli and bean sprouts.

They spent thousands of years eating broccoli and bean sprouts - and meat. (I'm no vegetarian, but you should work on your juvenile aversion to vegetables, broccoli and beansprouts are excellent - factory crops are as bland as factory meat, but real vegetables are an enjoyable part of an omniverous diet).

Your ancestors (and mine) spent thousands of years domesticating animals to help grow crops, defending said crops against rapacious animals, birds and insects, grazed some of those animals on land that would not support crops (or on which they didn't have the labour to grow or protect a crop) and butchering those animals for all the useful things a carcass provides...blood and bones, hoof and horn, hide and hair, sinew and so on.

Focus on factory farming if you're concerned about animals or ethical eating. Melanie (of the brand new roller skates) used to sing "I don't eat animals, and they don't me" - but they do...or many of them would, given half a chance. You're only on top of the food chain when you're in the middle of the herd.

 

[ynot]

What is your excuse for swatting and/or spraying flies and other insects? If you ate them there would be some excuse. Bloody mass murderer!

What is your excuse for killing vegetables. They have feelings too y'know.

What is God’s excuse your creating life forms that have to kill other life forms to survive?

 

[Pup]

if you believe in the golden rule and assuming you believe the golden rule applies to species other than humans, how can you justify killing animals?

If I met a hungry tiger, I wouldn't expect it not to try to kill me.

 

[cyborg]

Let me be clear here, lest vegetarians think I'm some omnivore apologist: I believe that if the human race is going to evolve and prosper, it will inevitably (whether its 50 years or 500 years from now) become more or less completely vegetarian.

No, that is not inevitable at all.

There will come a time when our descendants will look back with disgust on us eating (cooked) meat as we do with relative disgust with our earlier ancestors who may have eaten raw carrion.

Disgust is cultural as such is flexible.

It's our attitudes to death - the sanitation and denial of it - that probably contribute to this attitude. Not anything fundamental about human nature since it's not a universal attitude and reflects a Western cultural bias.

Or the fact that cows add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere) than they are by trying to talk others into quitting their meat eating habits, uh, "cold turkey".

Western Cultural bias again - the narrowness of the fauna on sale in supermarkets and the methods by which they are farmed don't all have the same implications.

There's loads of insects to eat without even having to try hard to stop them.

(Besides, this argument does pretty much say we should make cows extinct).

 

[GrandMasterFox]

Simple, to help the animals.

Why are the dodos extinct? Because they are not tasty.

Cows are tasty, therefore, human beings have an intrest to keep them around for a very long time.

If you don't eat your meat, it's only a matter of time till human beings will have no intrest in their protection and wipe them out.

 

[Soapy Sam]

(first of all I don’t mean to be flaming, just discuss nicely)

I guess most people here believe in the golden rule… meaning that they generally will avoid doing to others what they don’t want others doing to them.

By "others" I take it you mean "other humans"?

I also guess most people here believe in evolution… meaning they believe that there is nothing really special about the human race except that through non-random survival of randomly varying replicators we ended up developing skills that allowed us to become the dominant species in our ecosystem.

"Dominant " species? "Our" ecosystem?

So I’m curious to know what you critical thinkers tell yourselves so you can conciliate the Golden Rule and the evolutionary perspective and still justify an action that will directly harm something whose only fault is in context being weaker than you?

Why do you feel these two suppositions require "conciliation"?
Cows are not weaker than you. Go push one over and check. If everyone on the planet becomes vegan tomorrow, every cow on the planet will be extinct next month.
But where would we stop? What gives a cow rights that a stalk of wheat does not have? Both are alive and the wheat "weaker than "the cow.

Yeasts and algae are alive too. We should stop eating mushrooms? Drinking beer?
What evolution tells me is that things eat other things. I eat cows, bacteria eat people (and most other things) and that opting out of this to satisfy a moral assumption which some people hold strongly and others reject completely makes no sense for most of the folk in the middle.

Of course any defense will appear self-serving if it comes from a meat eater. I see no way to answer the OP's question without running that risk.

 

[Morrigan]

They taste nice.

Why didn't the thread get locked right after this? Good enough answer.

The law of nature is not an actually law. Following natural instincts is not an ethical way to live your life.
- You don’t rape somebody when you want sex
- or steal candy from a child when you are hungry.
- You should not kill an animal when you want to barbecue their flesh.

Hey, one of those statements is not like the other... try to guess which.

 

[Staropeace]

Cows and chickens taste nice....humans are too gamey.

 

[Primus]

Originally Posted by Brocolis
The law of nature is not an actually law. Following natural instincts is not an ethical way to live your life.
- You don’t rape somebody when you want sex
- or steal candy from a child when you are hungry.
- You should not kill an animal when you want to barbecue their flesh.

Hey, one of those statements is not like the other... try to guess which.

Also I would be totally comfortable stealing candy from a cow,

 

[Trent Wray]

Cows and chickens taste nice....humans are too gamey.

Some humans I've eaten have definitely been gamey.

 

[Achán hiNidráne]

you are not an animal. you are a critical thinking human.

Somebody better inform the biologists! A wimpy, squeamish, vegetarian prat has declared that humans are NOT animals.

and you have other options for nutrition that don't involve killing

Tell that to the plant. Life consumes life.

as civilized beings we drift away from natural instincts but if you want level you logic with the dumber beings, feel free to do so

Ah! The grand hypocrisy of the animal-rights retards! A pig is a dog is a boy is a mosquito is a rat is a small pox virus... but we humans are sooooooo superior to those dirty, filthy, beasts with their predation!

Tell you what, why don't you go wave a "Meat is murder" sign in front of pack of lions. I won't make me take your inane sentimentalism seriously, but I'll certainly enjoy watching you get torn limb from limb and devoured.

 

[Wolrab]

Until they perfect growing meat in labs I will be happy to eat what is available now, like slow cooked ribs....yum.

 

[Trent Wray]

The law of nature is not an actually law. Following natural instincts is not an ethical way to live your life. You don’t rape somebody when you want sex or steal candy from a child when you are hungry. You should not kill an animal when you want to barbecue their flesh.

I could argue that ethics and morality are illusionary, and that no other animals exhibit the need to accuse another animal of murder, rape, or stealing. And they still enjoy their lives, feel hunger and pain, pleasure, etc and so forth.

If you could do away with ethics and morality completely to where we were not even aware of "good" and "evil" as concepts .... we could still live our lives and enjoy sex, food, play, empathy, fear, pain, etc and so forth. I don't see how rape, murder, stealing would come into the picture because we would not have the capacity to be aware of those concepts. We would just do them and move on and get over it, continuing to live our lives. Possibly.

Ethics and morality are "necessary" evils because people think they deserve to have "good" things happen to them and not bad things, and people should be held accountable for their actions. Reality, is that the universe doesn't care about what we deserve or justice being issued. I don't see other animals doing it either. Just us. I view it as a detriment, not a evolutionary benefit.

Now, don't forget that barbecued meat is an aroma pleasing to the Lord ... the Most High is a glutton for mutton.

 

[Grimes]

Some humans I've eaten have definitely been gamey.

The most dangerous gamey?

 

[Trent Wray]

The most dangerous gamey?

Something like that

Some humans taste like slightly sweet kitten, while others surprisingly taste like twice-dead road possum. Don't eat those.



Yes. TMI

 

[temporalillusion]

Until they perfect growing meat in labs I will be happy to eat what is available now, like slow cooked ribs....yum.

This.

Growing meat would be much better, less space taken up, no need to grow the rest of the animal, no messy slaughter, probably much more efficient, etc...

 

[Juniversal]

(first of all I don’t mean to be flaming, just discuss nicely)

I guess most people here believe in the golden rule… meaning that they generally will avoid doing to others what they don’t want others doing to them.

I also guess most people here believe in evolution… meaning they believe that there is nothing really special about the human race except that through non-random survival of randomly varying replicators we ended up developing skills that allowed us to become the dominant species in our ecosystem.

So I’m curious to know what you critical thinkers tell yourselves so you can conciliate the Golden Rule and the evolutionary perspective and still justify an action that will directly harm something whose only fault is in context being weaker than you?

My response is inline with what JohnG says but i'm no vegitarian. Let me explain. Initially I would mention that human beings ARE animals. Also I prefer the designation "non-human animals" when refering to other non-human creatures. The humans centric view that the world revolves around us and we owe nothing to nature leaves a bad taste in my mouth. We are indeed a part of nature and as far as "mother nature" is concerned we have no greater instrinsic value then any other organmism, no matter how large or small. The natural disasters that have plagued us recently being testement to this.

Mind you I eat as much meat as any american but I don't claim it's because "we're at the top of the food chain" but that simply in the natural order of things, organisms consume others to survive. We are no different. We are food to other creatures (fly larvae consume our flesh after death, lions would make a quick meal out of us given the opportunity). Other creatures are food to us. Simple.

 

[Sword_Of_Truth]

They taste nice.

Whut he sed.

 

[dasmiller]

Some humans taste like slightly sweet kitten, while others surprisingly taste like twice-dead road possum. Don't eat those.

I've never tasted road-possum, let alone twice-dead road possum, so the comparison doesn't really improve my understanding.

But I suspect that's for the best.