Tell Us Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat

Zoogster said:

I must chuckle a little when so many SHTF fantasy scenarios people come up with involve hunting for food for some long period of time.
If say 10% of the population hunted for most of their food, even to the extent of compensating for a lack of calories from other food sources like carbohydrates, the animal population would be nearly gone in a year. For example a deer a week, multipled by 30 million people (10%), would be 1,560,000,000 deer a year. Or 1.5 billion deer. But there is only about 20-25 million deer. Not even enough for 10% of the population to kill 1 all year long, and still result in extinction. In fact much less has to be taken just to result in something sustainable.
And deer are the most numerous large game animal.
Feral pig numbers are much smaller.
Even if you start adding in all the typical game animals, the forests would be quite barren within a year, and many of the species unlikely to ever recover, and others requiring decades to recover if even 1% of the population survived on hunted game as the primary source of their calories for a year.

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I agree that most SHTF scenarios are just idle daydreaming, however, I think you overestimate the impact on wildlife. In a real situation that required large parts of the population to rely on hunting a large portion of the human population would perish and the calorie intake of the remaining people would nose-dive (solution to the obesity epidemic).

Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of the great depression could comment on what happened to wildlife in the 1930s.

wombat13 said:

Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of the great depression could comment on what happened to wildlife in the 1930s.

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The Great Depression is what almost completely removed NJ's population of turkey and deer. It wan't until about 10-15 years ago that they were in enough numbers that they could be regularly hunted, and now, they're at the point where they are becoming a problem. I believe the deer numbers were down in the dozens and turkeys were thought to be extinct for a while.

Great Depression is what almost completely removed NJ's population of turkey

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They all left due to the smell, and smart enought to not step back across the border...

I kid...



Serious I think wildlife would be fine... It's people who are Screwed.

If God never intended for us to eat meat he would have not made venison taste so darn good

Somebody write to the originator of the debate with a more pertinent question on ethics: Given the state of the economy with its high unemployment and the ever-increasing cost of food, is poaching ethical when an adequate quantity of a balanced diet is important?

I had an employee...very nice man...a devout Hindu. Cricket player. The guy would not eat beef in any form...ever! But friends, this man loved chicken, fish, pork (yes, Hindus are fine with pork...they eat it seldom in India because the Muslims object), goat (which is very popular in India because it is a good hot climate animal and nobody is offended if you eat them), lamb, I mean if it was made out of meat other than a cow, he was eating it...except on Thursday when he ate no meat at all.

So even in a culture with dietary laws link Hindus, meat is OK.

PS. I learned to eat goat and it was good. More beefy than lamb...you might not be able to tell in fact...I can always tell lamb.

My biggest aurguement that we were disgined to eat meat is our binocular vision. I mean people like all predators can judge the distance to our prey. Both eyes cn focus on a single moving object. Look among vertebrates and see how many that can judge distance well dont eat things thats cant judge distance well.

Art Eatman said:

Note that after the basic hunter/gatherer era, nomadic people dealt with animals which could travel more easily, and need lesser amounts of water. Generally, that meant sheep and goats,

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Well even that had a serious impact on the land, some of the most serious.
It was people such as nomadic goat herders that resulted in growth of large barren wastelands in the middle east, one of the places humans lived long ago.
The nomads would travel through with large flocks of domestic animals, which they would overgraze the land with. These animals would eat the vegetation down to the ground. This removed the protection of the top soil from the elements.
This meant a heavy rain could wipe out a lot of the top soil, washing it to other areas, along with its nutrients. Heavy winds without trees and other vegetation to slow them down and lacking plants with extensive root systems to hold the top soil in place contributed. The top soil could be blown and dislodged. Similar to what happened in the Dust Bowl in the US, but instead due to overgrazing rather than farming technique.
As most farmers know the top soil is not that deep and holds most of the nutrients needed for vegetation, so when it is lost not much grows.
The result of these nomads clearing vegetation to the ground by over grazing animals on it repeatedly and not contributing to new growth was not only barren wasteland, but concentration of the nutrients and salts washed away in the rain in low lying water.
This resulted in undrinkable salty water and barren dusty deserts.

So even nomadic goat herders would ruin the landscape.
People that take from the land without giving back to it deplete it. They killed off large amounts of vegetation, and were not involved in planting more. The result over time of such people was a barren place.



And yes farm land has been behind a lot of the wars in history. The entire fuedal system was based on it, and is what resulted in the clearing of most forests in Europe that had existed for thousands of years. Some of the only wilderness left in place in places like England was specifically for the nobility to hunt. Wild land considered wasteful when it could instead be a crop.
But a lot of it was because of greed and power, the more crops a land baron held the richer and more influential and powerful they were. Power was directly tied to the amount of crops, so they would clear far more land than necessary for food to hold as much crop land as possible. This resulted in the rolling hills of cleared land as far as the eye could see.

Eating meat is a way of paying your respects to your creator who endowed you with two incisors. Your creator did not endow you with incisors in order to rip carrots. So make your creator happy and eat a steak today.

Zoogster, I would argue that the desertification resulted from salt buildup in the soil, from irrigation from the Tigris and Euphrates as examples. Same as for the Imperial Valley in California. Nile floods avoid this by the deposition of new soil atop the existing fields.

Over-grazing by goats wasn't due to the nomads' pattern; it was due to near-city over-grazing in a market-place situation. IOW, desertification came after there were no more nomads.

In the early west in the US, the sheep herders were fairly nomadic, as were the cattle ranchers. They just didn't commonly move as far as the people of those in the distant past. Graze down, move on--but don't graze down beyond recovery.

The Biblical "cedars of Lebanon" went away from lumbering and firewood--another post-nomad activity from the city-folks.

Human consumption of meat is a biological imperative. If there's an ethical debate at all, it's over the conditions in which many meat-bearing animals are grown. We take pride in making ethical kills of game animals, but pay little attention to how meat is mass-produced.

Life consumes and it expends.
Neglect either and perish.
The marketplace determines the value of both these endeavors.
Morality lies elsewhere.

I had this debate with some vegans a while back, they insist that every life is just as valuable as any other, so you have no right to kill something else to feed yourself. To which I replied " If that is the case, what of the aprox 300,000,000 insects per acre that die so you can have your soyburger? Do they not count?" They won't talk to me anymore Things die so other things can live, that is not cruel or unethical, that is life, and it it not fixing to change anytime soon. The only thing I would consider cruel of unethical is the pointless suffering of farmed/hunted anamals. I have seen farmers beat anamals for no good reason, and hunter shoot game with calibers not suited for the game or taking shots that they really should have passed on, both of which are simply stupid.

wombat13 said:

Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of the great depression could comment on what happened to wildlife in the 1930s.

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I believe that it was during this time that firearms were originally banned in the national parks. The reason was to reduce poaching by people desperate for food.

I think it's funny when people say they don't eat red meat because it's "bad for them", but they all go to the doctor and complain about feeling sluggish and weak. Red meat is a key source of iron, without adequate iron levels and a steady supply of it, you have no strength. That's not healthy.

My sister's ex-boyfriend told me one time that he thought he "didn't have the right" to eat any meat besides chicken, because cows can sense when they are heading for slaughter. He told me that the chickens "don't know", and that made it morally right. I guess he's never seen how chickens used to be chased around pens to have their necks broken. They move pretty quick, and it's safe to say they have a pretty good idea of what's about to happen!

He was raised in an islamic household, and even though he doesn't practice it now, he still won't eat pork because "it's dirty".

Today, go out and have a BLT, and tell everybody how good it was.

Today, go out and have a BLT, and tell everybody how good it was.

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Good god I wish I could... Unfortunately Im in the Middle East right now and cannot get Pork as it is outlawed here. (Saudi)...

Thousands of years back, it made sense to not mess with hogs, since they need a lot of water and don't travel well in a nomadic existence. They tie people to immobility, one location near water and relatively-lush vegetation. Never has been a whole lot of that in the middle east. There was also the problem of trichinosis from under-cooking.

So it got codified from common sense into religious stricture and somewhere along the way "dirty" or "foul" entered the deal. The practical reasons were lost to antiquity and no real thought has been given, ever since.

I'm a second generation vegetarian. The cow eats the grass then I eat the cow.

You Should Read This Book!

Anyone ever read In Defense of Hunting, by James A Swan? It might be the single best thing I've ever read. (Lonesome Dove is up there too) I highly recommend it... Biology, Anthropology, Economics, History, Law, Ethics, and more and how they're intertwined with hunting and being carnivorous.

Because meat tastes good.

Human consumption of meat is a biological imperative. If there's an ethical debate at all, it's over the conditions in which many meat-bearing animals are grown. We take pride in making ethical kills of game animals, but pay little attention to how meat is mass-produced.

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Pretty much it. Not much more to say.

Freedom_fighter_in_IL said:

Anyone ever seen a healthy looking vegan or vegetarian? I sure haven't. Sick all the time, skin that looks like Elmers Glue, just eww. I'll take my meat and taters please.

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I know of a couple MMA fighters who are vegetarians. They look pretty darn health to me.

With that said, I'm a full-on carnivore myself.

The question is interesting, though. I'll have to give it some thought.

There are three MMA vegans and none of them are setting the world on fire last I checked. I spent five years training to fight in the UFC, I could not imagine training like that on a vegan diet. Yes I have tried that too, and it made me feel weak as hell.

in a word...Incisors.

"I did not claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat grass"! Was on a tee shirt I saw someplace....Thought it was humorous.