We _should_ speak to the greater ethical obligations: animals feel a lot, including things like pain, discomfort, suffering, fear, anxiety, etc. Some more than others, certainly. This means that things we unnecessarily do to them which cause these feelings aren’t okay.

And since we don’t need to eat any animals to be happy and healthy, raising and killing them in any capacity falls under “unnecessary suffering”.

Don’t eat things that feel. You don’t need to and they don’t want to be consumed.

Don't treat farm animals cruelly I'm fully on board with. But if you don't eat animals at all, farm animals won't exist in the first place. The choice is between the animal having a life that ends as food, or no life. If the life is a miserable factory farm one, I can see how no life would be superior, but I don't believe that's always the case.

By far the majority of all cows on farms have a miserable life. The female ones were made to give ridiculous amounts of milk, they get forcibly impregnated every year so they constantly produce milk, their offspring is taken away from them immediately after birth and will likely never see a single drop of milk or touch from their mom, after a few years those cows are put down because their bodies are exhausted for being pregnant and producing milk for most of their lifes.

Pigs and chicken have it probably even worse.

A world with our demand for milk, eggs and meat is not possible without ridiculous amounts of harm for all animals involved.

Weaning and raising a child with only vegan foods seems inhumane. How many beans, lentils and soy products do you need to make up for a serving of meat?

Why is raising a child with vegan foods inhumane? And you do realize that in order for you to get a serving of meat, we first had to feed animals many times more calories from plant based products? The majority of our soy is used to fed animals. Right now we produce ~350 million tons of soy each year, which means with 150-450kcal/100gr for soy beans that's enough energy to feed everyone on earth. Since we're also eating other stuff this means we could actually reduce our soy production if we stopped feeding it to animals but used it ourselves.

Why do you think it’s inhumane?…

That's fair, and I agree that needs to change.

Raising animals to torture and kill them is not a life we should seek out for anyone. Let’s not pretend we are doing anyone a favor.

Cows, pigs, goats, horses, fish, clams, etc. will all be fine without us killing them by the billions.

Your only makes sense if you equate the opposite of life as always being death, but in this case it isn’t. In this case you’re not killing something by inaction.

The distinction is important because otherwise condoms would be murder. (Which, in fairness, some cultures do believe. But they also believe that chanting at wine turns it into literal blood. So as open minded as I am, I have a hard job taking their view points seriously.)

Sounds like Scott Alexander's thinking on meat eating. Have you read his deep dive on this question?

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-n...

That's fallacious. Cows, pigs, sheep, turkeys, all existed before being farmed. And still exist in the while. Probably not on the scale of the 60 billions land animals slaughtered each year, though.

Domesticated farm animals are far enough removed from their wild cousins to be their own species. They have been selectively bred over millenia for traits that make them easy to exploit for humans. Most of those traits work against them in the wild.

This is what I'm saying - those 60 billion won't exist. Yes, wild animals, so much as they exist now, will continue to do so, but that's not really relevant.

Yes we should stop breeding them into horrible lives. The animals won’t go extinct though, so what’s the problem?

How is it not relevant. If we stopped breeding animals that doesn’t magically mean that we go back in time 60 billions years and kill every species of farm animal that had existed in that time.

It should be noted that animals won't stop suffering if we stop eating them. Animals in the wild usually live pretty desperate lives, and universally, always, 100% die horrible, horrible deaths that industrial processes would never inflict on them - their flesh tore open as they flee in a panic, or slowly starving to death as disease makes them unable to feed and insects burrow into their living bodies, or suffocating, or drowning or frostbite or or or.

I'm not claiming that farm lives (or worse, industry lives) are in any sense good, or even better, but it's important to remember that nature itself has no qualms in inflicting pain and suffering on animals.

Not to mention, we're only starting to learn how complex plants and fungi are, and that they have their own abilities to perceive the world, react to it, and communicate their reactions to other individuals. If (and this is a huge If, I fully admit that) it turns out plants and fungi are also capable of emotion or hurt, we really will need to re-examine some base assumptions of our morality.

I don't think any of that is relevant to the moral issue of eating animals when we don't need to to survive.

The fact that animals die horrible deaths in the natural world is entirely irrelevant to our moral obligations to induce suffering.

We can cross the plants-feel-pain bridge when and if we get there.

And what are you going to do when plant and fungi researchers start making similar claims?

Then I'll live my life so as to not cause unnecessary suffering. For what it's worth, that still means eating plants as I need to (thus its necessary) and it still reduces the total amount of plants being eaten when compared to diets with animal products.

But does anyone really believe plants are sentient? Nope! So we are likely able to completely avoid needing to worry about that.

Plenty of people do believe that plants are sentient. It is a part of plenty of spiritual belief systems that ascribe life, spirit, and sentience to all living things, and often many nonliving things.

But they are delicious! I can't help eating them.

Consider that they may have some self-restraint module you are unaware of, and you should start letting them bite you.

Edit: I do not see how anyone can find this (contentful) statement disagreeable, which I see as purely logical conclusion (in form of a joke) after a few really simple assumptions. I am starting to assume disagreement comes from masochist insects which are part of the poster's collection, as they probably cannot type.