I'd like to point out, respectfully, that appeal to nature, or to evolutionary "purpose," is (especially vis. ethics) an argumentative fallacy (social Darwinism, anyone?). Animals (and, historically, humans) also rape each other. Some get mad and kill each other. So what? I don't see how this has any bearing on our capacity to reduce their suffering, especially given that with our neocortexes we've figured out how to subsist on nutritional sources that are not meat.
We've developed an entire slaughter system that is extremely unsanitary and wasteful from a water and energy perspective, and not to mention downright cruel, simply to satisfy what is increasingly looking like a human "taste" for meat. A pleasure. You talk about reducing food costs for the poor. Guaranteed that a food calorie from a vegan source is cheaper than one from the meat source. After all, where did the meat source derive its calorie?
I highly recommend following the audio podcast link in my original post and giving it a listen.
Absolutely, but I've made no appeal to nature. The only part which may be confused as an appeal to nature is when I said that this issue is unlike slavery in that meat has played a crucial role in forming us. This is not to say that the moral question should be avoided, only that it's complicated. Calling human desire for meat "a taste" is like calling our desire for art or stories "a taste". Neither meat nor art is crucial to our survival, but they are both an important part of what has made us human.
You could say that, unlike art, eating meat causes suffering, to which I'd answer that our existence causes suffering. The crux of my argument is this: no matter what we do, as long as we live on this planet we will be killing animals, lots of them, and in very cruel ways. We might do it directly or indirectly, but there is no way to avoid it. When we approach the moral question this is something we must bear in mind. We might decide that it's better to grow tomatoes and slowly starve animals to death rather than slaughter them. But we cannot avoid killing them.
If your goal is to minimize suffering, then I'd say we should go back to being hunters-gatherers. But we can't, because technological progress is also an integral part of who we are. So we choose progress and death to animals. Now the question remains whether within these confines we should minimize animal suffering caused directly by humans wearing blood-stained clothes. Maybe. As I've said in the beginning of my original comment, human values change.
Sure, there's no way to avoid all of it, but we can avoid a heck of a lot of it. So why don't we? You seem to take a certain amount of carnism as a given, but I don't see for most people in the developed world why it should be a given, especially in light of the fact that meat isn't needed for subsistence.
If you agree that it is for taste and nothing essentially more, then we have to ask ourselves whether the suffering endured by slaughterhouse animals (in addition to the other environmental concerns I listed) is a worthy price for our pleasure. Without pointing to other irrelevant facts about nature or history.
I don't know that that's true even if we stop eating animals (what amount of land is required, etc.). But I don't have all the facts, so I can't argue.
> I don't see for most people in the developed world why it should be a given, especially in light of the fact that meat isn't needed for subsistence.
First of all, there aren't that many people in the developed world. What, a fifth from humanity? Second, not eating meat would place a heavy burden on composing a healthful diet for everyone.
> Guaranteed that a food calorie from a vegan source is cheaper than one from the meat source. After all, where did the meat source derive its calorie?
Meat derives its nutrition from insane amount of plant material eaten by animals. Herbivores do little more than eat all day, and most support an extremely limited brain. Meat offers concentrated nutrition. That's why it was necessary for our brains to evolve.
"All"? I'm not even sure about "most". I would love to see a citation for this extraordinary claim.
Wikipedia says this:
'The most common themes in cave paintings are large wild animals, such as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, and tracings of human hands as well as abstract patterns, called finger flutings. The species found most often were suitable for hunting by humans, but were not necessarily the actual typical prey found in associated deposits of bones; for example the painters of Lascaux have mainly left reindeer bones, but this species does not appear at all in the cave paintings, where equine species are the most common. Drawings of humans were rare and are usually schematic rather than the more detailed and naturalistic images of animal subjects. One explanation for this may be that realistically painting the human form was "forbidden by a powerful religious taboo."'
...
'Henri Breuil interpreted the paintings as being hunting magic, meant to increase the number of animals.
'An alternative theory, developed by David Lewis-Williams and broadly based on ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, is that the paintings were made by paleolithic shamans.[15] The shaman would retreat into the darkness of the caves, enter into a trance state and then paint images of their visions, perhaps with some notion of drawing power out of the cave walls themselves.
'R. Dale Guthrie, who has studied both highly artistic and publicized paintings and a variety of lower quality art and figurines, identifies a wide range of skill and ages among the artists. He hypothesizes that the main themes in the paintings and other artifacts (powerful beasts, risky hunting scenes and the representation of women in the Venus figurines) are the fantasies of adolescent males, who constituted a large part of the human population at the time.[16][verification needed] However, in analysing hand prints and stencils in French and Spanish caves, Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University has proposed that a proportion of them, including those around the spotted horses in Pech Merle, were of female hands.'
Now, I think this issue is best split into two parts: treating animals and killing them. The first part is much more clear-cut: many farm animals are treated cruelly (mostly in the dairy and poultry industries), and this should change.
The issue of killing animals is complicated. About a year and a half ago, the magazine I used to work for sent me and a photographer on a hunting safari in South Africa. I went there half expecting to write about the cruelty of man and the beauty of nature; I expected to write about the evils of hunting. Only problem is -- the trip changed my mind. So much so that my vegan editor decided not to run the story (I would share it, only it's in Hebrew and my English isn't good enough for me to translate it all).
1. Pain and suffering
Oh, the hunters (most of them, really) were just as cruel as I had expected. But nature was far crueler. The simple truth is this: no animal dies a dignified death in the company of family and friends. The lucky ones get a bullet or fall prey to leopards. The less fortunate are eaten by hyenas who eat the poor animal, starting at the stomach, while it's still alive. The rest die slowly of starvation, lying exhausted while vultures pick out their eyes and jackals eat their legs.
2. Death and destruction
The main issue, as I see it, is this: every creature, large or small, every organism, living on this planet kills others. From bacteria and plankton to blue whales: their mere existence means death to others. It was once believed that nature is harmonious, that all animals and plants live with one another, each having its place in the ecosystem. But this is false. It was found that if you visit, say, a forest, and take inventory of its flora and fauna, then come back 70 years later, the picture will be completely different. As a general rule, species don't live with other species in harmony. They compete, and some come out victorious. Then you have people. Like all other species, we, too, cannot avoid killing other species. What, you want to eat legumes instead of meat? Well, antelopes cannot live in a field. They can, however, live among free-range cattle. And those antelopes, buffalos and leopards that would die because you want to grow a wheat field will die a far more horrible death than cattle in the abbatoir. You say we turn a blind eye to the pleas of the cows? What about that of the antelopes? When agriculture was invented and people started planting fields to sustain a huge human population, many animals were condemned to death -- and those weren't farm animals.
It's just that we feel disgusted when we see the blood. Western civilization has slowly tried to distance death and gore from our lives. But it's absolutely impossible to avoid it. We can only push it further away from us.
3. Meat
The question of eating meat, while a moral one, is different from that of slavery because of the role meat has played in our own evolution. There is no doubt that meat has played a crucial role (though there is duscussion about the magnitude of its importance). Only meat was nutritionally dense enough to support a very energetically wasteful brain, and said brain evolved (in part if not mostly) for the purpose of hunting animals. It is little wonder that all primitive art depicted hunting. The first stories were about hunting, animals, and the gods, demons and monsters our forefathers encountered while hunting those animals. They were told around the fire where the meat was cooked. Also, there are several cultures that are entirely meat-eaters (the Inuit) and don't consume vegetables at all. To the best of my knowledge there have never been vegetartian societies. Now, this does not mean that the question of the morality of meat-eating should not be asked, only that it touches our very core.
Lastly, I just want to go back for minute to the issue of animal treatment. There is little doubt that chickens in industrial poultry farms are treated badly. They suffer. But growing free-range chickens and cows is so much more expensive (I think). This would mean that only the rich could afford "ethical" meat. Industrial farming allows even the poor to have it. This, however, does not mean that we shouldn't do our best to improve animals' living conditions in areas of the world that can afford it.