FulfilledDeer said:
Here's how it makes sense to me: I don't need to kill animals to live, so if I do it's only for pleasure. How egotistical and cruel to believe that their life is worth less than my slight discomfort.
Your really making a huge leap here. I'm a meat eater, I see 0 shame in it any more than I have shame about breathing. I don't take any pleasure in the act of killing anything.
But the simple fact is you can not gain anything with out first taking it from something else. Life is inherently an uncaring, unbalanced process and from certain perspectives unfair. Where you are sitting right now at your computer would have once been other animals habitat and feeding grounds, but the animals and plants have been driven off or killed, the ground leveled and poisoned so plants don't grow through the foundations. By the exact same definition where you live has killed animals, by this same counter-reality logic you should have looked for an occupied cave.
The extent of the computer you are reading this on stretches even further. Electricity generation and the scale it needs to be on is unimaginable for a single individual to accurately visualize. 100's of miles of cabling connecting you with the station that needs to be sourced and then laid. Gigantic energy plants effecting the area for miles around. Components within your computer often include relatively rare minerals often sourced from African mines in countries that have 0 laws protecting animal welfare or habitat.
So don't sit there on a high horse lauding over the rest of us merely following nature's natural route. If you don't eat meat on "moral" grounds, they are that you don't want to trade the beinfits of a balanced diet including meat, as we have evolved to do, for animal lives. But don't pretend almost every single good thing you have as a modern conveinece is not at the detriment of another animals. It's literally the circle of life.
By this bizarre logic applied to a reality where life does not care or recognize ethics of any form, the human race would of approached wolves and asked politely if they could share their land, shortly to die moments later. Or if following the logic that we should merely take what is needed simply to survive we should of stopped development as a species at tipi's, never progressed through the industrial revolution, let alone entered the electronic age.
I mean do you know just how many animals are killed due to the use of motor vehicles. So this is my question to you we could technically survive without them, the world would take a step back, industry would slow, the world would change forever but we could do it. SO should we abandon the use of ALL motor vehicles to save animal lives. By your logic is it not egotistical to think the advantages of speedy convenient travel are worth more than the lives of animals.
Here are some figure's I found on a site to put this in perspective "Every year our nation's experimenters kill 100 million lab animals, hunters kill 200 million "game" animals, and motorists kill nearly 400 million road animals. Only America's meat-eaters take a larger toll than its motorists." So why are vegetarians driving car's if it's immoral to kill animals for meat, its not an accident that these animals die due to road use, we KNOW it will happen and we accept this and trade their lives for the advantages.
I have a motorcycle as my primary form of transport, where the road kill numbers are exponentially lower, should I be lauding it over car users like vegetarians do attempt to over meat eaters?
