bungalow

Well, yes. Humans do not need to eat meat to survive--millions of living vegans attest to that. And the primary human motivation for eating meat is not need--in most cases it is convenience and pleasure. Our basic needs are not the same as all other animals. Humans have the ability to farm, to store and preserve food. These are luxuries that other animals--who do need to eat meet--do not have. And that moral standards were "fabricated" by humans does not mean they are superfluous or not worth adhering to. Why should we act morally at all if there is personal gain in acting immorally?

I don't understand this point, perhaps you could clarify? As for life being 'objectively' valuable: all living things wish to sustain themselves and to be free of suffering. Because I, as a human, am intelligent enough to understand that it should also therefore be my duty to respect it.

Freebase Dali

I understand where you're coming from, and I agree to an extent. I just mean that you're going to be farming whatever you eat if you're not relying on industry. And with the amount of people we have in this world, at this present time, with this present state of being... not many would be able to survive on their own if all the sudden meat and vegetables were no longer hand-packaged for them in grocery stores, grown on mass farms, and sold to the consumer.
Where do you honestly think you'll be able to obtain a means to survive if you couldn't buy it, or at least obtain a means to produce your own? I'm sure you'd trespass many times on someone else's property before you even got close.

The thing is, we're currently at a point where someone owns everything and when it comes down to survival, we really have no other choice but to be slaves to a market. Yea, you can personally decide to not eat meat from that market, but you're ultimately still serving the market with your choice regardless. And the market is what drives both what you stand for and what you stand against. So it's almost a catch-22.
And there's nothing you can do about that.
So in our reality, the human-being one, we're still just as restricted as an animal's environment (individually) because there's not much we can do about our situation except do what allows us to survive.
That's what it comes down to.

I agree that we could better use our talents and strengths to provide for ourselves in more humane way, but I personally don't believe that just because we're capable of feeling sorry for something that we should be ruled by those emotions alone.
The only thing that matters is the matter of survival. And to do that, we must intelligently do things in a way that benefits both us and our environment and the things living in it. Simply expecting the entire world to stop eating meat altogether is only going to shift the extreme from one end to the other, regardless of what it is.

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