[andsmedeiros]

[flagged]

[cogman10]

> There is no ethical meat

Depends on your definition of ethical. Assuming you define it in terms of a lack of cruelty to the animals and their handlers then such meat does exist.

However, the vast majority of meat is not that. The issue is it's cheaper to produce meat unethically than it is to produce it ethically. Because of that, at every step in the production to mouth there's a strong incentive to go the cheap route rather than the ethical route.

[SkyBelow]

>a lack of cruelty

But doesn't this depend upon your definition of cruelty? I've seen vegans who define raising an animal for the purpose of eating it to be inherently cruel, even if it doesn't suffer any negative treatment until the day it is killed to be eaten.

Even this is just going with common enough definitions found in modern society. If we expand our scope of what ethics and what views of cruelty are allowed, there is no end to what results we see.

[speeder]

Honest question: what you expect people that live in grasslands (Mongolia for example) to eat?

[tgv]

I'm a vegetarian, and while not vegan, I take care to reduce animal products to a minimum, but IMO ethical meat exists. If a farmer has a few chickens running around, and he slaughters one for consumption, that's fine with me. It would only be unethical if you hold all (animal) life sacred, a very difficult position. It's the scale and means of meat production that makes meat consumption unethical and immoral.

[jonahbenton]

Tell that to your genetic predecessors.

[cogman10]

Turns out the model of the primarily meat eating ancestors may be wrong.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Which sort of makes sense when you consider our closest relatives are primarily plant eaters.

[tmvphil]

"My predecessors did it" is not moral reasoning.

[micromacrofoot]

Tell them what? that we've grown so fat and stupid on the abundance the earth provides that we can't properly manage it and will probably cause millions undue suffering because we don't want to reduce our meat consumption to less than 250lbs per year despite it being easily possible?