Morality of eating Meat
I have to admit, the vegans are right! That is in the sense that we modern day meat eaters are more barbaric than our hunter gatherer predecessors thousands of years ago. The argument is, in our hunter gatherer days homo sapiens had to search for our food in order to survive. Anthropologists have found that many ancient humans diets consisted of about 60% fruits, nuts, seeds, tubers, fungi and 40% meat, seafood, bugs… obviously these numbers change depending on where you lived, for example folks living along the coast may have had more like a 90% seafood diet. We have evolved at opportunistic eaters, if a herd of elk passed through our hunting grounds we would kill some and feast, also we would dry meat for the less bountiful seasons, make valuable tools with the bones, leather for clothing and shelters, bladders for transporting water. At this time we understood that we were a part of nature, we survived the same way that other creatures survived but we were smarter, we planned ahead we made traps and tools, we had fire and we were aware of our impact on nature, learning ways to save seeds and encourage desirable plants and animals to grow and reproduce.
Today we live in a world of abundance! Modern day agriculture, manufacturing, transportation and technology provide us with endless food options at our fingertips every single day. Our survival skills as a species are no longer needed for the vast majority of the population, farmers growing all the food in the United States make up 1% of the nations population with a trend of that number becoming even smaller. But our brains have not evolved as quickly as our technology! We still have a strong primal instinct to feast when the opportunity arrives. This primal instinct is what guides us into the McDonalds drive though on the way home from work, to have bacon with every single breakfast, to order the Supreme pizza, because deep down we know (rather our brain thinks it knows) that our survival depends on eating what we can when we can. The food industries have grown very rich and become very consolidated and powerful as a result of our modern day gluttony, taking full advantage of what our primal selves desire most, sugars, fats, salts, meat. Highly processed, salty, fatty foods and cheap meats are abundant! The industries have found ways to produce these foods by mechanizing everything possible, by centralizing everything possible, by using modern chemicals and drugs to cut corners whenever possible. For cheap meat this means cramming animals indoors and into feedlots, reducing and eliminating the need for actual farmland to raise them on. These animals are pumped full of feeds and medications designed to make them grow fast because time is money and money is king! These mega companies are able to cut prices lower and lower as they scale because who cares if you only make a dollar profit from a chicken, if you raise a 100 million chickens a year you make a 100 million bucks profit!! A farmer raising what their land base can sustainably hold could never compete with the industrial model, not even close, so they go out of business and join the masses, the other 99%. We all know about or at least have heard about this dystopian reality of industrial animal production yet we choose not to think about it. Our primal desires overpower our intelligent logical minds and our moral compass get confused. We might watch a video of some horrible CAFO facility lifting an animal up with a forklift and think aww those poor animals, that’s just terrible! But damn I sure do love my cheeseburgers and chicken nuggets!
If we were to lift the curtain between the 1% producing the food and the 99% eating it and we all just looked around and saw the real truth I mean really saw it for what it is, our gluttony, our horrific mistreatment of animals, the total destruction of nature and loss of biodiversity in the name of profits, not to mention the way we treat each other and the violence that ravages the globe, how could we deny that we are barbarians? In fact when comparing our modern world to that of the hunter gatherer times we are far more barbaric then we were thousands of years ago. AND WHY? We now have the knowledge and resources to survive without eating meat, we know the consequences of war, we know better and we have the tools to live better but we DON’T!! This is a large part of the vegan argument and I agree with it! Another large part is about our human Morality. That it is our human duty to treat animals with kindness and not to kill them. This is where things get really complicated and where my personal beliefs veer off in a different direction from the vegan beliefs… Treat animals and all living things with kindness YES 100%!!! That means NO MORE CAFO. NO MORE VIOLENCE AGAINST EACH OTHER, NO MORE POISONING OUR SOILS, OUR INSECTS AND OUR PLANTS WITH CHEMICALS AT THE EXPENSE OF OUR ENTIRE ECOSYSSTEM! These things can stop, they must stop! But no more killing of animals? The reality is that meat is a huge part of our diet, probably too much meat, yes, we need to cut back on our consumption per person as our population has grown so numerous, but does anybody truly believe that we as a species will overcome our primal urge and cutout meat completely? And even if that were to happen, say through governmental restrictions and a further strangle hold on food production by the few powerful corporations (food corporations love the idea of eliminating the risk and hassle of raising animals if they could just grow stuff in a lab then hell yea $$$), do we have a good understanding of how the resulting loss of farm animals would impact our planet and ecosystem? No doubt, our planet has been shaped by ruminants and other large herds and flocks of animals for millennia, we have since wiped out those wild animals and destroyed their habitat (their will never be herds of hundreds of thousands of bison roaming from coast to coast for example). I for one cannot imagine what the world would be like, and its not even possible for there to be a scientific study with so vast a hypothesis and scope as to predict the global impact that eliminating the planets livestock would have. People say, oh all that pasture and corn land will just go back to nature and become wildlife habitat, I say bullshit, look around you, land is getting swallowed up by development and industry at a more rapid rate than ever before! Also when considering morality we must consider ALL living beings. This includes HUMAN BEINGS, animals, fish, plants and the welfare of all things! The human side is we NEED FARMERS TO GROW FOOD. To farm on a small scale in harmony with nature requires diversity. On our farm we grow lots of crops such as vegetables and grains fruits and mushrooms, honey, and a wide range of animals products like meat and eggs. But our main income that supports the livelihood of everyone on the farm and enables us to protect and heal the land rather than sell to development comes from our egg production. Without livestock our farm simply would not be profitable therefore would no longer exist. There is another STRONG ARGUMENT that agriculture cannot be sustainable without the fertility from livestock manure. The entire industrial food system is held up on a foundation of petroleum based synthetic fertilizers that are the root cause of so many of our ecological problems, take away livestock and our reliance on these synthetic fertilizers would skyrocket. Another observation that I have made on our farm is that the livestock are not only the source of our income but they help us to manage the land in a way that enhances biodiversity and soil health. There is exiting new science to back up this observation, check out https://rootssodeep.org/ to read their peer reviewed research on this topic. We in the developed world also often forget about the rest of the population in more impoverished countries that still do grow much of the food they need in their back yards, these homestead scaled operations would be devasted without their livestock. Livestock are a very efficient way to produce high value protein and fertility on a small scale. The complex issue of morality asks this question: should we stop eating animals at the expense of small scale agriculture, wildlife biodiversity and the overall health of our ecosystem? Or can we moderate our consumption of animal products (and our overconsumption of material things that we don’t really need) and produce it in a responsible and respectful way where the animals live a stress free, healthy and enjoyable life?
People will continue to eat animal products, period. That is out of our control for better or for worse. What is in our control is how we raise our animals and how we honor them, acknowledging that the life and the death of all living things are all intertwined and have always been since the beginning. Do not be fooled by scientists in fancy laboratories…all life is part of a complex ecosystem, we are a part of the food web, we are not above it, we are part of it. Humans are the greatest predator this world has ever seen, we have wiped out entire species off the face of the planet in a short amount of time, however we are also intelligent and we can fix the problems that we have created, we now can communicate with each other instantly from anywhere, speeding up the process of coming up with solutions and implementing them. We need leaders who understand holistic sustainable agriculture to take back power from the industry leaders who have been profiting from our gluttony at the expense of animals and our entire ecosystem!
We know the way forward, we have developed the methods of farming and producing food in harmony with nature, using the same deep understanding that we humans have always had from our hunter gatherer days. These methods give back to the land more than we take. They incorporate animals and plants into a system that promotes biodiversity, keeps our waters and air clean while providing a nourishing balanced diet for humans. This way of farming acknowledges that we are a part of the same cycle of life that all other living things are a part of. That cycle never ends, it involves birth, growth and death and decomposition. All things must die, including us. We have grown to fear death in our modern world and I believe that is a result of our total disconnect from nature. Our ancestors understood the cycle of life and often would celebrate death acknowledging that it was another step taken in a natural cycle. We lost this connection as we have become more and more reliant on the 1% of the population to take care of our needs rather than participating in our own ecosystem in a productive way like we used to. We know the way forward, yet most of us hide behind the curtain. It is easier to hide than to face our problems and instigate positive change. I believe it is possible but we still are few who are working to raise the curtain and they are many who cling to the curtain protecting the status quo. We must speak up and speak out. We must lead by example and prove that it can be done. WE must work together and stick together because this kind of work cannot be done alone.