Why I don't Eat other Animals

Quite recently, I decided not to eat meat. I struggled with the decision for a few weeks, having been a fairly enthusiastic carnivore for all of my previous 30 years, before deciding that being a vegetarian, a term I don't like all that much, was the morally correct thing to do.

I want to summarise my thought process when coming to this decision; to outline the dissonance that I was trying to resolve. You see, I didn't want, from a purely selfish point of view, to stop eating meat. I enjoyed eating nearly all types of meat and didn't even think, at the time, that I actually liked many vegetables. The basis of my decision and my objection to eating meat was entirely moral and, although I don't want to be seen as painting myself as courageous, it is the kind of decision that I think people might be tempted to defer indefinitely, as it involved an immediate sacrifice on my part, a change to my everyday life that I was making because I felt I had to, more than I wanted to at the time.

I can't tell you exactly what was the trigger, the thing that made me question my meat-eating and ask myself whether it was 'right'. I can tell you that I have always loved nature and animals and abhorred cruelty to them. I started to mull over the fact that I love the two dog members of our family as much as could be imagined, but that I would happily tuck in to a roasted piece of animal at the weekend, an animal that shared at least some characteristics with our 'pets' and probably a similar level of sentience; an animal that almost certainly experiences physical pain in a very similar way to us and whose instinct would ensure that it would fight to the very end in order to cling on to its life.

During the couple of weeks after first considering this, I avoided meat products and thought things through. I wanted to make sure that this was the right thing to do and was something that I thought was unavoidable, such was the difference I felt it would make to my everyday life. I began by tackling what I thought were all the common pro-meat arguments, the arguments I had all too easily assumed reasonable if the topic of vegetarianism came up previous to my serious consideration of my position, some of which, I am now ashamed to say, I have probably even uttered in my defence. Although I feel differently now, at the time I think part of me was hoping that I would find an argument reasonable enough to allow me to continue eating meat, but, as you will see, that proved harder than I thought.

Argument number 1: We are Designed to Eat Meat. This sounds quite attractive at first. Humans have been designed to eat meat with sharp incisor teeth for cutting, a digestion that will cope with flesh and so on. Of course, we have already discussed the illusion of design in other posts. Assuming you accept Evolution by Natural Selection as the 'designer', rather than a supernatural creator (and you should), the argument must be stated quite differently: we haven't been designed to eat meat, but our bodies have become adapted to eating meat since it has proved a successful strategy for our ancestors to be carnivorous. In other words, those ancestors of ours that ate meat were at a competitive advantage and it was their genes that became disproportionately represented in the gene pool, hence adaptations such as sharp teeth.

Darwinian Selection has nothing to say on morals. It tells us only what was successful previously and has no preference about 'right' and 'wrong'; it simply selects what works. It may have been a successful strategy for example, earlier on in our ancestry, for men to pounce on women and force them to copulate. It is not hard to imagine, since it was only from the beginning of the nineteenth century that women's rights movements began to argue that it was possible for a man to rape his wife. This was seen as legally impossible at the time, such were a man's conjugal rights. With abortion being a relatively recent process, it seems hard to imagine that there wasn't a time where this would have happened as I imagine it would have been a successful strategy, although something we would obviously now condemn.

So, because we have done something in the past, because our bodies have become adapted to allow us to eat meat, has no contribution to the argument of whether we should eat meat.

Argument number 2: Other Animals Eat Meat, Why Shouldn't We? I consider this argument less appealing than the one we have just discussed. It is true, lots of animals are carnivorous and seek their nutrition through the killing and devouring of other animals. We are part of a food chain and we have the physical tools that allow us to eat meat. But, and this is a big but, we set different moral standards for ourselves than we do other animals. It might be said that humans have a higher level of sentience than other animals, even than other higher mammals such as apes. Maybe we have a higher developed consciousness and sense of self. We could discuss these things at some length, but it's the consequence of this line of reasoning that I wish to use as my point. When a dog bites another dog, we don't charge it with assault. We don't put non-human animals to trial. We don't expect other animals to behave as we do.

The human animal is capable of a range of faculty not open to other animals, whether this makes us special or not is another argument, I would however argue that it places on us an altogether higher level of responsibility and accountability. If we can contrive such things as morals, principles, laws and so on, then it is our duty to follow them.

So, while I may not relish the fact that a lion is at this moment squeezing the neck of an antelope so as to crush it's windpipe, before tearing it's flesh to pieces, I wouldn't subject the lion to the same moral standards as I would myself. For the lion, this way of life is essential to its survival, for me it is not.

Argument number 3: We Must Eat Meat in order to be Healthy. I'm not even sure how wide spread this myth is anymore, but it is something that was suggested to me when I revealed my decision to some people. Meat is convenient in that it contains a full range of amino acids and may be considered a complete protein. Certain vegetables that are high in protein will be deficient as far as a couple of these amino acids are concerned and therefore might not be considered as complete a protein. All that it is necessary for the non-meat eater to do, is combine certain complementary food groups, so that by overlapping certain food items throughout the course of a day, the full range of amino acids are ingested. This is all that is required.

Argument number 4: Why Should We Care about Animals? Some people don't share my opinion and, although I wish that they did, I have to accept that not everybody feels the same towards non-human (or even human) animals as I do. I have a simple way of looking at this that might not be persuasive to everybody, but it helps me put things into context. Consider which animals you may be prepared to eat. Most people wouldn't be happy to eat another human, although, of course, there are exceptions in some parts of the world. However, the consensus in the 'civilised' world seems to be that cannibalism is taboo. Would you eat an ape? An animal that shares 99. whatever % of our genome. Apes have been seen to display a range of emotions, including bereavement emotions of yearning and mourning. They experience pain in a very similar way to us. You soon realise, as you go through any list of animals, all of which are related to every other animal on the planet including us, that there is a continuum of sentience. I'm not going to try and argue that eating a pig is like eating a human family member, but it is possible to draw a line of relation from you to that pig, although the line would be much longer and would take a less linear path than would the line to a human family member.

The arbitrary lines we draw, which are often cultural, between our love of domestic animals such as dogs, and our factory farming and mass slaughter of other animals of similar intelligence, such as pigs, seems to reveal a hypocritical, non-thinking and non-caring attitude towards non-human animals on the whole.

As a 'higher' mammal, I feel a level of relatedness to other animals and I feel my position is a privileged one. I have no natural predators (although humans do a good enough job of predating each other) and I can choose how I act towards other animals with no other immediate consequences, in the main, than the effect on my conscience. I do feel a sense of duty to all fellow animals.

Another thought exercise worth considering is this: imagine if a super intelligent alien life form, one that considered us just a stupid animal and entirely separate from them, came to earth. Imagine that we were the equivalent of a pig or a sheep to this uber-intelligent life form. What if they decided that they would eat us? What if we were in the position of the pig, unable to communicate with the aliens, but just as able to feel pain, fear and a sense of self-preservation? Well, our fate would be the same as the pig, we could only hope that the aliens would feel a moral obligation towards us and would not be happy simply to farm us for food and produce.

There are of course many arguments one can consider, but these are the major ones that spring to my mind. When deciding exactly what I felt that I could eat, my main considerations were a life form's ability to feel pain and level of self-awareness. I have decided that I will not eat fish, which I know is something that some vegetarians are happy to do. I’m not sure why, probably they reason that fish are the equivalent of swimming vegetables, with small brains and little or no ability to feel pain.

So, getting to the point of my stance and why I have taken it. I resolved that because I am able to satisfy my nutrition and my hunger without eating meat, then the only reasons that I would continue to eat meat are due to matters of convenience or palate. I decided that these were not good enough reasons to eat other animals. My vegetarianism is emphatically about choice; because I live at a time and in a place where I have a choice of whether I eat meat, and because I will suffer no ill effects that may be considered serious in not eating meat, morally, this leaves me with little choice!

There are some differences between my position and what may be considered the ‘mainstream’ position. For example, if animals lived free lives and died natural deaths, I would have no quarrel with then eating them. Of course, this would not satisfy the demand of the human consumer and the meat would be old and probably not considered good. Likewise, if, or maybe when would be putting it better, scientists are able to culture animal meat in the lab, meat with no sentience or mind attached to it, I would have no objection to eating it.

I don’t want to be an evangelist in my vegetarianism, but I did want to put my thoughts down in writing and see how reasonable my position sounded. I can’t honestly say that I would be disappointed if this piece prompted others to consider theirs.

Pascal's Wager

In some of my previous posts, I have briefly considered a couple of the more common religious arguments. I have focused on the argument from design, which is countered by the theory of evolution and I have also considered the argument from morality, which is juxtaposed with the problem of evil. We have also seen that morality can be explained without reference to the supernatural.

Evolution and the problem of evil are what I consider to be the strongest objections to all of the brands of religion that I have encountered. These are the two most powerful motivations for my atheism and the latter accounts for some of the passion you may perceive in the exposition of my arguments challenging religion. It is fair to say that I would have less argument with the deist, but at best I consider his god superfluous.

There are other arguments that we can consider. One that you may or may not be familiar with is known as 'Pascal's Wager'. I will briefly outline it.

Blaise Pascal was a mathematician who created the following wager- if you believe in god, that which you stand to gain if you are correct is enormous in relation to that which you have to lose if you are wrong, which is nothing. Pascal argued that if you live your life as an unbeliever and are correct, then death is final and after it you will cease to exist in any form, therefore you will have lost nothing. However if you are incorrect, you will be risking entry to heaven and an eternal life, things available only to the pious. Worse still, you may even be headed for somewhere such as purgatory or hell. Whereas, if you live your life as a believer and are incorrect you will die and your death will be final, you will know nothing and you will have lost nothing, just as the un-believer. However, and this is the lynch-pin of the proposition, if you live your life as a believer and are correct, you stand to gain far greater than you lose, for you may go to heaven and live eternally.

I suspect that Pascal’s wager wasn’t put forward as a serious proposition for being religious, but I do not know. I do know that it is cited as a common argument for belief in god.

The proposition does have a mathematical feel about it. It is an argument based on probability and the benefit to loss ratio involved in living your life as a believer and it does, for a moment, draw you to feel that the wager represents perfect logic. However after a little consideration, you will discover some problems with the wager.

Firstly, despite the delights available to the believer upon death, I find it hard to believe that one could grasp religious faith by the horns solely on this basis. Could one truly believe only in an effort to acquire the benefits of being a believer? You may start going to church, singing hymns and you may even start praying, however this does not mean that you will acquire a sincere belief in god. The wager itself does not provide any further evidence in favour of god existing, but merely proposes that the gain associated with being a believer far outweighs the loss. Could you believe on this basis only, especially if you already had doubts about the existence of god previous to ‘hedging your bets’ as suggested in the wager? I think that the best that may be mustered is a kind of lip-service belief offered only in an effort to secure a life after death.

Now, surely any god who has the properties as those that are suggested in many a holy book, such as omniscience, would be able to see the moral treachery committed by the ‘believer’. Surely god would tell instantly that the individual did not truly believe, but had acted only in a sycophantic kind of hedge betting so as to secure their own gain.

Also, the proposition does require that a believer also wagers heavily on the premise that any god who may exist places a high value on the belief of his flock. It assumes that the gates of heaven will be open to individuals who have managed to live their lives as believers. If a god did exist, he, she or it may place higher value on qualities such as sound reasoning, intellectual honesty and respect of evidence. Surely this god would praise the atheist for using the grey matter with which they had endowed them and reward their effort to make sense of the world around them to the best of their ability. Maybe it is people with these qualities who would be allowed entry into heaven, not those equipped with devout faith or those paying lip service in the form of worship to a god in whom they don’t really believe.

I do not find the wager very persuasive and recognise that many believers do not base their faith on this kind of cost / benefit premise, although I am sure that there are some who do. This argument is simply a proposition and an attempt to make belief a logical position. It adds nothing in terms of evidence and it soon becomes clear to us that human thoughts and feelings, and indeed belief, cannot be dealt with exactly as you would numbers in a sum or calculation.