Is Eating Meat Morally Correct?

FuChelle · May 1, 2005

I don't see anything wrong with eating meat. People have been doing it for thousands of years...it's normal for us. Our bodies need meat to get different proteins from it in order to survive and be healthy. Even if you decide to become a vegetarian and not eat meat, you still have to get the protein from somewhere.I don't like the way a lot of the animals we eat are treated though, for example, chickens. For that reason, I choose not to eat chicken (plus I don't like the taste - yuck!). All the things they do to those chickens, and put in their bodies to make them grow faster is not only bad for te chicken, but bad for us too. What's been given/fed to the chicken while it was alive doesn't just disappear once it dies, it stays in the body and when the chicken is eaten...whoever eats the chicken gets all those hormones that have been injected into it too, which can't be very healthy.I think we should put the animals before the meat. I think eating an animal that has had a long and happy life is fine...it was going to die eventually anyway. Keeping animals locked up in tiny cages that they can hardly move in, and giving them growth hormones just for the sake of being able to eat them sooner is wrong. What kind of a life is that, being locked up in a cage your whole life with no natural light, and just being made to eat? I don't know about anyone else but that sounds very dull and boring to me. It'd be awful if you were clustraphobic...I think eating plants is fine too. People have been doing that for forever. Maybe they do feel pain...who knows? They do kind of "bleed" in a way so maybe? If we're not gonna eat plants though then what are we gonna eat? You can't live on just meat. You need both plants and meat to be healthy. Plus if we don't eat plants, and don't exercise, we'll all put on a heap of weight because we won't be getting any of these "negative calorie" foods.

raaeft1 · May 2, 2005

In my personal opinion, there is nothing morally wrong in eating non-vegetarian food.From my reading of the scriptures, (Indian as well as The Bible) there is no prohibition whatsoever on eating such food. However,I may refrain from eating meat purely on health grounds as read meat has lots of cholesterol

me_boxer_dude · October 25, 2006

Eating meat may be wrong on Moral grounds but has been a key point in our survival through centuries. The animals should be treated more humanely and shouldnt be tortured. Many of the diseases people get from eating meat is just because of the filthy living conditions of the meat animals and the stress they experience when they are in slaughterhouses(prior to them being killed. If we treat animals a bit more humanely and make the slaughter techniques better(painless is the key word it would also help us indirectly as the meat would be healthier.

randomdood · October 25, 2006

well i know that where i live it isn't done that way, not with the free-range stuff anyway. but i see your point i guess how you put it it is quite bad how they do it, they should make the death quick and painless but meat is very good for you and we need our protein so it's not like we should stop eating meat. it's like if houses were threatening one species of animal are we going to stop building houses and live in tents????

jhsmurray · October 25, 2006

... Some people say (my classmate, for example) that eating fruits that grow on plants is OK because that doesnt hurt the plant... WRONG! Try eating an apple, and when you are finished with it, dump it in the trash bin and think about what have you just done! ...

I have read (from Jared Diamond) that fruit is an adaptation that which helps propagate the plant.
Considering that fruit is highly colorful, often sweet, and always has seeds (with a tough shell), its not hard to imagine the following scenario:
An animal passes by, sees the enticing fruit, eats the fruit (seeds and all), moves along, later passes the seeds on in excrement to an entirely different location. This would be a beneficial adaptation to the plant.
Your point is that we just throw away the seeds, which effectively nullifies this adaptation, so I can see your point there. But losing the fruit at all was a biological "write-off" to the parent plant to begin with. Indirectly, this adaptation helped the type of plant immensely if it was brought into agriculture.

I agree with me_boxer_dude about how important eating meat was in our history. Eating meat was the method by which biologically modern man spread from Africa to other parts of the world. It's part of our success story. Man's ability to take advantage of a huge diversity of food sources got us to the point where we could start agriculture and domestication. (By the way, some say that the invention of agriculture was the downfall of society - seeing as how it enabled cramped living conditions and helped diseases to be more effective) Chimps are omnivorous as well, but since they don't have the skill to get alot of nutrition in one sitting, they spend pretty much their entire day eating what's available nearby just to try to get the nutrition they need. Humans have set themselves up so that all you need to do is three squares a day (vegetarian or not), and then it's off to other business.

I have a friend who has been a vegetarian for years. The reason he is a vegetarian is because he is disgusted by the way animals are treated in slaughterhouses. While I am not a vegetarian myself, I can respect his decision. I just don't feel as strongly about it. But I also have a vegetarian neice who is six years old. I am concerned because the nutritional requirements for a growing child is different - yes it is healthy to be a vegetarian in many ways, but IMO there are circumstances in which you also have to be more careful.

HMN · October 25, 2006

I don't see anything wrong with eating meat. People have been doing it for thousands of years...it's normal for us. Our bodies need meat to get different proteins from it in order to survive and be healthy. Even if you decide to become a vegetarian and not eat meat, you still have to get the protein from somewhere.
I don't like the way a lot of the animals we eat are treated though, for example, chickens. For that reason, I choose not to eat chicken (plus I don't like the taste - yuck!). All the things they do to those chickens, and put in their bodies to make them grow faster is not only bad for te chicken, but bad for us too. What's been given/fed to the chicken while it was alive doesn't just disappear once it dies, it stays in the body and when the chicken is eaten...whoever eats the chicken gets all those hormones that have been injected into it too, which can't be very healthy.

I think we should put the animals before the meat. I think eating an animal that has had a long and happy life is fine...it was going to die eventually anyway. Keeping animals locked up in tiny cages that they can hardly move in, and giving them growth hormones just for the sake of being able to eat them sooner is wrong. What kind of a life is that, being locked up in a cage your whole life with no natural light, and just being made to eat? I don't know about anyone else but that sounds very dull and boring to me. It'd be awful if you were clustraphobic...

I think eating plants is fine too. People have been doing that for forever. Maybe they do feel pain...who knows? They do kind of "bleed" in a way so maybe? If we're not gonna eat plants though then what are we gonna eat? You can't live on just meat. You need both plants and meat to be healthy. Plus if we don't eat plants, and don't exercise, we'll all put on a heap of weight because we won't be getting any of these "negative calorie" foods.

ok personally i like eating meat. i eat all kinds of it. it taste really good. a human is sopposed to eat plants a meat. if they have one without the other to much then the body does not get all the good nutrition it needs. like if u eat just plants the human body will get skinny and wither away and if u eat only meat then u will get really fat and suffer alot. if u eat both of them then u will be healthy. a human has to have both meat and plants to survive. like i eat rice and beans everyday. but i also eat it wilth meat everyday(mostly chicken lol). so in order to survive eating is not moraly wrong. if u dont eat u die and im pretyy sure no one wants to die. so they will eat. besides that growling in ur stomach think its really annoying lol

Yacoby · October 25, 2006

I really enjoy eating meat, and it is what we have been doing since we evolved into humans, unfortunately, I don't like they way the animals are treated. it does seem however that we are starting to treat animals slightly better, with free range eggs and things like that.If I could chose what I ate, I would be more likely to buy food that wasn't reared in a way that wasn't good for the animal. Like how they raise chickens.

masugidsk8r · March 20, 2007

To me, meat is meant to be eaten. If we don't have it, we would lack the nutrition it provides us. How would you be able to get protein from vegetables, or other nutrition vegetables can't offer. Well I'm sure there are vitamins to help solve the problem but would you really want to be taking pills every day? I know I don't. Basically it's survival of the fittest. Unfortunately, some people kill animals in very inhumane ways.

TripleH13 · April 3, 2007

Eating meat is really just preference. Personally, I fee bad that a little harmless animal had to be killed just for me to eat something, but I do still eat meat. I tried not eating meat for a little while because I saw a video on something bad happening to an animal for meat, but the thing is, enough people wont stop eating meat to actually make a difference. If more people would have been in the same mind state that I was in at that time, we possibly could have made a difference. I think that KFC is just truly HORRIBLE. I refuse to eat any thing from them at all. The things that I've heard they do to the poor chickens is just disgusting and down right NOT necessary. If they're going to continue to make the chicken, they could definetly be a little less cruel to the chickens. I hope something happens with KFC soon because I think that what they're doing is horrible. Also, having Pamela Anderson and other big celebrities promoting for KFC to stop being so cruel to the chickens is also good because when people see celebrities doing things, then they start taking action. So, I really hope this helps. If we're going to eat meat, I think we should at least not be cruel to any of the animals in the making. Don't you all think I'm right?

Liam_CF · December 3, 2007

There is a thread in debates which explains my point of view on the subject.

dcshaw.en · December 4, 2007

I'm aware this thread is getting close to 3 years old, so I'm not going to say anything to the original poster, or anyone on the first several pages.Which is a disappointment, because I wanted to express my disagreement with the way this whole thread has been structured.The title would lead one to believe that the thread is an intelligent inquiry about whether eating meat is ethically appropriate, but instead the original poster did nothing but talk about the grotesquenesses of the actual slaughtering of chickens.So, to that effect, I'm going to give my input on both subjects: eating meat and commercially slaughtered animals.Eating Meat:It's natural. Whether humans were originally herbivores, or whether we evolved into an omnivorous state over time from eating meat is completely irrelevant. The fact that carnivores exist in nature means that eating the meat of another animal is a natural thing. And something done to sustain life. At the same time, back to the possibility that humans have only evolved into omnivores, no matter how we came about to be a meat eating animal, we -are- a meat eating animal. Making it natural for us to do the same.I'm sure we aren't the only creature on the planet whose diet has changed over the course of evolution.DISCLAIMER: The majority of my statements in the above paragraph are only to entertain the Original Poster's (I think it was his) theory that humans may have evolved into Omnivores.Slaughtering Animals:This opinion is much more short and concise. This is how I see it. Whether I agree with the methods used for mass slaughtering animals, it happens. And will continue to happen until society completely weeds out these people. Which will likely happen eventually. People feeling sick about how their food is killed have already caused the emergence of chickens and other animals are being raised free range and out in fields instead of in small cages. Eventually, I imagine all meat will come from naturally raised animals, as society will have put enough pressure on the suppliers to treat the animals in a humane way ("Humane Way" made me crack up a little bit.)That's assuming that the government doesn't cut in somewhere and pass a law against raising animals in small, dark cages to be slaughtered.But as it is, no matter how heartless my opinion may seem, I just don't get that heartsick over thinking about how my food was prepared.Free range, naturally raised or pumped full of chemicals, hung upside down and plucked alive with a slit throat doesn't really matter to me.It's food.The animal has already died by the time it gets into my house. Or even by the time it gets into the store. And if I refuse to eat it at that point, it might just go to waste. Then that chicken died 100% in vain.Surely none of you will actually take my last comment as a serious argument. I'll be thoroughly displeased with anyone who does.

strange-garden · December 4, 2007

Thanks to animal rights groups, issues like that have reduced over the past few years. I believe it's illegal now in Australia and the U.S (and probably Canada, but I'm not too sure).We have an unfair advantage over animals because of our minds and the way our hands are structured. I guess the only way things like that actually stop is if it's discovered and action has taken place due to sincerity...In the animal kingdom, though, that'd be a weakness.Funny how nature works.

bertman · December 5, 2007

When I first read the title I assumed it would be a serious topic, but as I read thru I realized it was more of a personal dilema. If you are sicken by the way that meat is obtained and have decided to live a vegetarian life, fine I can respect that, but hey respect me I have not chosen to do the same. I love meat, I have seen how its obtained, I know its natural to consume meat. Further, someone used quite a saying associating homocide with eating meat. Well, the fact that my desire for a good sorloin steak is not going to drive to kill someone.