The Ethics of Meat Consumption

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There is violence inherent to human survival, for to survive means to kill and consume another organism in order to absorb its energy and keep your heart beating. The necessity of this act is what makes it acceptable in the minds of human beings, for to abstain from eating would be suicide. However, questions regarding the necessity of consumption arise, when humans approach the decision of what to eat, particularly with regard to the decision of whether or not to eat meat. The practice of meat eating is demonstrably unnecessary, as many people have survived on vegan or vegetarian diets for centuries. Furthermore, it has been revealed that meat consumption can have negative repercussions for human health, paradoxically impeding survival, even while its ingestion sustains you in the short-term. The spread of awareness of both the needlessness and the health risks of omnivorism has proliferated of late, nonetheless meat remains a staple in North American diets; “on average, Americans [will] eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime” (Safran-Foer 122). The choices associated with meat consumption become increasingly complicated when individuals consider what psychologist Melanie Joy refers to as the human-animal connection. There exists between animals a form of kinship that is not often found between humans and other organisms; certain more developed connections cause us to favor the eating of some forms of animal flesh over others. This connection has provoked a wealth of scientific research on the cognitive and emotional capacities of nonhumans, which has been used as evidence for the discontinuation of factory farming. Still, there remains a gap in consciousness, where a forgetting occurs, so that we may consume t...

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...B. “Meat and Morality: Alternatives to Factory Farming.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 23.5 (2005): 455-468. ProQuest. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.
Safran-Foer, Jonathan. Eating Animals. New York: Little, Brown and Company (2009). Print.
Sorenson, John. About Canada: Animal Rights. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2010. Print.
“Understanding the Psychology of Meat for Effective Vegan Advocacy.” 1 Jun. 2012. YouTube. Web. 12 Apr. 2014.

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