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In one case, the animal is born for the purpose of being eaten. In the other, the animal is wild, and is imprisoned by an unintentional trap. I don't see how

• tsimionescu 7y ago
  Not just born, but raised and cared for, sometimes quite painstakingly (in traditional agriculture).
  • stbtrax 7y ago
    I'm not vegetarian but are you arguing that effort put into raising an animal gives you more of a right to slaughter it?
    • Arnt 7y ago
      That raising an animal for slaughter is permitted. You can't separate those two; the choice doesn't happen between the raising and the slaughter. Farmers don't breed animals and only then consider whether to slaughter them, the choice happens earlier. So the argument is that letting an animal see the light of day on condition that it'll be slaughtered at the right age is a valid thing to do. (Digressing: my own opinion is that it depends on how the animal gets to spend its time on earth. But that's just my opinion, not really relevant to the argument.)
    • gwd 7y ago
      If everyone in the world becomes vegan, what exactly do you think is going to happen to all of those domesticated cows, sheep, and chickens? Are people going to continue raising them as pets in the same quantities, out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not -- they would basically go extinct. I think that on the whole, I think that having a reasonably comfortable and safe life and then being humanely slaughtered for food is better than not existing at all. So while I'm definitely ethically against "industrial" meat production that treats live animals like meat-generating machines, I think that raising animals in reasonable living conditions before killing them to eat is perfectly ethical. (Whether we have the resources to raise them is a different question; I'm resigned to the fact that eventually we'll all be on plant-based diets for planet sustainability reasons.)
      • avar 7y ago
        I'm not vegan, but that's absurd. Right now we spend an inordinate amount of land on the relative monocultures of raising these animals, consuming vegetable matter is generally more efficient when it comes to land use. So we'd have fewer chickens, but we'd have more land left to the wilderness. I don't really care about the interest of 100 chickens somewhere, but purely from a conservation point of view veganism is one of the worthwhile things we can be doing. Those animals are taking up land that we can replace with a more varied ecology. But these species are never going to become extinct, we won't have 100% veganism, and some of them will still be raised even if they're not being eaten. E.g. chickens are very useful for pest control and to dispose of food waste.
        • gwd 7y ago
          > I'm not vegan, but that's absurd. Sorry, I'm having trouble figuring out from your response what it is that you disagree with. The main point of my post is to address the question of whether it's ethical to raise and eat animals at all: whether, all things being equal, a world in which nobody eats cows or sheep or chickens is better than a world in which we eat cows and sheep and chickens, but give them decent living conditions. Obviously other things are not equal, as I alluded to in my final paragraph.
          • avar 7y ago
            How does that make any sense? In the real world we have resource constraints, so positing something like "there won't be any chickens" as a moral loss doesn't make sense, we'll have something else instead since the resources to raise chickens were freed up. If you're throwing resource constraints out the window the question should be why we're not raising 1 billion blue whales for food in addition to of cows. After all they're smarter, and if you're going to follow this logic that these animals ultimately benefit from their numbers being raised as a result of food production that should go for all of them. Having 1 billion city-sized aquariums isn't an issue if we're assuming we have infinite resources. But we don't, in fact that's the entire reason we ended up with these particular species as food animals, they're the most efficient relatively speaking, not necessarily the tastiest.
    • EGreg 7y ago
      Consider the relationship between ants and aphids. Ants care for aphids and they survive because of ants. But ants have also been known to physically tear wings off of aphids to prevent them from flying away! And of course, farming is far different than hunting and fighting, which ants do as well.
    • tsimionescu 7y ago
      To some extent, yes. I'm not saying it should put that over your own moral line, but I definitely think that sacrificing an animal you cared for is more acceptable than hunting a wild animal, for example.
  • PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    Statistically, food animals are far more likely to be raised in hellish factory farms than in the traditional bucolic pasture or chicken run. I don't actually think raising animals for meat is immoral, but causing unnecessary suffering to improve the bottom line is.