[dok]

Originally Posted by Gulp

DOK, apparently I didn't make it clear. I'm talking about regular old meat eating. You're talking about fancy meat eating. I'm not talking about the kind of meat eating that relatively few people do, where they buy a cow that grew old on a pasture and was smothered with a pillow while it slept.

My point is that a lot your argument for vegitarianism is very much tied to modern, industrialized agriculture, and the way meat is produced in that system. Your problem is not with meat eating, per se, it is with the way most meats (and plenty of vegetarian products, for that matter) are produced in this any many other countries. This is why I think it's very relevant to the discussion for me to toss out all the public policy measures that I think should be taken in order to encourage sustainable and healthy practices.

I don't think that these sustainability arguments necessarily mean I shouldn't eat meat, either from a "think globally" or an "act locally/personally" perspective.

Originally Posted by Gulp

If you're doing that, that's awesome. It's much more in the acceptable gray area than trying to argue from the point of view of someone who eats fast food a couple times a week and buys the rest of their meat products from Wal-Mart or Kroger.

I usually buy my meat from the Whole Foods around the corner, and when the option is there I get the organic and/or local products. This is better than nothing, but I also freely acknowledge that I do my share of supporting industrialized agriculture. If I had more sustainable options available, I would take advantage of them.

The best steak I've had in months was bought out of a little butcher shop up in the mountains that only buys from locally ranched cattle. But I lack the chest freezer to store mass quantities, and I don't think driving 3 hours each way to buy meat is the most sustainable approach.

I eat very little fast food, but I must admit this has more to do with taste and the way it makes me feel than morality or even health.

Originally Posted by Gulp

I understand your cognitive argument, and that's why I haven't been arguing that animals have the ability to understand their deaths. Animals have the ability to understand fear and pain. If you have two buttons in front of you, and you choose the one that causes fear and pain to an animal just because you can, then that to me is excessive and unnecessary pain. I'd rather push the other button if it's all the same or better.

Any my response is, first, that it's not all the same; the animal only exists if it's raised to be eaten. So, there's at least three choices:

1. Living on a ranch, eating grass/hay and sleeping on grass/hay all of his/her days, and being killed quickly and relatively painlessly without seeing it coming.
2. Spending most of his/her life standing in cow dung, eating corn out of a trough and dealing with digestive issues as a result, getting shot up with antibiotics to avoid infections caused by tight living conditions and fecal matter, and getting killed in a stressful, somewhat painful way.
3. Never living at all.

I think most cows, if they had the capacity to respond, would pick option 1. After all, you get to live the life a cow was meant to live, if only for a time.

(As an aside, if I could only eat one type of meat for the rest of my life, I'd pick ostrich. Fantastic stuff.)