The Morality of Animal Consumption

Recently bought up in one of our seminars was the discussion concerning the morality of animal product consumption. More specifically, where the line was to be drawn between what was ethically consistent and what was not. Some believed that only meat from animals was to be avoided while others went as far to argue that not even meat developed in a lab was ethically consistent because of what that meat represented. Personally, I do not believe that meat grown in a lab has any negative ethical consequences. It may promote the eating of meat, but if switching to lab meat prevents the suffering of animals I can only view it as a positive action.

G. Owen Schaefer has a great article covering the benefits of lab meat here. Notably, he highlights the benefits by pointing out that “one tissue sample from a cow can yield enough muscle tissue to make 80,000 quarter-pounders”. While the idea of the ‘ends justifying the means’ may not always be an ethical one, if one tissue sample from a cow can save thousands of other cows from the slaughter then it is ethically consistent as far as I’m concerned.

What I don’t find to be ethically consistent however, is the slaughter of animals for sport (or, at the very least, for only singular components like ivory from a tusk). Although not a vegan myself, the idea of slaughtering animals simply for entertainment is quite a distasteful concept. One of the novels we’re coving in this module is one by H. Rider Haggard called King Solomon’s Mines. Although Haggard doesn’t appear to comment on the moral aspects of hunting for sport, he does nevertheless highlight the shameless brutality of it. For example, the method which they used to immunise the ox in order to make them more suitable for their travelling purposes:

“This is done by cutting a slit in the tail of an ox, and binding in a piece of the diseased lung of an animal which has died of the sickness. The result is that the ox sickens, takes the disease in a mild form, which causes its tail to drop off” (p. 31).

This is all directly related to climate change and the larger environmental crisis we are experiencing in the Anthropocene because of the vast swathes of the environment that have to be cut down to make room for the fields in which the cattle may graze. The meat industry as a whole has and is still making large contributions to polluting the Earth’s atmosphere as well as destroying its environment as it expands. This has greater implications for species that are at risk of going instinct such as the elephants seen in King Solomon’s Mines which are shot and killed for their ivory. In a more recent example of this, Japan are said to begin whaling again this year despite whale populations being bought almost to extinction when the practice was legal.

Not only for the sake of needless cruelty itself but also for the wellbeing and sustainability of the ecosystems that govern our environment, I believe it is imperative that we stand against, if not consuming animals, then at the very least protecting those that are endangered due to human activity.