Ethics and food choices

Here one poster was horrified by the idea of eating a live animal. I do not wish to criticize that poster IN ANY WAY (I happen to agree with her) but I am getting a bit of a mental disconnect and I decided to open a GD thread to follow it up.

I’m a pescatarian, which means I do eat fish, as well as dairy products and vegetables. My reasons for this diet are extremely mundane and frivolous - I just wanted to see how long I could go without eating meat, and having done so for the better part of a year, I became nervous about the potential for gastric distress (yes, I’m a big wuss) that can happen when meat is reintroduced. At least for the foreseeable future, I plan to stick to this diet. I don’t have ethical issues about meat - I’m not PLEASED to know that meat comes from animals, but it doesn’t really trouble me much, either.

I do not know if the poster in the linked thread eats meat, but I am interested in finding out if there’s a reason that eating a live animal would be considered less ethical than eating one that’s already dead.

Also, if you’re meatless to any degree and don’t mind sharing, please tell me what your limits are - do you wear leather, fur, silk or wool? Is animal testing part of your issue, and is it medical or just cosmetic testing that you object to? How much a part does your personal ethical code (which may include religion or environmental stuff, but I’d like to exclude non-ethical health concerns) play in your dietary/other lifestyle choices?

Simple – once you are dead, being eaten will not cause you any further suffering, whereas if you are eaten while still alive, you will suffer until you are dead.

I won’t go the obvious joke route there (especially since I unwittingly set myself up for it.)

But seriously - from what some of the more ethically-oriented types have mentioned to me when this subject comes up, the slaughter of food animals is not by any means a pretty thing, and I’ve heard that the lives of such animals aren’t all that hot, either. I guess I’m trying to determine if there’s a “well, since it’s already dead, I may as well eat it” thing. If I were the type to get nitpicky ethically, I’m not sure I could justify that. An animal died for my meal - does the fact that I didn’t personally kill it make it less my responsibility?

My personal ethics regarding eating meat are that it’s all right as long as the animal was treated well in life. In practice, that means that I only eat meat at home, where I know (because I bought it and know where it came from) that the chicken/beef/rabbit was raised on a farm, rather than an industrial factory-farm. At restaurants I stick to fish and vegetarian meals.

I admit I am still somewhat inconsistent about this. I haven’t figured out how to check into clothing sources, for instance, so I’ve ignored that issue so far. I drink organic milk, but I don’t know if those cows are pasture-raised or not. And I have simply cheated a few times when tempted and gone for that steak.

As for the ethics of eating live animals, I would use the same yardstick. Did the animal suffer while being raised? Will it suffer while being eaten? Except perhaps for a meal of small animals, like bugs, I can’t imagine a situation in which the second question could be answered “no.”

If you are walking along in the woods, and you happen upon a dead parrot, then it would cause no harm to the ex-parrot if you were to eat it.

If you eat a beefsteak that you purchased from the supermarket, it is because you created a market for it. It was born, grown and slaugtered for you and your friends to eat it, so you are responsible for the conditions in which it lived and how it was slaughtered. That’s why some folks go vegetarian. (BTW, I was a veggie for seven years, during which time I was a vegan for half a year – the problem was that I really don’t like most vegetables. It was for health rather than ethical reasons, however, I also worked in a vegan kitchen where the owner was vegan for ethical reasons.)

Others continue to eat meat, but try to meet their responsibilities to the animals by at least making efforts that ensure their dinners had pleasant lives and humane deaths – that’s where knowing which farm Bessie came from becomes important, for one can be certain of the care the cow received.

Along the same lines, some people, particularly aboriginals in my area, prefer to hunt their own game, and make an offering to the spirit of the Bullwinkle that they kill, out of respect for the animal whose life is being taken so as to provide sustinance for the hunter and the hunter’s family.