By this logic, I take it you also support cannibalism?
I’ve entered into a truce with other people – but sharks don’t seem interested in a truce, and deer keep dying upon leaping in front of my car.
Plants eat bugs. UNLEASH THE DOGS OF WAR!!!
What about the massive imbalance in species that would occur if all humans suddenly stopped eating meat? Every time a natural predator dies off, is driven off, or is killed off, all the animals below it in the food chain experience a population boom, followed by privation in the form of insufficient food resources and eventually death by starvation.
You could say we have an obligation, as top tier predators, to continue to eat meat in order to avoid the misery of death by starvation by thousands upon thousands of animals.
I catch fish by dangling meat in front of them – which I guess means I spare the vegetarians, and only devour the ones who are cool with meat getting eaten.
The fact that you had to add ‘today’ to the title.
I think the simplest argument is that, as eating meat is natural, in that humans evolved into what we are, not only while eating meat, but quite possibly in part BECAUSE we eat meat. I don’t even see eating meat as an ethical question; it’s neither good or bad, it simply is what we do. That said, there ARE ethical issues around the eating of meat that should be addressed.
Animal suffering is often the biggest one, and I absolutely agree that it needs to be addressed. I want the animals that I eat to not be in inhumane and filthy conditions. I’ve seen those documentaries of chickens kept in cages without even enough room to stand up, drenched in their own feces. That’s AWFUL and it needs to stop. But not eating meat isn’t the solution to that; not eating meat raised in such ways is just as effective.
Death is part of life. As others said, we’re fooling ourselves if we think that life doesn’t die as part of eating plants. Even putting aside the life of the plant itself, as mentioned upthread, creatures die as part of farming. They die when we till the soil and when we harvest. They also die when we make the fields in the first place or as part of our use of local resources or reducing biodiversity. Unless it’s life that can either get it’s energy from the sun through photosynthesis or from volcanic rifts in the ocean or something similar, all other life consumes other life to exist. There’s no shame in this, it’s not unethical, it’s just the way it is. What IS unethical is the idea that somehow the life of a pig or a cow or a chicken is somehow more meaningful than the critters and other life affected by our agriculture as a whole. We FEEL their suffering because we’re directly causing it, but we’re indirectly responsible for so much suffering we can’t even imagine it.
Use of resources. As also mentioned upthread, in some ways eating meat is a better use of resources than just eating plants. Yes, it takes a lot more water, resources, and energy in total to create the same amount of calories of meat as it does in plants, but that’s not the whole story. Some areas are terrible for growing plants but fine for grazing. With modern agriculture particularly, there’s so much waste that would just be left to decompose that can be fed to livestock. Yes, we do use plenty of land that could be used for crops for livestock and we even end up growing plenty of crops just to feed livestock, but it’s still overstated. We could, and probably should, reduce how much meat we eat, but it’s possible and reasonable to produce meat with far less waste than is implied or that we do now.
Health. As also mentioned, veganism isn’t inherently more healthy than eating meat. In fact, without meat it is extremely difficult to get all the necessary micro-nutrients to stay healthy. Some vegans are able to pull this off, many (maybe even most) are not. Yes, one can use supplements, but there’s costs in there related to wear those micro-nutrients come from and the difficulty and expense of extracting and preparing them.
Domestication. This is one I didn’t see mentioned upthread, but it’s a massive implication most vegans really consider. When one really thinks about it, we’ve domesticated tons of animals (and plants) and changed their genes in such ways that they would have a difficult or impossible time surviving out of human care. Or, worse, they might have the opposite problem of becoming invasive species if we ever just stopped eating them and let them go in the wild. There’s implications on not only essentially letting creatures go extinct that we created but on what might happen as a result if we did. If we all stopped eating meat tomorrow, we’d literally be signing the death warrant of billions of livestock and countless other creatures connected to all of that.
Sure, maybe one day we can make “ethical” meat, or something similar, grown in a lab that is free of suffering, but we’re at least decades away from that being a possibility, and it still has some ethical issues involved, like whether or not it’s a good use of resources, which currently it’s FAR FAR from being worth the investment, and even if that’s solved, there’s still the ethical issues about what to do with all these domesticated species. So, in the meantime, I see absolutely no issue at all with eating meat, and just putting in the effort to do it as humanely as possible. Beyond that, the onus is really on vegans to explain why it’s not ethical and I haven’t really seen anything that isn’t refuted either by one of the points I mentioned or other ones mentioned upthread.
But a man’s diet should always include enough pussy.
In all seriousness, it’s silly to apply ethics to something that doesn’t have an inherent ethical system or mode of thought. Chickens, for instance, will kill other chickens for various reasons. Hell, some hens or roosters will even eat each other. These animals don’t have anything close to an ethical ethos, let alone self-awareness.
I believe in treating life humanely, but applying “ethics” to any animal that couldn’t even conceive of such a thing by nature alone is silly.
In short… Fried chicken is fucking good.
“I believe in treating life humanely” is an ethic.
For that matter, one can have ethics about proper relations and treatment toward non-living things, too. It’s not (necessarily, anyway) about their capacity for thought–it’s about ours.
It’s deeper than just “cows in the wild” starving. If we all went meatless, farmers wouldn’t turn the cattle out to make it on their own. Wandering cattle would head straight to the place with all the cow food! That place is farmer’s fields, where loose cattle would destroy crop yields.
“Freed” cattle, no longer a crop in themselves, would be great big, very hungry pests. They’d be shot, not released.
If he’s a vagitarian, that is.
The entire existence of life depends on a food chain, in which some species eat another species lower down the food chain. If you consider that to be unethical, it just proves that your ethics are at odds with the natural order of things, and your ethics are going to lose.
Is the Venus Flytrap an “unethical plant”?
Ethically speaking, exactly what is on the table (no pun intended) to be regarded as food for human beings? By what criteria do you demarcate the line between that which humans can ethically eat and not. How are you on killing low-order animals that would otherwise eat the entire vegetable food crop before it is even harvested for human consumption? Just play Barry Manilow songs in the fields so the ravaging pests will run away? Wouldn’t that also be cruelty? Where would they go and what would they eat?
Which is an ethic of my own (and I assume many around the globe). It’s a human construct. I don’t want to be cruel or inflict pain on anything that has the capacity to feel it. And as you say, the capacity for thought to the degree of having ethics is by and large a human condition. Animals, besides us, have not shown a capacity for complex morals and ethics and will kill and eat what they need or want, whether in defense or because they’re hungry.
As a human animal, why should we be any different? I can apply my ethic of being humane to my nature of accepting I’m an omnivore by mitigating any suffering an animal may undergo while killing it for some pork. Using that logic, I’m far more ethical than any animal I choose to kill and eat.
Yet, in practice, I just go to the supermarket and by a pack of bacon.
G0sp3l. Proudly vagitarian since 1985!
Terrific thread !
So many very, very good points have been made.
I will be going crappie fishing on Monday and will have a whole host of ethical dilemmas in front of me regarding my harvest. {If I should be so lucky as to catch fish}
Some of these dilemmas include:
-Should I impale a small minnow on a hook to catch a larger fish {crappie} ?
-Will the extraction of crappie from the water terrorize them ?
-Will the threading of a nite crawler exactly nose first on my spinner rig, which will then be attached to a bottom bouncer and thrown overboard, be cruel to the worm? But dang, those walleye sure like a nite crawler trolled at .8 to 1.5mph…
In fact, I won’t give it a minute’s thought. If that makes me bad/evil or whatever some people may think, I o.k. with their opinion.
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While I actually agree with this, I just wanted to put forward the pedantic nitpick that we could be good caretakers of the environment by killing the over-population in prey herds…and just leaving the carcases for the environment to reduce naturally. We don’t have to eat them in order to practice good herd-management. We could just kill 'em from helicopters (there’s precedent) in order to balance the sustainable populations.
Kinda wasteful, but it would prevent the worst naturally caused die-offs due to predator/prey imbalance.
As for the real question…I guess that “ethical” is a judgement made by a consensus of society and culture. If enough people come to believe that eating meat is unethical, then it will be unethical. We’re in the midst of a big change in the way chickens are raised for eggs and meat: what once was “okay” is now unacceptable.
Speaking of which … (not quite NSFW, but definitely not for the feint of heart)
I watched the Racing Extinction documentary aired by the Discovery channel last November, and learned this: If every American skipped meat and cheese for just one day a week, it would be the equivalent of taking 7.6 million cars off the road.
One day a week? I can do that. I wish everyone would do that. One day a week.
Why do I consider it ethical to continue eating meat?
If you watch this short video, you’ll learn that there are some species of corn and cotton plants that when preyed upon by caterpillars, emit a pheromone that draws parasitic wasps in to kill the caterpillars. Plants don’t want to be eaten either! Moreover, the plant does not have to be damaged. They will emit this pheromone when played a recording of the sound of caterpillars eating leaves! So they are “hearing” this, and “thinking” in terms of self defense. They will NOT be led like lambs to the slaughter. 
Some points from the documentary:
They have been able to prove that plants can learn. An example: the Mimosa pudica, or Sensitive plant, will close if touched. So they dropped one from a height of 15cm, and it closed. After being dropped 4-5 times, it quit closing. It would still close if shaken or touched, but it “learned,” and “remembered” that falling would not hurt it - for weeks after.
More startling, though, is what the acacia tree did to the kudu. One or two kudu was not a problem. But the herds? During a drought, the livestock kudu preyed heavily on the acacia. And died. In large numbers. The acacia had started producing large enough amounts of tannins to kill the kudu. Upon further studies, they learned that the affected acacia were also putting out large amounts of ethylene gases, which in turned caused all the acacia trees downwind to produce large amounts of tannin, whether they were being eaten or not.
A direct quote from the documentary: plants can, “Learn from the past, plan for the future, and work together for the benefit of the species.” So there are no Judas sheep in the plant world.
They are still doing studies, and the documentary is only 2 years old. I tend to be a bit skeptical, and that is the reason for some of my quotation marks. Some of it might be woo. On the other hand, no one believed Galileo, either.
My thought is, if nothing wants to be eaten, then I might as well share out some of that to the animal kingdom. Because steak is delicious, and fried chicken is fucking good!! 
This is hilarious. Gave me my first good laugh of the day, and I thank you.
Last Glacial Maximum, I am going crappie fishing tomorrow!! I absolve myself of all guilt in this matter, based on The Other Waldo Pepper’s post.
Forget about humans a second. Are you aware that MANY “vegetarian” animal species regularly eat meat when given the chance?
Deer and rabbits, for instance, mostly eat plants but will happily eat carrion and small animals who wander too close to them.