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Pain is not a necessary component of the animal being eaten (unless it's being hunted down in the wild, of course, but most animals that are consumed by humans aren't), so if that is the problem it can be (and, as far as I know, is being) dealt with without reinventing the whole lifecycle in the lab.


Apart from pain, I would not like to die, and thus I would not kill anything that also does not want to die.


Two questions:

1) No species on earth "wants" to die. Every living organism has defence systems that it will try to prevent/repair any damage made to it.

Even more, (some) plants communicate and use signaling system to warn their neighbours about threats. Clearly, any species try to avoid death

How do you define "does not want to die"? 2) What about carnivorus species? Do they "allowed" to eat meat? If they are allowed, why humans can't? And more specifically, why you can't?


1) I'd say "being sentient" is a good definition for that. What exactly is sentient is left open to interpretation a bit, but I know big animals are, and I know plants aren't.

2) Eating meat is immoral, animals can't reason about morality, therefore they do whatever they do. Morality is the domain of beings intelligent enough to think about it. I consider killing animals immoral. That said, I do eat meat, because it's so tasty, in full conscience that I am immoral.


If you are so inclined, you could try being a weekday vegetarian - http://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html. For me, the two hardest things, when finally quitting eating meat a year ago, were convincing everybody around me that was serious about it, and finding alternative foods. I still occasionally eat fish. I try to justify it to myself as fish being of lesser intelligence and sentience.


That would have been much easier if I liked fish, plants, etc :/ I'm a pretty fussy eater, sadly.




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