Eating Animals

Singer and Mason outline several arguments that have been proposed to justify the killing of animals for food. I do not believe that these arguments adequately defend the position that killing animals for our consumption is permissible. Singer and Mason have thoroughly outlined in their book the reasons why eating meat is wasteful and unnecessary. People may be just as healthy, if not more so, and just as well, if not better, nourished, by abstaining from the consumption of animals. If eating meat is unnecessary for human survival or wellbeing, then there is no need to take part in it. Perhaps there exists a farm where a cow lives a happy life. To kill her for food would cut short her life, rob her of her natural life cycle and years of continued happiness, and prevent her from experiencing the full series of life stages. Were this cow allowed a full life, killing her for food would still be wrong. The cow is a sentient teleological center of life, and her being a teleological center of life entitles her to moral consideration and entails that one should not end her natural tendency towards life needlessly, and her being a higher-order creature capable of feeling pain entails that one should not cause her pain unnecessarily. To kill the cow would be to risk inflicting pain on her, and would thwart her tendency towards life, and would therefore be morally wrong. Unless one would be willing to end the life of one’s aging pet dog or cat to use the body for food, or perhaps more controversially, to kill one’s senile grandparent to feed on the body, I do not see how it is acceptable to kill even a cow at the end of its life for the purpose of obtaining food. Animals are not simply things for us to use. I might not object to the eating of meat if the animal died of natural causes, but then I might question the health of the meat, and, at any rate, I doubt that its taste would be particularly appealing; there also seems to me to be something dirty or disrespectful about this. There is then the argument that eating the cow from the farm that gave it a good life cannot be bad for the cow, since if no one ate meat, the cow would not exist. I would, however, argue that the existence of a great number of cows, even with happy lives, is worse than fewer cows existing who are not killed for human consumption. If no one ate meat, the cows that did exist would live natural lives not cut short by slaughter. I would argue that, while it would be wrong to bring a miserable being into existence, it would be neither good nor bad to bring a happy being into existence. It seems that turning misery to happiness, or spreading happiness among the already existing would increase the quality of their lives and would be good; however, I do not see that simply adding to the quantity of the happy, rather than bettering the lives of those already existing who are not happy, would be either good or bad. It could not be wronging the potential creature to deny him a life, even if it would be happy; the act of denial would be neutral, because it would neither increase nor decrease the happiness of those in existence. I do not think that the argument that it is best for the animals to be killed and eaten, because if they were not they would not exist at all, is an effective argument.