You can just accept that meat is a human food. Animals die for it.
The natural world involves animals eating other animals.
If you have to kill male calves because you're on a dairy farm then you kill the male calves. It's really not that shocking.
Meat is human food. But industrialization of meat is much more morally grey. Working with a local farmer to buy pasture raised pigs free from gestation crates is totally different from the hog mills with tiny cages and concrete floors.
> The natural world involves animals eating other animals.
A "natural world" argument will always be weak. The natural world also involves rape, infanticide, and a general lack of morality. A "feature" of humans is that we can reason about, assign morality to, and ultimately move beyond some things that occur in the natural world.
The natural world also involves species consuming their entire food supply and then going extinct. Or polluting their ecosystem until they are unable to survive.
I would hope we are intelligent enough to avoid that. Meat eating is contributing to both.
Not the first. Sounds like we're not consuming our entire food supply, but rather generating more as we need it.
And there's a lot of other things besides cow farts contributing to global warming, which can have a much bigger effect for much less effort than making the world vegetarian.
Clearing huge swaths of Brazilian rainforest, “the lungs of the planet”, to make way for cattle seems like a pretty significant contributing factor though, would you agree? Less demand for meat, less demand for eliminating large pieces of a rather important natural carbon sink.
