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How can anyone who claims to love animals, eat them? Especially after how they are mistreated in those horrible factories? They are abused and then brutally killed...

I've heard the argument before, "People were MEANT to eat meat....it's what the animals are there for.....how do you think they survive in the wild, they eat each other, we have to survive too"..............*gets ready to explode*

No, that's not what animals are meant for. Animals were not put on this world to satisfy man's hunger. They were here way before us. At least in the wild, both the predator and prey are given a chance to either run and survive, or die trying. What man is doing is wrong. We are capturing them and keeping them cooped up, we are not giving them a chance to fight for survival. We completely strip the meaning of 'survival of the fittest.' It just bugs me how ignorant some people are. They claim to love all animals YET they abuse and murder them, then eat them like it's nothing...all we do is coop them up and use them when we need them, we don't give them a chance to live or to fight for life. They are living organisms and I feel like crying thinking of how tortured they are only to be slaughtered...

And NO! We DON'T need meat to survive. There are so many other foods out there that work perfectly fine that are not cruel, unusual, or abusive and they are healthier and taste better. Like the other day! My boyfriend and I decided to make eggplant parmesan, it's based off of chicken parmesan. On the side we had noodles with alfredo fettacini mixed with olives. It was so good and MEATLESS and I felt full yet healthy.

At least with cow and chickens, it's not as bad (still pretty bad and abusive) but at least they aren't being murdered...at least the ones used for eggs, milk, and cheese. I only eat unfertalized eggs. I'm becoming really iffy with milk and cheese....we all know that a cow has to be pregnant to make milk and since milk is in high demand, cows are being forced to be pregnant all year around which is PAINFUL.

Anyways, any discussions?

Great rant. Since I'm in the mood for debate, I'll have to counter (and being the resident omnivore here, I'm prepared for attacks from everyone xD).

I sympathize with this statement, and understand where you're coming from. However, I can only call straw man on this one.

I volunteer up to 20 hours a weekend sometimes (on average, I volunteer about 12 hours per weekend) at a wildlife rehabilitation center near me. I'm majoring in zoology, and I plan on starting my own wildlife rehabilitation in the future. I eat meat. I don't think it's fair to say that because I eat meat, it negates my passion for caring for animals. I'm sure I could come up with excuse after excuse for why I eat meat and yet ignore the appalling practice of factory farming. I'm not the first to admit that I've become desensitized to the process of killing and butchering an animal. I don't do it personally, I only receive the end product. However, not all animals in every factory farm are abused and brutally killed. Sure, there are exceptions, but in regulated, upstanding factory farms, animals are humanely treated and rendered unconscious before being killed.


Again, I don't think it's healthy for you to assume that all animals are tortured before they're killed. There are plenty of sustainable and organic farms that are quite humane in the way they treat and kill their animals. "Humanely kill" is an oxymoron, I know, but you get the point. In the wild, many times predators do not humanely kill their prey, and the victims often bleed to death while running before they are captured. Big cats crush the throats of their prey suffocating them to death, fish are eaten by whales and sharks whole sometimes only to be slowly digested, snakes constrict and crush the entire bodies of their prey before eating, dogs break neck bones by shaking the prey vigorously in a painful act of violence, birds of prey rip their prey apart alive while it struggles underneath the powerful talons. You can't romanticize about the animal kingdom in comparison to humans without looking at the brutal side of nature. Not all animals are picking off the old and weak, either. Mountain lions ambush prey, including healthy, strong animals. Snakes don't select, nor do birds of prey.

Does this give us an excuse for doing what we do? Not necessarily. But we are humans, we evolved to create our current technology, we have the capacity to create things that other sentient beings can't fully comprehend. By your definition, we shouldn't be living in houses with electricity, heat, air conditioning, running clean water, cars to get us around, etc. This is what we are. We have created the problem of overpopulation and as such need to keep up with it, which includes the unfortunate truth of factory farming. People always have and always will eat meat. It is completely unfeasible to think that factory farming, in a world of 6.3 billion and counting, will go away.


You're entitled to your opinion on whether we need meat to survive or not. I think it's a fallacy to assume that humans were meant to eat anything, but my personal choice is to eat meat. Are white tailed deer meant to eat meat? As I outlined in another thread, white tailed deer have been studied to eat birds nestlings, eggs, and adult birds caught in nets. Why do they do it? Basic foraging ecology; if the nutrients are right there for them to consume, why make the extra effort to get it from some other source? I look around this forum and see the topics involving B12. How is it natural to go around finding B12 from other sources than from where it naturally occurs? I'm not saying that veg*ns are wrong, but I'm saying that the "humans are not meant to eat meat" argument needs a serious reality check.

Meat is not unhealthy. When prepared properly, it can be an extremely healthy option in any diet plan. I can equally compare potato chips, a non-meat food, to be unhealthy as well. What makes meat unhealthy, like potato chips, is the amount humans consume. Humans on average consume way too many pounds of meat more than necessary. This leads to cholesterol problems, obesity, and other such health issues, but is mostly due to irresponsible diet than from the food itself.


I don't mean to be the one to point this out, but this paragraph right here renders your entire rant as hypocritical. You call people who eat meat out as uncaring, insensitive animal haters, but you freely admit that you eat eggs and milk products, both by-products of factory farming.

Claiming that you eat unfertilized eggs doesn't make you sound like you're better than the average person, as most people eat unfertilized eggs... in fact, I don't know anyone that eats fertilized eggs. In case you're unaware of the egg-factor process, let me give you a brief run down. The fertilized eggs chickens lay are sorted by male and female. Females are kept because they can lay eggs, males are discarded and commonly thrown into meat grinders alive because they cannot produce eggs. The female chickens chosen are then put through an assembly line to have the tips of their beaks melted or soldered off to avoid pecking at each other. The chickens are then crammed into cages to lay eggs 24/7.

As you mentioned, cows are also not in the best of terms for their milk production. They are constantly impregnated, their calves ripped away to either be dairy cows themselves, fed an iron deficient diet for tender veal, or raised for slaughter while the milking cows are milked constantly, leading to infection and sore udders in some cases. When a cow becomes less productive, she is sent off for slaughter.

Hate to break the news to you, but eating eggs and milk is an indirect contribution to factory farming. Unless you're raising the chickens and cows yourself, you can never be 100% sure of where your egg and dairy products are coming from. Unless you are completely veg*n, you can't really call people out on these issues when you yourself contribute to them.

I'm aware of the brutal nature we treat animals for our own consumption. I've seen videos countless times, read numerous journals, articles, and books on such. I'm aware of the benefits of avoiding meat and meat products. However, my personal choice is to eat meat, maybe for selfish reasons, sure, but that is my choice. Factory farming won't go away, and I've accustomed myself to deal with that fact. I applaud the efforts of vegetarians and vegans like you, but I think it's unfair to label us as animal haters and uncaring.

Sorry for the wall 'o text, got a little carried away.

Edit: Ha! Looks like I was beaten to the punch on the egg and dairy industry, thanks Lorien!

You're very right, animals do have the option of being free and dying of old age without being someone's dinner. Freedom is a precious privilege that we sometimes take for granted or ignore completely. Even though the lowest prey animals, such as mice or zooplankton, are predestined most of the time to be eaten, they are granted the freedom of movement and life before they end up on the table.

Not that it justifies it any, but cattle, pigs, chickens, and other such animals have been domesticated to the point where they are no longer wild animals. I know you're not suggesting it, but they don't really have that option of being wild. Most cattle, from what I understand, live in grassy rolling fields where they have the option of eating grass and running around before they're hauled off to the feedlot, so in one way or another, they have experienced some semblance of "freedom." Weak argument, I agree. However, having not known what the wild is, what experience are we really robbing them of? I realize that sounds domineering and utilitarian, but this statement you give here:

is what I have to call out. Anthropomorphizing may make you feel better in abstaining from eating animals, but it's something you need to keep in check in an argument. How do you know that animal had wants and desires? What did it want? What did it desire? By placing human emotions on that animal, you've turned it into more than it really is. I'm not saying that animals are huge dumb beasts with no "person"ality or anything, but you can't place guilt on someone for robbing things you don't know that animal can even comprehend.

I would like to say that we are putting animals through horrible emotional trauma and that's why factory farming is wrong. But we're not. The only thing we can see that animals respond to is pain, and that is when abuse becomes the issue, as well as the very real and emotional stance I have on Asian fur farms (an entirely different subject, but there is just one scene in this particular video that gets me so emotional I could scream, where an entirely skinned raccoon-dog lifts its head up weakly among a pile of skinned carcasses, obviously still alive). In other words, when you go to argue against omnivorism, I suggest you avoid anthropomorphic analogies and focus on the real issues involved.

Haha, re-reading what I've typed has made me realize that I look like a cold-hearted, uncaring b***h, but I assure you that's not the case. There is a reason why that in wildlife rehabilitation animals that can not be released must be euthanized. They've experienced that wild freedom, and to rob them of having it again to live life in a cage is unethical. Many people get angry when I tell them we had to put down a blind hawk because it wouldn't be able to survive in the wild, and they wonder angrily why we won't just hand feed it and allow it to live and fly around "the house." I digress.

We also raise dozens of mice and rats for the express purpose of feeding the animals; their only destiny is to be someone's food. Yes, the situation is different here, but I just had to throw it out there. The rats get no human play time and only interact with other rats, much like the animals we've been putting in factory farms. When some of them get loose they have no clue what to do, come up quite close to people because they have no idea how to forage for their own food and this unfortunately has led to the demise of many of them to wild rats, dogs, raccoons, and other animals.

I'm also not preaching to you, I'm actually envious of your commitment to better your life, diet, and the environment. I sometimes wish I could go vegan, but I suppose I'm too selfish. And I applaud you that you can have an open mind. It's people like you that remove the stereotype of preachy hardcore PETA vegans being the worst people out there.

I was under the impression that most "food animals" were kept in small and dirty places until they were killed. And that's not right, no matter how wild or unwild the animal may be.

My 10ish pound dog is not a wild animal. I don't know if he'd even last the night if I shoved him out there right now. But if I kept him in a small pen, never cleaned it, then killed him, boiled him, and ate him, no one would think that was ok. In fact, it would be a felony.

So whether wild or domesticated, I can't see why it would be ok to kill an animal. And I don't see why we think it's ok to kill some animals and not others.


We're pretty sure that animals do have thoughts, feelings, and wants though. The research has been mounting for decades.

A recent study found that dolphins can probably think about their future. The researchers went so far as to say that we should think of dolphins as "nonhuman people."

Apes have preferences. They can be taught sign language to express those preferences. They seem to love, and feel, and want, very much like human children do.

Elephants and apes seem to mourn their dead. Some animals even seem to get so sad after the loss of a family member or friend that they'll stop eating and die.

And those aren't even close to being the only studies or examples. So we already have some idea of what might be going on in their head. And I bet there is a lot more going on in there than we even realize right now. It's just their type of intelligence may be so different from our own that it can be difficult to fully see it, study it, and understand.

So we can't deny that research. We can't say they don't have thoughts, feeling, and wants when it looks like they do. If we close our eyes and pretend that they have no thoughts and feelings just so we can justify eating meat then we're no better than the white Americans who closed their eyes to the equal intelligence of African people in order to justify slavery.

Thank you all for the great replies. I learned a lot, I thought the milk making cows were kept outside allowed to graze and stuff.......I didn't know it was that bad. crying And I can't believe chickens are killed waaay too early "because younger ones make better eggs." That is.....disturbing and bothersome to me.

@ Ailinea: My major for the longest time was Wildlife Conservation/Ecology Restoration. I hope in the future I can continue with it though. And I know, Just because people eat meat doesn't mean they hate animals. I was a bit emotional when I wrote that post. sweatdrop Every one is entitled to their own opinions, I just choose not to support the meat industries and by doing so, I choose to not eat meat. I've loved animals my entire life and still ate meat for most of my life. When I started doing some research though, I thought it was time for a change.

Thank you all again, I love the little debate that's been going on in here. heart