Is It Morally Wrong To Eat Meat?

In any business it’s a good idea to tailor your writing energy around addressing the main opposition to your work.

I believe in proactively framing your ethos in a positive light instead of fighting in the back streets of face book or twitter.

Primal Meats gets a significant number of negative comments from extreme promoters of a vegan diet. One of the main concerns about eating animals is that it’s cruel or somehow immoral.

In this article we deconstructed the argument and posed a different perspective.

I recently saw a video shared on Facebook of a hyena disembowelling a wildebeest. The shocking part was that the wildebeest was fully conscious and sitting upright, it was simply immobilised due to injury or exhaustion.

 

I was totally horrified and it made me angry at the hyena for a ‘silly’ second. I wanted the hyena to have compassion for the poor beast, or at least put it out of its misery before he started tucking in!

 

This started me thinking; if this is just nature in action, it can’t be inherently ‘bad’ to take another’s life in the name of food or survival, can it? In other words, isn’t eating meat a natural instinct?

 

Now you could argue that the hyena was simply trying to survive and it doesn’t have a choice or the brain power to make ‘better’ decisions – this is totally true – but it still stands that as part of a natural ecosystem it is perfectly right that animals consume each other; morals don’t come into it.

 

Wild omnivores are able to digest both animals and plants very effectively and so have the choice, but they know that in order to be healthy they need to have the flexibility to select foods when in season and to eat the full range of foods that will keep them well. Their craving for meat is not just a self-indulgent desire, it’s a genetic compulsion based on the hard wiring that helps them survive.

 

Are Humans Different to Wild Omnivores?

 

I don’t think so; we have the same genetic wiring and the same compulsions, it’s just that social conditioning leads us to believe that we should ‘know better.’

 

I find the notion that humans are superior to other animals, and somehow don’t need to be part of the world’s ecosystem, both arrogant and naïve. The only reason humans are ‘superior’ to animals is that we happened to be the species who knocked over the first domino on a run of fortunate evolutionary developments.1

 

The development of tools to crack big animal bones allowed us to access nutrient-dense marrow effectively, and the development of tools for slicing meat allowed us to chew flesh more easily and quickly. These two significant breakthroughs accelerated the quality and density of nutrients we could digest in our food in a day.2

 

A further leap in human evolution was when we learned to control fire. Cooking food3 increases the bioavailability of nutrients and significantly increases the number of useful calories we can assimilate in a day.4

 

These seemingly simple advances allowed us to reduce the amount of bulky plant matter we had to find and eat to sustain us – apparently this takes up to 80% of a large primate’s daytime activity – and allowed our digestive tracts to shrink, turning us from big bellied creatures using hands and feet on the ground, to an upright ‘six pack’ sort of person who can run and hunt.

 

After tucking into a fatty, meaty feast we had the energy to last a few hours without food and could now afford to take the time off endlessly foraging for relatively low-nutrient, low-calorie foods in order to hunt down the next nourishing high-calorie meal!5