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So what? We evolved to thrive on a wide variety of diets. I don't judge my homo erectus ancestors for doing what they needed to survive. It's fairly apparent that the person you're replying to is referring to modern society's obsession with producing as much meat as we do, not the concept of eating meat as a whole.
Complete and utter bullshit. Don't move goalposts because you don't want to concede a point. They explicitly said:
That doesn't even remotely imply there is a quantity of meat consumption that is morally acceptable.
Right, they explicitly said that, and then in the literal next fucking sentence they explicitly said
It sounds like what they are describing is modern society's obsession with producing as much meat as we do
It's me; I'm the person. I will clarify my stance. But focusing on my individual personal motivations and disregarding my overarching observations seems a little goal post manipulatey too. Even if my personal motivations fail to meet your scrutiny, the facts I present still remain: we are harming our planet, we are harming animals, and we are harming ourselves by eating meat. Which seems counterproductive at best and ripe for improvement. We can and should advance beyond this unnecessary and harmful indulgence. At the very least, we should consume a very small fraction of what we currently do.
Though I am a vegetarian, I used to eat meat. I acknowledge that it's delicious, and I miss it sometimes. But I don't eat it because I've determined that it would be logically inconsistent of me to do so.
In a vacuum I don't think the "wrongest" part about meat is the moral/ethical implications of killing an animal to eat it. But I'm not talking about subsistence meat consumption here. Because that's not how we eat meat on a human race scale anymore. We churn it out at disgusting scale. Imparting suffering and pollution into the world. We eat it primarily because we like it. And we eat too much of it because we are gluttonous. If your uncle shoots a buck with his bow and arrow, and make some summer sausage of it, I'm not really perturbed by that. I don't love it, but I'm fine with it. Now, if your uncle gasses 10,000 chickens too fat and atrophied to stand, and heaps them into a pile and burns them, because the flock has an outbreak that exists solely due to our habitual over crowding of hellish enclosures, now we've got problems.
That being said, my personal chief concern is environmental. The scale at which we produce meat, and the methods we use to produce it, are completely untenable and are inconsistent with continued life on this planet. In 50 years we will have another 3 billion or so people on the planet, and we're already operating way beyond our means with our current population. We need to change our habits or die.
My third priority is health considerations. This is probably my weakest argument, because eating meat isn't imperically unhealthy. But again, we as humans don't just eat meat from time to time, most of us are eating it every god damned day. We're going to a wing joint and hoovering up 15 chickens worth of wings without even thinking about it. But even if people stop packing their colons with gristle and turning their blood to paste with double bacon cheeseburgers with bacon and a fried egg, they'll find some other garbage to eat. We don't value healthy living in my country which is a whole nother issue beyond the meat thing.
I strongly agree on all points. In particular the inhumanity of the way animals are treated in contemporary mass ranches is troubling. DFW's "Consider the Lobster" resonates with me.
The reason I called out the above comment is because slamming to the absolutist rails is regressive. What makes a difference isn't going to the extremes but bringing people into the fold. It is particularly effective to highlight the issues you have and then say "you don't need to stop eating all meat". Most people won't. If your points are well received then a takeaway of "choose to not eat meat more often" is much more impactful rather than "oh well nothing I can do since I am going to continue eating meat".