Allie Fenlon

Why do people eat meat? In my ethics class, we have gone into a great debate on why people eat meat. The teacher is vegetarian and asked the class to give him a morally sound reason for eating meat. He wants to eat meat, but he cannot, in good conscience, eat meat without feeling guilty. Many people brought up the tradition of eating meat. His face lit up like a kid in a candy bar. You see, it is his job to make you feel as though nothing is right or wrong, he questions why any of your morals are the way they are and he makes you question the world completely. Back to the story. He then started talking about the tradition of slavery and asked why that was wrong if it was tradition. Obviously, he knows it's wrong, but he pinpointed the aspect in the argument that he thought was weak. This topic was dropped. Any topic brought up after this, he had a rebuttal. He has exhausted all of the ideas related to the morality of eating meat.

He then delved deep into why he, personally, was a vegetarian. This is basically against his will. Let me explain. He knows that the meat industry basically raises animals to prematurely murder them when they could be living great lives, grazing and living their days. This is true for mostly all meat. Then the argument for fish came. Well when people eat fish, many times it is wild and caught from the ocean. He believes that we murder fish daily for personal satisfaction, which is eating meat. Another argument or realization that he brought up, was the fact that people are not allowed to do this to any other animals. If someone raised a dog to kill it and eat its meat, they would be arrested. It is only farm animals that are victims of this trade. All of this is true. 

That being said, I am still not a vegetarian, however, this class is testing me a little bit. Here’s why. Although I am an animal lover, I eat meat. This, as pointed out by my professor, is kind of a conflict of interest. I have considered the fact that some animals are raised just to be eaten. In some cases, this is the circle of life. If these animals were in the wild, they would be eaten by a predator. So why is it wrong for people to eat animals? The argument for this is that we have the consciousness and morals that prevent us from eating animals alive, sometimes, at least I do. Another argument that I posed, if our entire class stopped eating meat, all of the meat in the store would go to waste. The animal’s life would amount to nothing, as its purpose was to be eaten for meat. Now, I am not saying I am eating meat so these animals' lives would not go to waste, but that is something I felt as though I need to bring to the spotlight.