Meat and right: the ethical dilemma

My favourite vegetarian, hearing that I was preparing a paper on the ethics of eating meat, said 'That should be brief.There are none.You can only do it if you don't think about it.'You may not agree with this statement but it raises two difficult issues: (1) most people who eat meat prefer not to think where it came from.This suspension of awareness is becoming ever easier as the consumer becomes ever more remote from the realities of livestock production; (2) once one starts to think from first principles, and without prejudice, it is not easy to justify (a) killing another animal for food when cheaper, nutritionally acceptable alternatives are available, (b) feeding cereal to livestock to produce meat for our titillation while millions go hungry.Although these criticisms are not always expressed rationally, anyone who dismisses them out of hand is equally irrational, or is simply refusing to think.There is, of course, another, more paranoid, objection to meat eating; namely that it helps to kill us rather than keep us alive.I shall not deal with this third issue here since it has nothing to do with ethics (see Blaxter & Webster, 1991).Ethics is that branch of philosophy which deals with human character and conduct.It is therefore meet and right to question the eating habits of Western society and ask 'Can we justify all, or indeed any of our meat-eating habits?Unless one holds the extreme vegan position, the question is complex.A gourmand may, for example, begin with whitebait and proceed to white veal.Most people would, I think, agree that the ethical problems posed by the two dishes are not the same.Nobody knows, (though many have speculated) what primitive man thought about the beasts he hunted.He will certainly have been reminded on a daily basis that meat comes from killing animals usually while in a state of fear.At some stage this must have aroused compassion in some people.With the onset of agriculture, man began to get to know animals as individuals and so began to develop favourites; animals that acquired lasting value by virtue of their lasting utility or their companionship or both.The real favourites escaped being eaten altogether.In India, the cow became sacred, in England, the horse.(That highly intelligent animal, the pig, has persuaded four of the world's great religions not to eat it but for rather different reasons.)Even the killing of meat animals raised by man acquired its own dignity.We may today criticize Shechita and Halal slaughter as