Norsefire:
They are clearly self-aware. "Sapient", according to my dictionary, means "acutely insightful and wise", so I'll grant you that not all non-human animals are sapient.
Yes
Not "impacts". Try "harms". And what greater harm can you do to a conscious creature than to curtail its life?
None, although you still miss the point:
We are human beings. Chickens are chickens. They are not intelligent; they do not think as you or I do. We have no obligation to them. They are not sacred. They have no souls (and neither do human beings). They are nothing more than a chemical reaction.
Things die. Sometimes animals kill other animals in order to eat those other animals. Whether it's "necessary" is irrelevant; it happens. Human beings kill other animals in order to eat them. There is nothing wrong with this.
As human beings, we look out for our interests first and foremost; we cannot put chickens before humans. The survival of chickens means absolutely nothing to us, apart from their value as a food source. Food is necessary; in order to eat, something must die. The discrimination on your part between chickens and brocolli seems arbitrary to me; perhaps brocolli does not feel pain, but it is alive and life wants to keep living.
As Human beings, our lives matter most to us. As nature is a competition, we human beings compete among the other animals for resources; and we happen to be better than them. Therefore, we are able to not only gather enough food, but also a variety of eat, from meats to vegetables, to satisfy our nutritional needs and tastes.
It's immoral, so there is a lot wrong with it.
It's not immoral to me; the way I see it, there are predators and there are prey.
I very much doubt you hunt for your meat, except maybe in the supermarket, where it has been neatly killed for you by other people.
Obviously, although that wasn't my point.
There is no need to eat meat. You just do it because you like the taste and you're selfish. That's all.
Of course I'm selfish; a certain extent of selfishness is natural in all human beings. Wolves are also, then, selfish because they don't even have to live. They can die and spare the rabbits, but instead they choose to eat them. Those selfish wolves.
Again, things eat other things; call me selfish, but that's the way it works, and I'm going to eat meat. We're not the only creatures that do it. We're not the only creatures that are omnivores, either.
Your only obligation is your own pleasure, it sounds like.
Chickens certainly aren't my obligation.
Last time I checked, bacteria and veggies were not conscious or sentient and had no concept of their continued existence into the future.
However, as living things, they do "desire" to continue living and reproduce - eating them, then, is morally wrong because you are preventing them from doing this.
Why kill cockroaches and tapeworm? Do you eat those too?
Nope. They're pests......hold on, don't tell me it's wrong to kill pests too?
You support factory farming every time you eat the meat supplied by factory farms. You're living in a fantasy land if you think you don't.
Not all meat comes from factory farming, and not buying the meat is not the best way to put an end to factory farming.
Many vegetarians I know love the taste of meat. But they don't eat it on moral grounds. I know this must sound like a totally bizarre concept to you: not doing something you enjoy because it's the right thing to do, but that's the way some people actually try to live their lives.
Again with the arrogant attitude; my morality is not your morality. What is immoral is denying yourself on a nonsensical premise, in fact, a very religious premise which is that somehow, chickens are sacred and can't be eaten.
Killing a conscious, sentient being that has a concept of its ongoing existence as a distinct entity is morally wrong.
Why? You sound very religious in saying this; life is not sacred. Life has no meaning, purpose, or value beyond the value we attribute to it.
You apply that concept to human beings, presumably, so what's fundamentally different about a sheep? Explain.
The survival of sheep is not our concern.
If we could "grow" unconscious meat in a vat, I'd have no problem with eating it. I probably would have a problem with taking existing animals and genetically engineering them to lack a brain - even assuming such a thing was technically possible. Suppose we could do this with human children. Would you eat them?
An argument based on nothing more than an appeal to my emotion.
Children lacking a brain are not children at all; they are hunks of flesh and chemical reactions. It might be crude, but it's the reality.
And I'm sure such a technique could be possible; there are braindead people. If we are able to figure out what causes this, we could then induce it in all livestock. Or, we could simply tranquilize them from birth and sustain an unconscious state; since they never know "life", they can not know death.
It's far far more efficent to feed the population a vegetarian diet, if that's what you're concerned about.
Perhaps, but people want meat. And vegetarians, and especially vegans, often have a difficult time getting an adequate source of protein.
A lot of things are not conscious, sentient beings.
You miss the point: we don't owe them anything.
Also, if eating meat is wrong, why isn't drinking milk or eating eggs? Sure, it doesn't "harm" anything.........but that milk isn't intended for us, and we're milking them as machines. The same for eggs, we're stealing their eggs and milk and isn't that morally wrong?
And what about lab mice? Lab mice die all the time in experimentation. Those egotistical scientists.......after all it isn't
necessary to run their experiments. It's unnecessary killing; those unthinking morons.
No. Some are just unthinking morons.
And some do think, and don't see anything wrong with it. At any rate, I don't eat that slop called McD's, I'm just saying.
No. I abide by the morals I have because it is the right thing to do. It's not always easy to be moral.
Then change your moral code; take mine. And enjoy meat!