In Defense of Meat Eaters, Part 2: Animal and Human Well-Being
Yesterday, I debunked a few of the common, “evolution-based” arguments leveled against meat-eaters that might have the potential to stump anyone with only cursory knowledge of evolutionary science. By and large, these are arguments that appeal to our emotions. They invoke a peaceful, gentle pre-history of slender, humane early humans co-existing in perfect meatless harmony with the animal kingdom, an image that sounds great and makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Those sharp spears found at various dig sites, you ask? Why, those were just used to skewer hard-to-reach apples, or perhaps to gently separate two squirrels battling over an acorn. But the fossil record shows distinct markings on large ruminant bones that seem to indicate cuts, tools, and butchering – how do you explain those? Oh, those? See, early humans were so grossed out by animal carcasses that they couldn’t bear to actually touch them with bare hands. They developed tools so that they could move the offending meat out of their line of sight without actually putting hands to flesh. Pretty ingenious!
Jokes aside, the reality is that life for Grok wasn’t a Disney movie. Lots of animals died to ensure our species’ survival. Lots of plants, too, plus innumerable other organisms, unicellular and multicellular alike. The cycle of life, you see, is also a cycle of death. Plants get eaten by animals, animals poop out the waste, and that waste gets consumed by the living soil, and the enriched soil makes it possible for more plant life to flourish. Similar cycles occur in every imaginable environment with different organisms, but the basic story is the same: the constant interplay between life and death.
Death, then, clearly has a place in our world. But that sounds cold and heartless (damn our evolved sense of sympathy and empathy!) to most people. “Death”? I mean, it’s death. It’s gotta be bad, right? In fact, one of the weirdest problems people have is that death is necessary for survival, even though the act of killing an animal for food is somewhat unpleasant. Omelets require broken eggs, but cracking that shell turns a person’s stomach. So when a vegetarian utters something like “Meat is murder,”I can almost understand, just as I can understand why people might think low-carb diets are dangerous – because Conventional Wisdom continuously, constantly promotes these viewpoints. All animals raised for food suffer needlessly and cruelly, and no one can stick to low-carb diets long term and if they do, they’ll get heart disease and die. Those are the talking points, anyway.
So, what do you say to an ardent anti-meatist whose evolutionary arguments have been rebuffed and who comes at you with concerns about animal cruelty and human health? Read on.
Meat is murder.
I went over this already in my review of Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth, but I’ll reiterate: life is death. Life springs from death, everywhere and always. You cannot live without something dying to make it all possible. Grain heavy vegan diets require the destruction of ecosystems and all their inhabitants; meat heavy Primal diets require the slaughter of a pig or a cow. If you’re going to exist in this world, you have to accept the fact that things will die. Oh, and things won’t just die; they’ll die to ensure your survival. You, me, all of us have blood on our hands. Your pets have blood on their paws. Those pigs rooting around in the dirt have blood on their hooves. When you have a knee-jerk reaction to the reality of death and try to escape it, either by eating a vegan diet or hurling insults at meat-eaters, you risk throwing off the delicate balance of life on this planet. When you remove death from the equation, life simply doesn’t work.
Now, there are right and wrong ways to produce meat. I won’t argue against that. In fact, I always maintain that the industrial CAFO system is unsustainable, produces unhealthy, unsuitable, antibiotic-laden meat with skewed O6/O3 ratios, and is damaging to the environment. Whereas a grass-fed, pastured farm produces healthy meat and usable manure that fertilizes the grass and helps replenish the soil, CAFOs produce mountains of sloppy manure (these animals aren’t eating their natural diet, so they poop endlessly). Whether we can support the entire world population on pastured animal products, I don’t know. I suspect not. There are better ways to farm, better ways to raise animals on their natural diets (moving animals off grains so that we can convert the croplands designated to feed them is a good start), but feeding six billion (and growing) is a tall order. The planet probably wasn’t meant to hold all of us. There are no easy answers to the environmental impact of meat, but they certainly don’t lie in the amber waves of grain and soybean farming.
Your average meat eater gets more diseases.
Superficially, this is the most effective rhetoric. It’s punchy and technically true, and it confirms most people’s suspicions of meat eaters. Meat is unhealthy; everyone knows it, right? Of course they get the most diseases, the most heart attacks, the most cancer. They can even cite mainstream studies that claim as much, studies that make the front page of every mainstream publication. The latest was the infamous red meat study that seemed to show the more a person consumed red meat, the greater their cancer, heart disease, and total mortality. It makes for a good headline, but it doesn’t mean much. For one thing, it shows correlation, not causation (establishing a causative mechanism would require controlled studies), and for another, it also showed similar connections between mortality and marriage status, smoking, high BMI, lower education, low physical activity levels, and low fruit and vegetable intake. How many of these meat eaters were also eating potatoes fried in rancid vegetable oil, swigging a jumbo Pepsi, and polishing off the meal with a bowl of ice cream? The stigma that meat is unhealthy is a potent, virulent one, and your average CAFO-meat-eating American is more likely to be the type that smokes, drinks heavily, never exercises, and lives in front of the television. If anything, these studies are strikes against the Standard American Diet and Lifestyle, which is technically omnivorous but completely and utterly different from the Primal Blueprint, which prides itself on promoting healthy, pastured, organic meat along with regular servings of fruits and vegetables, plus exercise of varying intensities. Throw a few modern Groks against your average vegan dieter (let alone someone following the SAD) and see how their health stacks up. We already know that the evil saturated fat found in animal products isn’t so evil after all, especially in the context of a low-carb Primal diet made of real foods.
We aren’t your average meat eaters.
Meat eaters don’t eat vegetables.
This one really riles me up. It operates under a totally false dichotomy: that meat eaters eat only meat. Just because a person eats a lot of meat doesn’t mean vegetation takes a backseat. I’d be willing to bet I eat more vegetables than most vegetarians out there, simply by making room and avoiding all those refined grains that form the basis for many vegetarian diets. You could conceivably remain a vegetarian and live off a diet of pancakes, fake meat, cereal, and pizza, while a plan as nutritionally-bereft as that one is impossible on a high-meat Primal diet.
And even if someone decided to go completely carnivore, so what? You can obtain all the essential nutrients that way, if you plan it well. I’d put a slab of organic, grass-fed beef liver, a heart steak, and a side of lamb brains up against a bowl of couscous and lima beans any day.
Between yesterday’s post and this one, see how long that took? It’s tough giving a quick two or three sentence rebuttal to a quip like that. You can’t link to posts or studies in real-time conversation. Try doing that the next time you find yourself accosted by vegans at a cocktail party. It probably won’t work on them, but you might convince a couple eavesdroppers.
To sum up
There’s a whole lot we don’t know, but what we do know is this: the human animal was designed to eat meat. It fuels our cells, our brains, and it builds our musculature. We designed tools to assist us in the procuring and processing of meat, and we still get that instinctual, savage urge to consume it. Meat tastes good. It provides essential nutrients and vitamins. And, contrary to popular belief, meat and meat alone is not responsible for cancer, heart disease, and a whole host of other ailments. Meat, when properly sourced, is a crucial element in the human diet. Despite the specious arguments about saturated fat and frugivores and chimps and murder, we know that meat is a good, healthy thing for the individual. And in the end, you’ve got to look out for your health and personal well-being. I refuse to sacrifice my health and happiness just so man can “evolve” past meat.
At least that’s my take on it.
What other arguments have you heard from anti-meatists? Let it all out in the comment boards.
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Posted By: Mark Sisson
Mark,
I feel you made a strong argument against many reasons for vegetarianism. However I don’t feel that you’ve adequately addressed the common concern among vegetarians for the suffering of animals.
While I see no issue with the killing of animals, I feel that modern forms of meat production inflict far greater suffering than what would occur in nature.
If animals are capable of feeling pain in the same way that humans do, shouldn’t we take this suffering into account?
Cheers
Should we avoid pointlessy torturing / injuring animals? Sure.
Should we let the fact that they clearly feel pain serve as a justification for sacrifice? No
Does the fact that animals feel pain give them rights? No.
Unfortunately, you didn’t address cruelty or animal rights at all, the real reasons for eschewing meat. You did address the animals’ deaths and countered that we vegans also must kill to live. But harvesting a vegetable is not a violent act in the same way as slaughtering a mammal. Of course we evolved eating meat. We also evolved waging wars, but I doubt you advocate for that. We have the capacity to evolve spiritually beyond that point now.
the absolute evil is the sterilization of millions of acres of prairie for the legions of soy and wheat worshippers. how many animals were killed so the ecosystem could be converted for your use? how many more are poisoned, burned, plowed under and mangled so that you can harvest a crop? me, I’ll happily “eschew” on a hunk of beef liver that required only one animal be killed.
What’s a moral vegetarian to do?
She briefly entertains studying with a mystic breatharian, hoping to (tongue-in-cheekily) learn to subsist purely on oxygen. She spends hours picking slugs from her garden and goes to relocate them. Nothing works. She keeps coming back to death.
“Let me live without harm to others. Let my life be possible without death.” Keith realizes this vegetarian plea (which “borders on a prayer”) is impossible to fulfill. She can’t live and eat without something dying, and that’s the whole point of it all. Death is necessary and natural. Circle of life, you know? Without death of some sort, life would get a whole lot worse.
The above was taken from the review on The Vegetarian Myth that was provided. So saying that death is inevitable and cannot be avoided doesn’t mean that it is okay to kill 10 billion animals a year in the US alone. We should try to avoid unnecessary death.
Remember the Holocaust? Remember when it was stopped because millions of people were dying for no reason? Hmmm I wonder if this is similar to the meat industry and killing millions of animals when we can obviously live without doing so?
And then there are people who say animals don’t have natural rights. “We are more advanced and have philosophy and know where/what we are” is something I’ve heard before.
Well what if there was some creature that was more advanced than us and wanted to harvest us and eat us. Do we still have no natural rights compared to this superior being?
According to your logic: having less of some ability/logic means that you are inferior and can be used however the superior chooses.
Think of being the animal. You certainly don’t want death. So why should we refuse their desire to live?
If you eat meat I honestly want you to look up material on the life of a factory farmed: turkey, chicken, cow, pig, duck. And more. And then tell me that is how living things deserved to be treated.
except that animals don’t have “rights”. Do you understand the nature of rights and where they came from ?
The absolute horror that meat farms inflict on animals is atrocious. Meat eating has never been the issue, it’s the f’ing evil nature that is attached to the production of it. Where do you think those 99 cent cheeseburgers from Wendys come from?
who here is proposing anyone ever eat those 99 cent cheeseburgers from wendys?
”And even if someone decided to go completely carnivore, so what? You can obtain all the essential nutrients that way, if you plan it well. I’d put a slab of organic, grass-fed beef liver, a heart steak, and a side of lamb brains up against a bowl of couscous and lima beans any day.”
Do you have any training or formal education on human nutrition? If you did you would know that if the diet does not provide enough carbohydrate the body will make its own glucose from protein. This involves breaking down the proteins in blood and tissues into amino acids, then converting them to glucose. This is called gluconeogenesis. When eating a diet that is very low in carbohydrate, our body will take amino acids from the blood first, and then from other tissues like muscles, heart, liver, and kidneys. Using amino acids in this manner over a prolonged period of time can cause serious, possibly irreversible, damage to these organs.
do you have any training in biochemistry? it is not impossible to survive without carbohydrates, many animals do it, from centipedes to sharks to eagles to tigers. have humans somehow evolved a DISABILITY in this area? don’t think so. from what you’re saying, I should be sure to consume plenty of blood, tissues, heart, liver and kidneys so that I can fuel my gluconeogenesis… I know, I know, my apparent good health after years of eating this way is physiologically impossible. there must be some hidden possibly irreversible damage of which I am unaware and one day 7 or 8 decades from now I will drop dead and prove you right.
I fail to see where eating eggs is a violent act. When you eat an egg, you’re eating an unfertilized ovum. Hens still lay eggs with no rooster around, they just don’t develop and hatch into chicks. I can see the violence aspect if one is speaking of factory farm chickens kept in poor conditions, but free range chickens eating their natural diet and providing eggs to humans I see no ethical issue with.
The ethical issue with eggs, even those that are unfertilized, is what happens to unwanted males and old laying hens. Farms with no roosters buy hens from breeders, and breeders need very few of the 50% of chicks that happen to be male. So, most male chicks are destroyed. And while it’s certainly possible to let laying hens live out their natural lives, egg production falls off as they get older, so old hens are typically slaughtered, even on small farms raising pastured eggs. There are similar issues with dairy. Bottom line: slaughtered animals are a byproduct of egg and milk production.
Really? You feel the need to DEFEND meat eaters? You guys are absolutely insane, the way you FREAK out if a vegetarian or (god forbid) a vegan is within 10 feet of you. YOU KNOW you guys freak out and get all defensive if someone happens to mention he or she doesn’t eat meat. Go eat your dead animals you nerd.
wow Ross. ironic much? chill out with the caps lock. a better diet might calm you down a bit.
I’ve been in bodybuilding for 10 years and I’m curious – Ross, do you think non-vegans / non-vegetarians run the other way when they sense the presence of a vegetarian/vegan because they don’t feel like being judged, being “accused of murder”, or “being a bad person”? I personally eat a lot of veggies and some meat, and more often than not, if someone engages in conversation on this subject, it usually comes with a hostile undertone – almost like imposing religion on someone. I just think there are better ways to approach the subject.
was hoping for a bit more from this article, but these arguments are pritty weak really.
it’s easy to just wash your hands of battery farming and condemn it as unsustainable without offering a useable altenative that the whole world can use. but, as you admit, pasture farming can’t feed the world. it@s an idealistic, relatively cruel way of providing meat which the average person never sees or buys from.
another beef I had is when you point to the correlation between red meat consumption and cancer, heart disease etc and say it’s a correlation, not a causation. if there is a direect correlation between just these 2 things, and the read meat isn’t the cause then that means that being prone to cancer, heart disease etc causes people to eat more red meat. retarded. sure you can blame the other factors and pretend that there isn’t a direct correlation just between eating red meat and bad health,but the science speaks for itself. another weak argument.
I would like you to address the most commonly heard vegan argument against meat eating: minimising harm. yes to survive, we necessitater the death of other beingas, nobody will argue against that. the argument I hear the most is that the vegan lifestyle mimimises the about of harm and suffering in the world. you talk about deforestation for soy, but that soy feeds factory farm animals. my vegan friendsa eat organic soyp, and say that the land used to farm animals would be better used growing soy so there is no need to keep tearing down forests. how do you address these arguments?
So what you are saying is that association is science and we need no further evidence. If that’s the case, let’s get rid of all firefighters. They are 100% associated with house fires. Get rid of them and house fires will go away.
Ridiculous you say. Of course it is. We know firefighters don’t cause house fires. When it comes to red meat, we do not know that it causes anything.
Association is not causation. It is complete and utter folly make any decision based soley on association. You are making huge assumptions when you do. Bad science!
Humans can work well (and be healthy) with many fuels, from the blood / milk / meat diet of the Massai people to the almost vegetarian diet of many asians. As I can see you need and certain amount of animal food plus vegetables to have a good and long life. Ethical cuestions are different for health ones and you are mixing all. We domesticate farm animals many years ago and use them like the plants that we cultivate: To eat them. Farm animals have the same rigths of humans? please!!
Vego’s/vegans have it wrong… when you eat meat you’re not eating death, you’re eating life! I’m not saying humans as a whole are necessarily more important than other species, but i will say that MY life and those i care about are way more important than any other species.
Six years of a supposedly nutritious and well-planned vegan diet left me with many nutritional deficiencies as well as the pain of brittle dry skin, rashes, digestive disturbances,high cholesterol, anxiety, aggression, feeling miserable and constantly being ravenously hungry despite stuffing myself full. Converting to a regular “healthy” diet slightly improved some of these. Medical specialists, naturopaths, chinese medicine practitioners etc.. using medications, herbs, supplements had no impact.
Yet after recently converting to a predominantly primal diet i have had massive improvements in all of these areas. My doctor now says i have the best nutritional and health profile of any of his patients!
That the traditional Inuit and Masai people lived on 100% animal product diets with exceptional health is proof we don’t need to eat grains or legumes.
At the end of the day I don’t need some “junk science” study to tell me what i am eating is unhealthy for me. Indeed The China Study as referenced by some pro-vegetarian/vegan posters is a typical example of this kind of flawed junk science – see link for a critique of it. Good health to you all!
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/01/08/chris-masterjohn-criticism-of-the-china-study.aspx
No living thing wants to die, whether it is plant, animal, bacteria or fungus. That’s why they all have defence mechanisms, including plants. Poisonous alkaloids, enzyme inhibitors, thorns, tannins. Many species even chemically communicate threat of insect plague to other same-specied plants to increase their tannin content to deter such threat. If you talk to anyone who practices energetic therapies such as kinesiology or reiki they will tell you they can feel the life force in plants just as readily as they do in animals. Regarding vegans and vego’s i propose that having “sap on your hands” is no different to us meat-eaters having what they misleadingly call “blood on our hands”.
I stopped eating meat when was 14 years old. I didn’t want to kill animals and that seemed like the most sensible way to stop. Although that was before the whole vegetarianism is healthier craze, my parents respected my beliefs and supported my choice. Over the years I went on and off fish, but mostly on (thank God for that!)
Fast forward 14-20 years. As an adult I started having all sorts of digestive and allergy issues. First it was lactose, then gluten. Now I can’t eat cow’s milk, gluten, eggs, corn or soy without getting eczema, hives or an upset stomach.
It took a while to get pregnant with my first child because my sex hormone levels were so low, and I miscarried twice.
When my mother died a year+ after my son’s birth, and I was feeling horribly exhausted all the time, a nutritionist friend who practices Traditional Chinese Medicine suggested that I add some meat back into my diet. “Think of it as medicine,” she said. I was feeling so awful that I agreed to give it a shot.
I tried everything: poultry, red meat and fish. Chicken did nothing special for me, but I rediscovered my LOVE for turkey. Beef and buffalo were tasty, but my years as a veggie made it hard for me to feel gung ho about eating them. Fish became a staple. After a year or so of having animal protein back on the menu, getting pregnant and nursing kid #2 was a cinch.
A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon the whole paleo community, and the scientific and medical literature supporting a low-carb, no grain, animal protein diet. I’m a scientist by training, so I couldn’t ignore the data. And the data says that I was doing it ALL WRONG for a long time.
I still can’t bring myself to add lots of beef and/or buffalo to my diet, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time. Hell, I may just grab a burger for dinner tonight see how it makes me feel.
Now to wean the kids off crackers and bread…
God gave people the following things in it’s most organic form possible:
Honey
1) Fruits
2) Leaves, stems, and flowers
3) Nuts & seeds
4) Grains
5) Legumes
6) Animal flesh of grass-fed animals
7) Milk
9) Squeezed fruit juice (VERY limited)
10) Clear water
He did not give us:
Olestra
1) Dietitians
2) Pesticides
3) High-fructose corn syrup
4) Dessert
5) Added sugars & sweeteners
6) Eggs
7) Processed food
9) Trans fatty acids
10) Blood from animals
He also instructed us to practice self-control, so that means we may not drink or eat to our heart’s content even if it’s the food he gave us. Jesus ate fish(meat) and bread(grain). He also drank wine(grape juice), but God warns against drinking to the point of drunkenness(debauchery). He also has many other instructions for us other than eating.
Correlation does not equal causation in this instance because a. Red meat is carcinogenic depending on how you cook it – look up acrylamide b. Preserved meat studied separate to just meat shows a correlation to heart disease , look it up.
loads of people don’t get correlations and causations
Correction, look up hca, not acrylamide. Acrylamide is for high heat starchy veg and bread. Browning sugars means carcinogens. Burning meat means carcinogens.
Many of these points are quite validate. I really do appreciate your comment on the nature of death. However I do not totally agree with all you’ve said. I can easily produce scientist and archaeologists who support the idea of original man being a scavenger. Also, consider this, a cow can run 17mph and lets say for good measure the average human can run 9mph. So lets say that human did catch that cow, how many humans do you know that could tear a cow apart with their bare hands? And also are teeth really are not made to rip flesh from bone. Yes i do realize man is the ultimate predator because of our brain and the ability to create tools and traps. But does this make it necessarily right? I am not demonizing anyone who eats meat, but I do not agree with the absurd amount of meat being consumed in America and other gluttonous countries. I also do see any justification for the abuse that occurs in factory farms. So okay a cow “has” to die for you to live? Well even if this is true, how is abuse and torture okay? Lastly, I see so many of these blogs all over the internet (that is arguments for or against eating meat). Frankly, its getting old vegetarians need to realize that all people will NOT give up meat or even a majority of people. And Meat eaters really need to stop criticizing vegetarians for living a lifestyle they approve of. And vegans..please stop acting like your better than ALL of us vegetarians and meat eaters alike, because like this man said death is imminent, as much as you’d like to reduce it it will always occur.
Just my thoughs
*Valid
The argument you’re forgetting here is cows/chickens and the sort only transfer 10 percent of the energy to us as they get from grass or their feed of choice? Seems very inefficient doesn’t it?
Also just as we’ve “evolved” to use tools to eat meat we are still very much more plant eaters. Tribes to this day only eat meat about once a week unnecessary amounts of protein cause stress on the kidneys and the enormous amounts of fat clog our arteries. Not to mention meat causing digestive tract cancers but I can leave that out if you really think that is just a correlation. Anyways just as we evolved to eat meat 1000s of years ago we can no evolve to not eat meat our spectrum of food we can choose nowadays is endless, hemp seed is known to contain all of the amino acids the human body needs (no need for meat anymore) We have so much food that contains protein also forgot to mention hemp seed has more protein by weight than meat what? So why continue this endless addiction of poor dieting and eating ridiculous amounts of meat, have you ever seen vegan bodybuilders? They’re out there and probably healthier than anyone here. I believe that the overeating of meat and and other useless foods is causing all this heart disease and digestive cancer just from the data that I’ve seen but hey I’d like to see you provide data that proves me wrong.
Then you haven’t checked out the site,look in the archives.But then,never let your superior dogma cloud your judgement,right?
I have looked at this website and surprised about how much bullshit it entails. Carnivores were never supposed to eat cooked meat and if there was a fire in the forest they wouldnt eat any cooked remains of animals so unless youre eating a purely sushi diet, a primal diet is very carcinogenic not to mention the stress it puts on your kidneys as I mentioned before. All of the data here is anecdotal experience and I’m sure a lot of you just enjoy eating meat and were the kind of kids that didn’t like eating there vegetables . We can get all of the same organic molecules from plants as we can from meat so if somehow you’re telling me it is more healthy to eat mostly meat than you are absolutely wrong, you need to pick the right foods. Also the treatment of animals in factories is wrong, our society has lost its integrity of respect for animals as food and should not use it for nutrition anymore. Imagine your whole family growing up in Auschwitz knowing you are going to die at 18 and knowing your whole family will have the same fate. Our overpopulation cannot and will not be able to be nourished by meat as it is an inefficient product.
In case you hadn’t noticed, humans use fire. They cook their food on it as well as putting it to other uses. Been that way for quite a long time mon frere.
imagine your whole family growing up and knowing they were going to die at some point. That’s called life. You may be under the illusion you are removed from it but you are not.
I think it is appropriate for people to feel some amount of guilt at the taking of a life for whatever reason. But following the cruelty argument of vegetarians/vegans to its logical conclusion leads you to jainism. If you don’t know what that is, look it up. And if you feel like it is going a bit overboard (and contains some inherent hypocrisy) as far as actually living in this world, then you might want to rethink your argument.
Feedlots are bad, but they certainly aren’t the only way that livestock are raised.
For anyone interested:
Calling All Carnivores – Tell Us Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat: A Contest
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/magazine/tell-us-why-its-ethical-to-eat-meat-a-contest.html?_r=1
“Don’t tell us why you like meat, why organic trumps local or why your food is yours to choose. Just tell us why it’s ethical to eat meat.”
Vegetarians now want to see a meatless society because they think the agriculture industry contributes significantly to climate change.