Is It Okay To Kill Animals For Food?

As children, most of us were confronted with the reality of life, which is quite brutal when it comes to food chains. Children all over the world realize at some point that the tasty chicken wings on the plate came from a living creature. Not only children, but also adults all over the world are slowly becoming more self-conscious about this fact. The rise of vegetarianism and veganism are two clear consequences of this mass realization. But still, if it were a universally moral thing to abstain from killing animals for food, we would have stopped it by now, right? What is going on here? Let’s try and investigate.

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The Hunter

Remember the last time you went on a hunt to kill the animal you’re about to have for dinner? That’s right. If you’re the average civilized individual, you don’t hunt. You probably do not know what it means to kill something big enough for you to understand the process of killing. But at some point, we as a race did know and did understand. It’s not just cats that go after projectiles, but also human beings. Have you ever wondered why we humans are obsessed with ball-related sports? The ability of yours and mine to track fast-moving objects such as balls is partly because of our evolved instinct to hunt.

Even the ability of ours to cover vast distances by foot is an evolved trait to track, tire-down, and hunt preys. But these days, we mostly run or bike long distances using this ability of ours (at least some of us do that). But then, we arrive at the question: If we are not hunting anymore, do we really need to kill and eat animals? Let’s hold that question in our minds, and consider a few more significant factors before trying to answer it.

The Gatherer – “No Need To Kill Animals For Food”

The other side of human history involves covering vast distances, and gathering food and other utilities necessary for survival. Be it berries, or be it wood for shelter, human beings have always gathered food and utilities from nature. A part of us is composed of the gatherer. If we could survive partly just by gathering essentials in the past, with our current technological advancements, shouldn’t it be possible to completely avoid killing animals for food? Let’s hold that thought as well.

The Farmer

One of humanity’s greatest achievements is agriculture. What agriculture essentially did is it industrialized hunting and gathering. Organised mass-raising of crops and animals is done in farms, until the day of harvest arrives. Once the plants and animals are harvested, the next batch is queued. To try and answer the two questions we’ve already asked, agriculture could be an answer. Agriculture is a piece of technology that allows us, if we wish to, to completely eliminate animal-killing, and just focus on crops. But why hasn’t this come to pass?

The Detached

While agriculture has made our species flourish, it has also created a vastly complicated system, where the majority of the population is no longer required to work directly with food. While a minority of the population is involved in raising and harvesting food via agriculture, the vast majority has moved on to solving other problems and questions that humanity faces. The women and men who design our latest smartphones are probably so detached from agriculture, that they do not know anymore what it means to kill. For them, when they see a plate of chicken breast, or steak, or ham, they do not relate it to an animal being killed. As a result of this detachment, most people are oblivious to the suffering that is caused to the animals in most of the farms. There exist some farms that still treat animals very kindly, that is until the day of the harvest comes.

What would happen if people became more aware of the suffering? Well, our present reality IS the answer. With the growth of internet, people in every walk of life and corner of the society are becoming aware of the suffering caused to animals, and they are presented with the choice. Vegetarianism and veganism seem to be potential answers. But they don’t seem to have saved the day either. Why is this?

The Nature – “Kill Animals For Food”

To me, it appears that we are fighting against our own nature here. If human beings could live without eating meat, we would have already accomplished at some point in our history. At the same time, we are confronted by our altruistic nature. We, as a collective, wish to eat meat, but do not want animals to suffer at the same time. The answer that I’m about to reveal here could surprise and offend many. But still, the answer lies in the nature of human altruism. Approaching it biologically, altruism exists in human beings not because we wish for the ultimate good of life (we convince ourselves that this is the case). But rather, altruistic behavior is an evolved trait for social integration and hierarchical mating placement within the species. This is one of the reasons why vegans judge people who eat meat, and the other way around. This is also one of the reasons why identity politics exists. The research work done by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler in their work: The Elephant in the Brain covers the scientific reasoning behind this concept in detail.

In fact, if you think that this behavior exists only in human beings, you would be mistaken. It exists in almost all animal species, even those that cannot reflect their altruistic nature like we can. We are struggling more because of the scale in which we have developed as a planetary species. In the end, in my opinion, we need to accept our nature, and find ways of minimizing the suffering we are causing because of our scale. But to completely stop eating meat could very well be impossible, because this requires a gene-level change in the human beings, which could potentially wipe out the entire species. If there’s anything we have learned from evolution theory, it is that the primordial instincts of a species kick in when its survival is challenged. And primordial instincts are by nature not capable of moral decisions. The dog continues to chase its tail.

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