The Discussion of Meat Should be Mostly About Factory Farms

It's bad to focus on the small weird edge cases when billions of beings are being tortured to death

In general, when discussing some topic, it makes sense to focus on what goes on ordinarily in that topic. If someone says ‘I think U.S. arms sales are bad,’ this would not indicate opposition to every single arm the U.S. has ever sold to anyone the world over. Instead, it would indicate that, as a general rule, they think that the U.S. does more harm than good with its arms sales. The correct response to “U.S. arms sales are bad” is not “well, if you look at the 13 arms hat we sent to Micronesia, they turned out fine.”

Similarly, if one claims that vegetables are healthy, they are not claiming every single vegetable is healthy and that if you were on a desert island where a person would poison you for eating vegetables then vegetables would still be healthy. They’re just claiming that, if we look at the real world, vegetables tend to be healthy, most of the time.

So, when a person claims that it’s wrong to eat meat, they are not claiming that every piece of chicken ever ingested by a human is wrong. Nor are they claiming that if one went to a desert island and they had to either eat a chicken or die, they should die. Instead, they’re merely claiming that, in most realistic situations, eating meat is no Bueno.

However, it turns out that there’s a rather inconvenient fact for the people who disagree with those who say they don’t like meat: nearly all meat in the U.S. comes from factory farms. Nearly every being that graces most people’s dinner plate grew up in the glorified torture chambers we call factory farms—before suffering a brutal, merciless slaughter at the hands of a slaughterhouse—it’s blood adorning its concrete floors.

When put in this light, the wrongness of eating meat becomes obvious. Even if you think that it’s perfectly fine to eat meat that lived a good life, you really shouldn’t think that it’s right to pretty much ever eat meat in the U.S.. Nearly all meat is the tortured corpse of an animal—as I’ve documented before.

If you think that it’s only okay to eat happy animals, then you should be against nearly all of what goes on in the U.S. meat industry. You should be almost entirely on board with the vegans.

The question of the wrongness of eating meat is the same as the question of the wrongness of eating factory-farmed meat. The sooner we recognize that, the less we’ll waste time on irrelevant digressions about the minuscule fraction of meat that lived a good life. Our consumption of meat from the actually existing meat industry is a cruel and savage policy that we should terminate.