Animals Eat Animals
Last updated
Last updated
Sometimes it is argued that killing and eating other animals is ethical because other animals do this in the wild. There are two main asymmetries with this argument: 1.) Animals in the wild are in a survival scenario. There are doing what they have to, and it would not be generally practicable for them to only eat plants. 2.) Most other animals do not have the same moral agency that we have - they don't have the same capacity to conceptualize right and wrong.
1.) Humans in survival scenarios may ethically do things that we would otherwise consider in civilization to be unethical. For example, there was a plane crash in the Andes where the survivors ate the dead bodies of their fellow passengers to survive. Another example would be the crew of the Essex in 1821 (whose real-life experience inspired part of the novel, Moby-Dick). Their ship was sunk by a sperm whale, and while awaiting rescue on an island they began to run out of food. They resorted to killing each other and cannibalism to stay alive. In any other context, this would be inexcusable murder, but here it is a survival scenario. As mentioned above, the same logic holds for wild animals. They are in a survival scenario and are doing what they have to to survive. But we are (mostly) in modern society with grocery stores, so we are not in the same survival scenario and therefore don't have that as a justification to kill them. 2.) Very young human children also do not have the same understanding of right and wrong that adult humans do. Therefore, the fact that very young children may hypothetically kick an adult in the shins does not give an adult any justification to, without provocation, be violent against children. It especially would not justify preemptively being violent to any child. In other words, they don't know any better. We do. The same goes for most other animals.
In addition to these two main asymmetries, there are several more counter-arguments depending on the specific situation. 3.) Many animals are herbivores. About one third of all animals are herbivores. For these animals, the argument "animals eat other animals" does not apply, because they don't typically eat other animals. It would be ridiculous to say that they deserve to die because they killed an animal themselves if they haven't even done that. "Among these taxa, 63% were carnivorous, 32% herbivorous, and 3% omnivorous" "One out of every three described eukaryote species is a herbivorous insect" 4.) "Lions tho". Humans are not obligate carnivores, but some other animals are. One the flip-side of the previous argument, some animals do eat animals because they not only have to out of scarcity but because they cannot digest plants. Humans are not lions. We have the ability to eat plants.
5.) Not all wild animals suffer a horrible fate Some people have a picture in their mind where all "prey" animals ultimately die by being ripped to shreds by "predator" animals, and use this impression to justify killing animals because "we're saving them from a worse fate". However, rough statistics suggest that more like 12% of "prey" animals are killed by predators. In Minnesota, 11.5% of white-tailed deer are killed by wolves "There are 3,000 wolves in Minnesota. They eat on average about 50,000 of the estimated 450,000 white-tailed deer a year. This represents about 11.5 % of the deer population, with minimal supplements of snowshoe hares, beavers, and moose." In the UK, 13% of red deer calves (and presumably an insignificant percentage of adults) are killed by Golden Eagles - their only natural predator in the region "To the exclusion of humans, there is only one predator in the UK that is probably capable of bringing down an adult Red deer: the golden eagle [...] 13% of calf deaths were caused by eagles"