You can argue all you like about eating or not eating meat. I have never seen either side win such arguments. As a 'vegetarian' up-taker I do not argue nor judge at the individual level. I have simply made an existential choice. The choice is how I want to live. The choice is to give up food provided by the capture, husbanding and killing of animals. At first this was not easy, now it is no problem. To the majority food animals are utilitarian and expedient beings. Their use and disposal is behind some temple veil. They are not creatures with a will-to-live, capable of their own fulfilment, possessed of their own lives. Krishnamurti said he did not eat meat because he did not want to take the shine from their eyes. It was eloquent and sufficient.
Contrary to lazy monotheistic thinking animals are not put on earth by the deity to harvest their flesh so the great human project can flourish. They are rather a result, like us humans, of time and evolution. Generally the difference between us and them is that we have won the evolution lottery. Our brains, knowledge and technology have made us masters of the world, lords of all creation. The status of the 'domesticated' animal means little to us. That it is the strong and mighty, the civilised, killing the weak barely registers as unjust. If we could see in one vision the vast apparatus of man's scheme, the enclosures, the feed lots, the slaughterhouses and distribution links it would astonish us. As we are a little squeamish and ashamed (our better part) our provisioners hide it from us. It is ironic that having elevated ourselves to the status of 'human', a meaning of which is being substantively different to other creatures, we should in our treatment of them be so heartlessly exploitative. No doubt, man will continue with his dismal project (unless climate change forces a shift.) Most of it is done in good conscience. It is the way we are conditioned in childhood, the banal cultivation of unfeeling and unthinking. But the existential choice is always there, simple, clean and liberating.
