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Eating Meat

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Submitted By bigbengii
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Eating meat has become a ritual since mankind was created. Hunting to survive and to feed, or in other words our ‘survival instinct’ is one of the few traces that our ancestors have left the modern mankind today. Although mankind are not carnivores per say, we have evolved into thinking so. The majority of us have been brought up eating meat and presumably, have never questioned it. Taking these into account, how ethical is meat eating? One can argue that non-human animals also have the same rights and killing them for food and using them as a mean to human gratification, does not treat them respectfully. The fact that one has been raised to eat meat is cannot be an explanation of why mankind started eating meat and it cannot justify the claim that eating meat is ethical. Yet most of us have no idea that when we eat meat, we are in fact making a subconscious choice. When we were growing up, forming our identity and values, it is fair to say that generally our parents decide on whether we eat meat or not and opposed to making our own choice. We were never asked to reflect upon this daily practice that has such profound unethical dimensions and personal implications. Eating animals were just a given; it was just the way things were. However, this kind of argument allows us to eat human flesh all that required is that one is raised in a cannibalistic tradition, because then we can say that ‘this is the way that things are! But what if in a culture eating human was ethically good? What if one was raised to cut people’s head off with a knife everytime the desire arose? To give more real examples, two generations ago, women used to stay at home and were expected to be submissive to their husbands. They did not work or have the same equality with men. Now, are we to accept those as ‘proper’ in perpetuity? For more than two million years we were primarily

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