I considered the morality of eating meat for a decent portion of my life. The conclusion I came to is such things like ethical vegetarianism is an ethical and intellectual dead end which disregards the nature of the beast, and the beast is the most violent and violently omnivorous apex predator to ever grace the Earth. If there’s a landmass we haven’t walked, it’s because it is literally underwater having been foreclosed upon by some glacier or the Ocean, and we’ve walked some of those lands too once upon a time.

If the way things are isn’t right, then it is besides the point because the way things are is so deeply rooted into our psychology that you can’t change it without violently changing what it means to be human, so you essentially have to have humans become something other than human, and that doesn’t seem like a winning survival strategy in the long term.

When we’re not eating God’s creatures, we’re burning down the forests and fields they live in and pouring concrete over them so we can sleep better at night in little towns and villages and hamlets with other people who participated in the festivities, or at least their ancestors did, or at least they bought the house from someone whose ancestors did etc. We also do it to grow more food, all those plants we’ve selected for over the entire history of agriculture that we’ve deemed to be beneficial to us to keep around? We burned down other species, even to extinction with no regard as to whether the burning mass over yonder was plant or fungus or animal flesh or insect.

I can’t seriously consider ethical vegetarianism or ethical veganism a serious argument for not eating meat because it goes so deeply against the violent nature of humanity that it disregards what we are entirely. Given it is probably the most defining characteristic of Homo sapiens, it is a fairly massive characteristic to overlook.

I can seriously consider reasons for eating less meat that include things like “this meatless dish is delicious”, only you don’t emphasize the meatless bit, or “methane emissions are a pretty serious concern, is there something we can do about that?” or “cows actually use up a large amount of resources that might be better spent on something else.”

I can consider those seriously, I just don’t think they’re winning arguments. But, at least they’re willing to try to work with the nature of the beast rather than against it. People who consider themselves “ethical vegans” can make a better case than starting from a position that eating meat is morally wrong, even if you believe it! It’s okay to believe something like that, I don’t agree with you, but so long as you or someone else isn’t trying to use state force to enforce their belief on me, I think we’ll get along just fine.