The Student Room Group

cruelty free meat-would you eat it & why?

Scroll to see replies

Original post by ChaoticButterfly
Because there are other consideration to take into account.

I may get a lot for personal enjoyment from hitting you round the head with a base ball bat. Why should I not do that? To not do that would deny me enjoyment and would be the inferior option.


These other considerations being? I'm not one of these people that cares about being able to claim the moral high ground, and anybody who's willing to pay for that is frankly a moron.

There is also a legality issue with whacking me round the head?

Posted from TSR Mobile
How kind and constructive of you.

Chicken has less flavour than other meats- inferior
Artificial meats have less flavour than their natural equivalents- futhrt inferiority
Artificial meats are relatively expensive to produce- paying more for inferiority

Is it so hard to grasp the concept "paying more for less is stupid?"

Posted from TSR Mobile
Wait, did I make a typo? Because I'm fairly certain that I didn't say we can be cruel to them. I'm fairly certain I said I would eat cruelty free meat, and that it would be better if we were not such a-holes about meat and towards animals.*

Also, I didn't say they don't have interests, I said that it doesn't concern me as much.

Their 'concern'- by which I assume you mean comfort, *being well fed (but not overfed) and a generally happy life, not to mention a quick and painless death- extends about that far. That's all we need to think about when it comes to those sort of creatures.
There is no such thing as a logically coherent moral argument because it relies on the assumption of an absolute morality, in other words for your argument to be coherent you require me to hold a certain moral standard, it also requires that moral standard to be self evidently, well, morally correct.

In other words, for your argument to work you pretty much have to be preaching to the choir.

Posted from TSR Mobile
Reply 44
Original post by Jammy Duel
There is no such thing as a logically coherent moral argument because it relies on the assumption of an absolute morality, in other words for your argument to be coherent you require me to hold a certain moral standard, it also requires that moral standard to be self evidently, well, morally correct.

In other words, for your argument to work you pretty much have to be preaching to the choir.

Posted from TSR Mobile


I think a logically coherent moral argument only relies on the consistency of your own set of moral values.
no i wouldn't. i'm a vegetarian and now the thought of eating any kind of meat grosses me out :colonhash:
Original post by h3rmit
I think a logically coherent moral argument only relies on the consistency of your own set of moral values.


To convince anybody else requires them to hold a similar enough set of moral values, and that supposition is exactly where the argument collapses

Posted from TSR Mobile
Reply 47
Original post by Jammy Duel
To convince anybody else requires them to hold a similar enough set of moral values, and that supposition is exactly where the argument collapses

Posted from TSR Mobile


If you convince them that your moral set of values is beneficial, then you can change their set of moral values to be more similar to yours so the argument will work.
At the moment, I'd definitely look into eating milk/eggs that way, but I'd want to eventually become vegan, as I am moving toward at the moment.

Morally speaking, it's a very tricky one. The quality of life for the animal is what I'm worried about here - they need an animal to take a biopsy from, so does the animal suffer? How is the animal kept - if they're kept in a tiny cage just to have cells harvested repeatedly then it's not exactly a good thing morally.

But at the same time, animals aren't dying, so it's probably a lot better than the current industry IMO
I know we all probably eat frankenfood to some degree, but this is a bit creepy for me. I stopped eating meat because I didn't like the taste, although some of that was hinged on the fact that I didn't like the thought of eating animals. My answer is therefore no, but it does raise interesting questions.

What if you took the DNA from a human and created human meat - would that be any less disgusting?
Original post by Angry cucumber
I will almost certainly eat it in my lifetime as it will be a lot cheaper once commercialised than your standard meat. I'd be happy to eat it.

I'd also pay the premium and buy some actual meat as well.

Also hyperbole of peace with the hidden adhoms with regards to animals suffering. It's a matter of opinion whether the majority of animals raised for meat actually truly do suffer and as we've discussed many times I'm of the opposite opinion to yourself


I haven't done enough research on the issue, but what makes you think that they don't suffer/ Are you just closing your mind to it because it's convenient? Is it morally right to kill an animal even if it didn't suffer beforehand? I doubt animals simply drift off to sleep in a painless way.
Original post by YaliaV


What if you took the DNA from a human and created human meat - would that be any less disgusting?


Rationally I'd be fine with that.

There would be a yuck factor though.
(edited 7 years ago)
Reply 52
The idea of eating any kind of meat, cruelty free or not, makes me feel sick. I'd only eat if I had to for whatever reason
Exactly my thoughts. If they could make sure the animals weren't hurt, had safe conditions, the animal's offspring was ok, etc, then it'd be amazing.. but I'm not sure if that's possible. They also said in the video this industry requires less land, which worries me - what are they planning on doing with the animals they biopsy from or their offspring to require less land?
Original post by Angry cucumber


Also hyperbole of peace with the hidden adhoms with regards to animals suffering. It's a matter of opinion whether the majority of animals raised for meat actually truly do suffer and as we've discussed many times I'm of the opposite opinion to yourself


Hack a cow with a machete and see how it reacts....

There are levels of suffering that are empirically blooming obvious. It is not a matter of opinion.

Do you believe humans are the only animal to feel pain? Of course we can never truly know I guess. But I am going to say my inference that animals feel pain is so plainly the one more likely to be true by orders of magnitude. Humans and cows come from the same place...
(edited 7 years ago)
I did realise this, but I thought about it in the wrong way and mixed myself up with what they meant in regards to land!
I already eat a lot of meat, and would gladly eat meat if no living beings were harmed.
But killing animals is only part of it. There's also the idea of mistreating the animals in the time their cells are harvested, by giving them a bad life (e.g. battery hens). As long as the animals are treated well, I will eat the meat.
Original post by h3rmit
If you convince them that your moral set of values is beneficial, then you can change their set of moral values to be more similar to yours so the argument will work.


Which still requires the arguers morals to be agreed with

Posted from TSR Mobile
Original post by YaliaV
I haven't done enough research on the issue, but what makes you think that they don't suffer/ Are you just closing your mind to it because it's convenient? Is it morally right to kill an animal even if it didn't suffer beforehand? I doubt animals simply drift off to sleep in a painless way.


No, I'm not closing my mind :smile: My work is entirely to relieve animal suffering and pain. Whilst farming is far from perfect, the majority of animals do not suffer.

Original post by ChaoticButterfly
Hack a cow with a machete and see how it reacts....

There are levels of suffering that are empirically blooming obvious. It is not a matter of opinion.

Do you believe humans are the only animal to feel pain? Of course we can never truly know I guess. But I am going to say my inference that animals feel pain is so plainly the one more likely to be true by orders of magnitude. Humans and cows come from the same place...


Lol hyperbole and I think you misunderstood what I meant. How many cows get hacked to pieces by machete in Europe? Exactly

Animals feel pain lots, however in farming, the majority of animals do not suffer, that is my opinion. Yes at times they will feel pain, much like a human would. There's a miriad of pain medication out there that should be used under the 5 freedoms.

As above, farming is not perfect. But to say that most animals live a life not worth living is false in my opinion.


Posted from TSR Mobile
Reply 59
I'm strongly in favour of lab-grown meat and would eat it if it did indeed cut out suffering. Currently, billions of nonhuman animals suffer unnecessarily in the meat industry every single year, and the industry is a major greenhouse gas emitter. Cultured meat could potentially address both of these problems.

There are currently still some concerns about the ethics when it comes to the culture medium. At the moment, fetal bovine serum is used for the culture medium. This process requires slaughtering a pregnant cow and draining blood from the heart of its live, unanesthezised fetus. This is obviously an inhumane process, but pursuing lab-grown meat is absolutely the right thing to do as there is already research going on into using alternative culture mediums.

I'd highly recommend this policy paper on cultured meat for anyone who is interested, outlining the benefits of cultured meat and the challenges it faces going forward.

I've never heard of supermeat before, interesting. New Harvest and Memphis Meats could also potentially have products that are commercially viable in around five years.

Original post by Angry cucumber
No, I'm not closing my mind :smile: My work is entirely to relieve animal suffering and pain. Whilst farming is far from perfect, the majority of animals do not suffer.


Even if this were true, we're still inflicting suffering on millions of nonhuman animals entirely unnecessarily.

I don't think it is true, though: factory farms won't even let you inside to look at them, and they produce the majority of the meat sold in the UK. Chickens are bred as fast as possible such that their legs collapse under their weight and they suffer heart problems; female pigs are confined in farrowing crates for weeks at a time in which they can't even move their bodies (here are some typical UK pig farms, including one owned by someone who received a Queen's honour for work on animal welfare); fish are an entirely separate matter and suffer immensely when being pulled out of the sea.


Millions of animals in the meat industry die before they even reach the slaughterhouse due to fires, floods, road collisions, disease and neglect. During the transportation, the journeys are often long and the animals are under a great deal of stress. And, in the slaughterhouse itself, the slaughter process goes wrong in 10-40% of cases, even in secular slaughterhouses. Again, this equates to millions upon millions of animals dying in intense pain every single year, entirely unnecessarily. Random investigations of secular slaughterhouses corroborate this.

Gassing, an increasingly popular 'humane' way of killing chickens and pigs, is anything but 'humane'. Pigs can be seen gasping for their breath and desperately trying to get out of the gas chambers for up to 20 seconds.

The truth is that industry welfare standards are designed to suit the farmers, not the animals. When animals are viewed as economic units and not sentient beings, their welfare is never going to be taken seriously: they'll be bred as fast as possible as cheaply as possible. Animal welfare law says that we should cut out unnecessary suffering. If the government was serious, they'd shut down the factory farms and outlaw the slaughterhouses, because we don't need to eat meat.

Would you be willing to allow humans to be confined, transported and slaughtered as they are in the meat industry today, even if a majority of them didn't suffer? If you think that intelligence somehow makes a being's suffering less important, let's say these humans have the same mental capacity as a nonhuman animal reared for meat (as some humans do).



The meaning of that was that there's no logical justification for putting the comparable interests of humans over those of nonhumans simply because humans are a member of the species Homo sapiens. If we would have an ethical problem with confining, transporting and slaughtering human infants or severely intellectually disabled humans (who have similar mental capacities to the animals we rear for meat) in the meat industry, then we should have an ethical problem with doing so for nonhumans.
(edited 7 years ago)

Quick Reply

Latest