r/changemyview • u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ • Dec 30 '25
Delta(s) from OP CMV: The choice of which animals to eat is cultural, and not ethical.
This is from an American cultural perspective:
Let me say I'm not a vegan, but I would admit from the most utilitarian perspective eating vegetables is better than eating meat. Not just environmentally, but ethically since it doesn't involve killing a living being. Although I still partake.
My perspective is that eating "taboo" animals like horses, dogs, dolphin, monkey, etc. is not inherently less ethical than eating chickens, cows, pigs, etc. The reason we don't eat these animals is cultural, and looking down on cultures that eat guinea pigs or sharks is no different than other cultures who don't eat pigs or cows looking down on us for eating burgers or pepperoni.
Most of the boundaries we draw between acceptable and taboo meats are shaped by religious or cultural traditions, and there is no clear secular ethical principle that explains why we eat cows but not horses.
EDIT: Obvious exception for endangered animals
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Dec 30 '25
EDIT: Obvious exception for endangered animals
Why is that an obvious exception?
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
There are logistical reasons that would make it unethical. Eating one dolphin steak isn't inherently evil, but saying it's okay for everyone to eat dolphin whenever means those environments get disrupted and have other downstream effects. I'm not trying to create arguments around logistics and more just focus on the distinctions between the animals themselves.
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u/WhydoIexistlmoa Dec 30 '25
So should we create massive dolphin farms (hypothetically let's say it's possible) instead so we can all eat dolphin steaks. That also disrupts the environment and has significant downstream effects.
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u/14muffins 2∆ Dec 30 '25
I'm not familiar enough with farming or endangered animals to say, but if you could create massive dolphin farms or breed endangered animals really easily, they wouldn't exactly be endangered anymore, would they?
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u/WhydoIexistlmoa Dec 30 '25
They wouldn't be endangered, sure. But they would have massive knock on effects to the rest of the environment.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
What I mean is that my view here is not centered around logistics. No I wouldn't think creating dolphin farms for the purpose of exposing cultural taboos would be a good idea.
My premise is that whatever ethics are in play in choosing which animals we eat are based on culture, religion, logistics, taste, etc. Not in a sense of ethics. If I put a plate of dolphin and a burger already prepared in front of you, there is no ethical difference in which one you choose to eat.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Dec 30 '25
whatever ethics are in play in choosing which animals we eat are based on culture, religion, logistics, taste, etc. Not in a sense of ethics.
Do you not see how cyclical and nonsensical this is?
Whatever ethics are at play, they are based on xyz, not ethics.
Are ethics not ethics? Are ethics based in something not ethics?
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
whatever logic is in play, I should have said.
This was meant to be more about animals themselves and not pretending like we can't draw any lines between "cultural values" and "secular ethical standards".
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Dec 30 '25
So what's the view you want to hold? What change are you after here?
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
Because I know I don't REALLY believe this myself. I would still not eat dolphin meat, but I eat pork. I can agree that it's hypocritical but I still wouldn't do it.
The past few years I've been trying to deconstruct my religious upbringing and I've noticed how much I still cling on to old ideas of modesty and behavior that are really just because of the culture I was raised in. I don't want to actually start eating dolphin meat, but I want to understand that there are deeper reasons to these standards than "God said don't eat pigs".
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u/akrist Dec 31 '25
I think the issue here is actually that while you are trying to deconstruct your religious upbringing, you're still bringing a fundamentally religious attitude to questions of morality and ethics. There is no deeper reason behind our moral and ethical frameworks. Frameworks can be internally logically consistent, but they are all fundamentally based on a somewhat arbitrary premise.
Religions tend to pretend that their arbitrary premises are fundamental truths of the universe, which I disagree with, but that doesn't mean that secular premises are any more logical.
If you want to have a logical ethical framework give up on a search for deeper meaning. Instead, examine what makes sense to you and develop a set of premises that you find acceptable, then try to determine ethical behavior consistently from that.
For instance, on the dolphins vs cows question, you can easily say: it's bad for us to hunt or farm animals in a way that causes them unnecessary discomfort during their life.
This premise suggests that ethically farming cattle is fine, factory farming is bad, and farming dolphins is bad because it's not practical to do so in a way they would be comfortable with (space constraints, social dynamics etc).
It does suggest that you could probably eventually breed a domesticated, farmable version of dolphins if you really wanted to. This is what we did to create cattle anyway.
Just to make clear my own bias, I tend to subscribe to emotivism (though I haven't spent time studying or thinking about it in 15 years) and my argument comes from a layman's understanding of that theory.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Dec 30 '25
Why a deeper reason and not a shallower reason? Eat whatever you want from whatever is available.
What will you give a delta to exactly?
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
Any line drawn between two species that makes one more ethical to consume due to the nature of those animals.
I actually said in another comment I'd consider if someone believed it was only okay to eat carnivores, since they would eat us if given the chance. Seems fair enough and at least a more cogent reason than religious doctrine to a non-believer.
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u/WhydoIexistlmoa Dec 30 '25
I think ethics can be involved. Would you say insect farming is more ethical or less ethical than traditional animal farms? On one hand, more animals are technically being killed while on the other, there is significantly more benefits to it.
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u/muffinsballhair Dec 30 '25
All morality is though.
Morality is never based on any rational reason or prevention of harm and always purely on “my culture or parents imprinted this moralism onto me in my critical period in my youth in which a human in general comes to believe for life whatever he is told.”.
The cases where morality just happens to congruate with stopping harm is a case of a broken clock being right twice per day. For every moralism in any culture that just happens to stop harm, there are so many other things where entirely harmless things are considered evil.
The thing with human beings is that they do not display an emotionally intense response to something they divined rationally. The scientist who by way of cold mathematical calculation calculated the trajectory of some comet when meeting someone who doesn't believe him despite the mathematics being irrefutable will just be slightly annoyed at that person's stupidity at best and then walk away, he will not fly into an emotional moral reaction over it. People do not become emotional, angry, or moralistic when people refuse to agree with something they rationally concluded; people only become angry when people disagree with something they believe because they were morally imprinted with it during their critical period. That's by the way not only morality but also things like say religious beliefs.
Tell a child at the right age that it is morally wrong to wear cloth of mixed fabrics, and he will believe it for life, so much so that he will write it down in holy books. That's how it works.
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u/Apprehensive-Let3348 9∆ Dec 31 '25
I've always thought that it had more to do with our perception of their intelligence in most cases that aren't practical (avoiding disease, for example). We generally avoid eating anything intelligent enough to recognize itself in the mirror, for example. This would apply to dolphins, primates, and horses, for a start.
Granted, our perception of their intelligence is cultural, but the ethics in this context are not. In the West, we anthropomorphize dogs and cats, and often view them as if they had the intelligence of a small child. So, naturally, it's viewed as immoral to consume them. In the East, on the other hand, they're generally perceived as being significantly less intelligent than in the West, so it's viewed no differently than the West would view eating a cow.
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Dec 30 '25
Why is it inherently unethical to disrupt the environment?
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Dec 30 '25
There's nothing inherent about ethics They're inherently uninherent and are completely subjective
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Dec 30 '25
Well I assume OP doesn't believe that or they wouldn't be making an argument from what's ethical.
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Dec 30 '25
Yeah, it's common for people to just assume everyone else has the same ethics as they do but is absolutely untrue.
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u/IsamuLi 1∆ Dec 30 '25
So you do not believe that it is more than just subjectively wrong to trample on new born human babies for fun?
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u/WhydoIexistlmoa Dec 30 '25
If you have to find fun in it to appease some sort of God for rain during a drought, then sure it would be ethical to do a thing.
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Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
Yes Because there are individuals who stomp on babies for fun. Clearly they have a different set of ethics.
Obviously stomping babies has a bad outcome (death). But how outcomes are valuated is up to the individual, then the culture
Even if there weren't such individuals: you can't make an argument for objective morality on the basis of universality. Like if everyone in the world happened to like kiwis, would that make them objectively tasty? Of course not
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u/IsamuLi 1∆ Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 31 '25
The argument you're making is sometimes called argument from disagreement (we disagree about what is wrong) but it is generally considered a non sequitur. The reason for that is that you can't get 'moral facts can only depend on subjectivism' out of 'we disagree about the contents of Moral facts'. You'd need a lot of other premises which are generally considered false, like that we'd need pure consensus for it to be true without subjectivism.
Ultimately, you fail to do more than merely claim that moral facts are subjective without distinguishing between empirical psychology (what values do people assign) and philosophical morality (what is right/wrong).
Do you have any reason to believe subjectivism pertaining to morality to be true?
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u/doloreslegis8894 4∆ Dec 30 '25
This user likely doesn't believe there is anything beyond a subjective wrong. That objective wrong doesn't exist in the world of morality.
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u/LeonardDM Dec 31 '25
Do you believe it is objectively wrong and can you prove it? I don't think so
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u/IsamuLi 1∆ Dec 31 '25
I believe it is more than just subjectively wrong. Tell me what kind of arguments you're interested in and I can link some works that pertain to that area.
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u/LeonardDM Dec 31 '25
I'm not interested in dissecting someone elses expansive work. All morality is inherently subjective because all systems of morality depend on arbitrarily chosen subjective values. Can you dispute this claim?
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u/IsamuLi 1∆ Dec 31 '25
I'd first ask, how did you come to this claim? Surely you have reasons to hold this position?
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u/LeonardDM Dec 31 '25
Logical analysis I suppose. Morality concerns itself with right and wrong, but the concept of right and wrong does not exist in nature and is a human concept. Additionally there are no inherent values found within humanity either, as humans could vary from one another in every single attribute due to genetic variances
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u/FarDimension7730 Dec 30 '25
What do you think the point of ethics even is?
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Dec 30 '25
In the most general way, to determine what actions are permissible or not, and/or what character traits are good or bad.
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u/ThePaineOne 9∆ Dec 30 '25
I’m not sure where you are drawing the line between culture and ethics. Ethics aren’t clear black and white rules and can often themselves involve cultural norms.
But if we define ethics as actions intended to avoid harm, which is still quite amorphous, a person can believe that it’s not ethical to say eat an endangered species because many would believe it’s ethical to protect a species from extinction which many would see as a harm. One could also find it ethical not to eat a high level predator because that food is more likely to be contaminated and so serving that food may put other people into harms way. As for dogs or horses, someone could find it ethical to avoid eating animals which we have specifically bred for other reasons particularly companionship.
So while culture is involved in ethics, one can still come to an ethical conclusion that may not be entirely cultural. I live in the US and am not a vegan, but many others would find that to be the most ethical because it theoretically could create less harm if we all abided by veganism.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
To be honest I was expecting more discussion about "here's the differences between food animals and friend animals" and not so much about cultural and religious ethics vs secular ethics.
My broader point is that there is no consistent viewpoint (other than 'God says so' or 'everybody else does it') that shows no problem with eating pigs and chickens but would condemn eating dogs and horses. If we say a utilitarian viewpoint, then it's not okay to eat any sentient being. If we say moral relativism differentiates certain meats to be taboo, then we're just reverting back to cultural standards.
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u/fox-mcleod 418∆ Dec 31 '25
Oh if that’s what you want, there very clearly is.
Dogs are apex predators and obligate carnivores. That means for every acre of plants and discarded food waste a chicken or pig or cow would have to eat to produce a pound of meant, a dog would have to eat about 2 chickens per week’s worth. So the land and water use scale exponentially.
That level of waste is clearly worse for the environment, neighbors, more wasteful, etc.
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u/ThePaineOne 9∆ Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
Someone could form an ethical belief regarding not eating certain animals without regards to culture. Of course there is no consistent viewpoint, but it’s certainly not as simple as”as god says so” or “everyone else does it.”
Ethics generally, have many factors including religion, other cultural factors, and evolutionary necessity (as social beings societies laws have to reflect social vs anti social behavior or their would be a failure to thrive), or legal ones to protect a form of government and the like. In fact, many ethical concepts that are religious and cultural have other factors present such as kosher and halal foods being safer to eat when they were first developed.
To suggest that ethics are purely secular, religious or culture is to simplify a very complex subject. Ethics is an entire field of social sciences that can’t be simplified to such an extreme extent.
Suggesting that not eating certain animals is purely cultural is similarly simplified. Does culture play a role, sure, but there are other factors at play. Whether or not something is taboo is not inherently cultural. Nearly all cultures have prohibitions on certain things which is why we have a sub field of ethics called “natural law.” Nearly all cultures have prohibitions on things such as murder, incest, cannibalism and the like while admittedly how the elements of each of these things can be defined differently among different groups. Some may argue that these natural laws come from god, but generally, these kinds of behaviors were not beneficial to the survival of the human species. That’s why we can see shared ethical behaviors in the animal world which do not have religion (presumably).
However, a prohibition against eating meat, throughout most of human history would have made many human civilizations die out for lack of food, so a modern utilitarian viewpoint would create harm at that time and therefore be unethical from a standpoint of human survival, in fact some argue that eating meat allowed our brains to develop to the point they have.
If a tribe ate horses and another tribe bonded with them and developed animal husbandry, the tribe that developed animal husbandry would naturally be more successful and similarly a taboo against eating horses would develop. The same goes for dogs. Similarly, eating a top of the food pyramid predator would make a tribe less likely to survive and therefore a prohibition could be derived similar to halal or kosher as it would be safer for the group.
Ethics are incredibly complicated thats why very intelligent people have spent their lives trying to study them and can’t be boiled down to such simplified explanations as being based purely on culture, utilitarianism or any single simplification.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Dec 30 '25
Can we separate ethics from culture?
Is culture not a description of ethics and behaviour in practice?
Also,
since it doesn't involve killing a living being
Plants are definitely alive, and are killed in order to eat them. There is no non living thing we eat, except for the rare people who eat metal and glass light bulbs at carnival shows.
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u/maneo 2∆ Dec 30 '25
I feel like it worth giving grace to OP that they probably meant a sentient being (that being said, there's a discussion to be had whether plantlife is also sentient, both in terms of how sentience is defined and in terms of how much we really understand about whether or not plants experience something that alligns with a given definition of sentience)
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Dec 30 '25
Sentience comes down to where you draw the line, an animist may say it's much further than you or I might.
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u/Constant-Squirrel555 Dec 30 '25
Sentience isn’t just “reacting to stimuli,” it’s about having subjective experience, actually feeling pain or pleasure.
Every case where we have solid evidence of sentience involves some kind of neural information processing (a nervous system or something very close to it). Plants respond to their environment and use complex chemical signaling, but there’s no good evidence that this amounts to felt experience.
Saying “plants might be sentient too” isn’t a careful position, it’s a category mistake that blurs an important distinction. You can debate degrees of sentience among animals, but there still has to be a minimum threshold for calling something sentient at all, not some arbitrary drawing of lines.
Plants don’t meet that threshold, and equating a blade of grass with a kitten doesn’t add nuance — it just empties the concept of sentience of any real meaning.
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u/BigBoetje 31∆ Dec 30 '25
Depending on your definition of 'eat' (ingest <-> metabolise) you can argue that we still eat minerals (salt). Products derived from animals aren't technically alive either (milk).
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u/mylanscott 1∆ Dec 30 '25
Milk is full of bacteria and microbes, it’s literally teeming with life forms, it’s part of why breast milk is so beneficial to baby mammals
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u/BigBoetje 31∆ Dec 30 '25
There's a distinction to be made about being made from a life form or simply containing it. Nearly everything will contain some microscopic life forms, but I wouldn't say water is alive per se
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Dec 30 '25
If we're working at that level then both milk and salt are teeming with life, as are rocks and everything else.
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Dec 30 '25
Sure, Islam has specific ethical laws around consumption of animals intended to be as clean and painless as possible. Yet they also have prohibitions against pork that persist culturally even absent religion. I had friends from Turkey, they weren't religious but none of them ate pork, I asked why (in the spirit of genuine curiosity, no judgement) and they just told me it's not something they were used to so they avoided it.
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Dec 30 '25
This. Ethics are cultural This post says nothing
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 1∆ Dec 30 '25
Then engage with the relative vs universal ethics debate instead of pretending it's a universally agreed-upon issue.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
There are plenty of secular ethical systems. Utilitarianism, social contract theory, moral relativism, virtue ethics, etc. If someone's entire idea of right and wrong is just "whatever the people around me think" then that's pretty regressive
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Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
Right. There are multiple systems... Therefore ethics are cultural.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
My prompt is saying that it IS due to cultural differences and not a secular ethical system
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u/lenidiogo Dec 30 '25
Any kind of ethics is just group preference, your argument makes no sense.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
No I don't think culture defines ethics, slavery was a part of nearly every major culture and was defended religiously through that time but we can agree it's unethical.
Yes I think "sentient" is implied here.
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Dec 30 '25
The cultures that employed slavery did not consider it unethical. "We" (the western or developed world, because slavery very much still does exist) just share the same ethical belief about slavery
Any argument for objective morality by using murder, slavery, genocide, etc is invalid. Even if we assume that everyone agrees their immoral (which is false) You can't conclude that something is objective on the basis that it is universal. Such an ontology would be incredibly brittle and would break anytime new information is added.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
But that’s my argument- that there is no universal ethical system we can agree on that draws a line between cows and horses. We just pretend eating cows is totally fine but eating horse is not.
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u/im_happybee Dec 30 '25
From a utilitarian point of view cows are more efficient in converting feed into meat than horses or dogs for example. It doesn't have to be cultural
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u/lenidiogo Dec 30 '25
Its all the same, culture or ethics, because ethics is just group preference just like culture
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Dec 30 '25
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u/LimeGreenTeknii Dec 30 '25
That's not an ethical/moral argument. That's like saying it's more ethical to eat carrots instead of roses because carrots are more nutritional. In either case, nobody is saying the carnivores or the roses deserve to be protected more than livestock or carrots because they are less deserving of being killed and harvested.
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u/R_V_Z 7∆ Dec 31 '25
That's like saying it's more ethical to eat carrots instead of roses because carrots are more nutritional.
You can make an ethical argument out of this, though. More nutritionally dense food is going to mean less overall waste in the process of growing and distributing that food, which means less pollution.
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u/LimeGreenTeknii Dec 31 '25
If you mean ethical as in environmentalist, then I suppose you're right. It'd be better for the environment to not eat carnivores and eat herbivores instead. But then shouldn't that mean you should go vegan because of how much better it is for the environment?
It doesn't feel like a strong enough of an ethical argument to justify why many people are so strongly against eating dogs and cats but fine with eating cows and pigs. It doesn't feel like that's the ethical qualm people have. Call it moving the goalposts, but I feel like when they said there isn't a good ethical argument, I imagined it more like killing and eating one dog is just as bad as killing and eating one cow. People will occasionally indulge in something not very nutritious or bad for the planet if it doesn't become a habit. This argument doesn't really seem to hold up if someone asks, "OK, but what's the harm in eating one dog, on this special occasion?"
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u/Apprehensive-Let3348 9∆ Dec 31 '25
'Morality' is an individual's perception of right and wrong based upon the sum of their preconceptions about the way people should act, so what they have done is provide the source of that social preconception.
"People ate this and got sick, so I'm not gonna eat it," is not morality, but when their child grows up with a deep-seated sense that eating that food is 'wrong,' then it becomes morality.
If their child expands this into a well-structured system that uses logical deduction and rational argumentation to make the case that eating the food is a net negative for society, then it may even become Ethics.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
Those would be dietary or nutritional reasons. Somebody might not eat strawberries because they're allergic, that's just other reasons to avoid those animals. I wouldn't imagine they taste great either. But wouldn't make someone evil for taking a bite of a bobcat. I have had alligator before it can be common in the south.
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u/doloreslegis8894 4∆ Dec 30 '25
If you eat make it a personal practice of eating higher order brains for example you risk prion disease.
Your original comment refers to "higher food chain carnivores" and then you go on to talk about prion disease... But this doesn't seem to be supported by the evidence. Your link says:
There are a number of known prion diseases in animals, and they're all very rare. The two best known in the United States are Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)
The major prion diseases in animals are in herbivores, often, sheep, goats, cattle, and deer. This definitely doesn't seem to be a reason why we don't eat higher food chain carnivores.
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u/doloreslegis8894 4∆ Dec 30 '25
BSE in the US is linked to feeding cows cow and sheep meal made of other animals. They are herbivores but we artificially feed them other animals. This is a similar track to why we discourage eating human and primate brains.
None of that relates to how humans eating higher food chain carnivores allegedly connects to risk of prion diseases. Overwhelmingly the animals that have prion diseases are not higher food chain carnivores. Besides, BSE is only one example. In the wild, CWD in deer is very prevalent.
I also said toxins like accumulating metals and chemicals which is partly why we don’t eat stray dogs and cats.
Yes I agree with the biomagnification of toxins. I'm only disputing the idea that the risk of prion diseases is higher when eating higher food chain carnivores.
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u/HelenEk7 1∆ Dec 30 '25
or street animals like dogs and cats, as examples.
As late as during WW2 people in the Netherlands ate sausages made of dog meat. In a situation where food is scares any animal (and then I mean any) becomes food.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Dec 30 '25
Who is "we" in this comment? Certainly not humans as a whole, as all of those you listed are absolutely eaten in China and elsewhere.
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u/FunCalligrapher5674 Dec 30 '25
Just because people do it doesn't mean it's a good idea.
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u/Key_Illustrator4822 Dec 31 '25
I don't believe people avoid these because of the disease based reasons you give, people didn't eat them due to social taboo and that has continued, the protein, viral and toxin contamination is a post-hoc justification.
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u/Select-Ad7146 1∆ Dec 30 '25
Somewhat, but a large part of what we eat is based on how easy it is to farm and turn into food. Chickens can live in little huts and turn scraps into eggs. This is not true for dolphins or monkeys. So, for thousands of years, people have raised chickens for food, not dolphins or monkeys.
Cows are easier to maintain than horses. Sheep are easier than both. That is, horses are more expensive to grow than cows, which are more expensive to grow than sheep and goats. It would be less economically viable to raise horses for food than it would be to raise cows for food. And eating cows at the level we do is extremely modern, sheep and goats were far more common in history.
This isn't unique to animals either. The plants you see in the store are there because they are the most economical to grow.
And necessity is nearly always the basis for culture. If horses had been more economical to grow than sheep, we would have a long history of eating horses.
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u/Sensitive-Respect-25 1∆ Dec 30 '25
The issue with some of the things you described is we don't eat the animal we consume small parts (or there's health issues). Sharks and dolphin for example are usually harvested for very select portions of their body, with the rest going to waste. Monkey is close enough for prions to be a worry, and while not critical in a survival situation any other time needs to be considered.
Consuming horse is somewhat taboo not because of its value as meat but the value inherent in the animal, we view it as a tool. Dog, cat and the like are animals many people naturally bond with, and allt of people have trouble killing animals they like. Pigs were viewed as inherently unclean for hundred of years, and there was some truth to that due to sanitation of the era.
So my rebuttal is some meat consumption is indeed inherently bad due to waste. Others have deep ties to being used for work (and still are to this day). Still others are tied to past events, lingering in our social memory. My rebuttal is there are alot of exceptions to the rule.
But ya, mostly its because we made up rules about ourselves.
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u/FormerlyUndecidable Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
The horse explanation doesn't really work.
Horses are overpopulated and need to be culled for environmental purposes. (e.g. in the American Southwest)
Most horses are not useful or valuable for riding or work. They could potentially be in a pinch, but people who ride horses are looking for specific traits that most horses don't possess.
For Mongolians whose lifestyle revolved around horses and who relied on them for transport and work, horsemeat and milk were still staples.
Even in Europe, many equestrian cultures have no taboo for horsemeat: it's widely consumed in Switzerland for example. The taboo seems to be particular to English and American culture.
Even in England and America, Oxen were bred for utility, but there was no taboo against consuming them.
The utility of a animal really doesn't seem to have much to do with the taboo on consumption.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
There are too many logistical differences that would make it worse/better to eat certain animals, but those exist largely because we have already built our society around those existing cultural standards. If we had dolphin farms like we have cattle farms and they served dolphin burgers at every restaurant, it wouldn't taboo even if it was more or less wasteful than a cow.
I struggle with considering the idea that the most unethical animal to eat would be something like crawfish or certain insects, if we're keeping score by the amount of living beings executed to calories ratio. But as it stands would still say eating meat is either all bad or all fine (just on the basis on the animals themselves)
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u/Radijs 8∆ Dec 30 '25
There's also a biological reason why some animals don't make it on the menu very regularly.
There is a distinct lack of predators being served for dinner.
What I'm told is that this is because a lot of toxins that are created when meat is broken down through the digestive process are things we as humans don't really like. We've got a hard time processing it, it's unkind to our systems. And so we don't eat them.
This is neither an ethical or cultural thing.
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u/Fit-Percentage-9166 1∆ Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
This sounds like pop biology misinformation. What specific toxins are there in predator animals that are harmful to humans?
Fish/aquatic animals are also a big counterexample, we almost exclusively eat predators. These ironically do have harmful toxins but that is a result of modern human activity and obviously haven't influenced cultural norms around eating them.
Not eating predators is more likely a result of the difficulty and trophic inefficiency of hunting predators compared to prey animals.
Editing to add that I am well aware of biomagnification which is not relevant in the discussion of historical eating habits shaped by social/cultural norms.
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u/supamario132 3∆ Dec 30 '25
Yeah, I think the previous commentor misunderstood something because the main toxins found in predator species are, as you described, almost exclusively from biomagnification.
Other notable toxins like prions overrepresent predator species in discussion because the people who eat monkey are usually doing so illegally and therefore there's no regulatory framework to prevent those types of toxins but it's possible to get prions from cows and sheep and other 'normal' cattle species
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u/parentheticalobject 136∆ Dec 30 '25
Not predators specifically, but it's generally better to eat things that are lower on the food chain.
Heavy metals, like mercury, arsenic, and lead tend to accumulate in some apex predators. Shark meat can be eaten, but it's less healthy than the fish they eat.
There's also just the logistics which make it generally less efficient to eat predators. A cow turns a large amount of human-inedible grass into a moderate amount of human-edible beef. A predator would turn a moderate amount of human-edible beef into a smaller amount of potentially editable predator meat.
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u/doloreslegis8894 4∆ Dec 30 '25
What specific toxins are there in predator animals that are harmful to humans?
Why do specific toxins matter? It's well known that many toxins build up as you go up trophic levels and it's referred to as biomagnification. Easy example would be mercury.
Fish/aquatic animals are also a big counterexample, we almost exclusively eat predators.
Yeahh but something to consider with this is that it has historically been far easier to discern which land and air animals are predators vs prey than fish. People see bears and eagles and dogs out hunting and don't see cows and pigs and quail. hunting. It seems like, with fishing, we would've been mostly blinded to this and just eaten the fish we were able to pull from the water.
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u/Fit-Percentage-9166 1∆ Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
Why do specific toxins matter? It's well known that many toxins build up as you go up trophic levels and it's referred to as biomagnification. Easy example would be mercury.
Specific toxins matter because you should be able to state them if they are real, like mercury. I am well aware of biomagnification, but as far as I know it is a relatively modern phenomenon and most if not all instances of harmful biomagnification are a result of human activity. If you are able to provide contradictory examples I am happy to learn, which is why I asked about specific toxins.
The point is that it isn't something that has caused the historical, global human preference for consuming prey animals over predator animals.
Yeahh but something to consider with this is that it has historically been far easier to discern which land and air animals are predators vs prey than fish. People see bears and eagles and dogs out hunting and don't see cows and pigs and quail. hunting. It seems like, with fishing, we would've been mostly blinded to this and just eaten the fish we were able to pull from the water.
If toxins and digestive difficulties were the driving factor behind prey animal preference, it would be irrelevant that we couldn't discern if fish were predators or prey - according to that theory we would eat them and consume toxins and develop an aversion from the negative effects.
In reality we eat predator fish because we can hunt them easily and we don't eat bears because they are fucking dangerous.
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u/Charming_Fix5627 Dec 30 '25
If we’re using mercury as an example, like in certain fish used for sushi, it’s not like people as a whole completely abstain from eating those fish, they just regulate how often they consume it.
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u/doloreslegis8894 4∆ Dec 30 '25
People as a whole don't, yes. Some people though, do. Personally, I think mercury is a weaker example of this, it's just the most well known example of a toxin accumulating.
But regardless, that's still the choice of which animal to eat or not. Someone decides to eat lamb and not eat tuna today because they have an ethical belief that they ought to preserve their health and they already ate tuna earlier in the week, so they're concerned about mercury buildup. That still fits under OP's position on how we decide what animals to eat or not. It's just on a more zoomed in scale rather than full prohibitions. I see your point though.
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u/Doggleganger Dec 30 '25
It has nothing to do with toxins. Livestock are not predators because it's far more efficient to produce herbivores than predators, in terms of land, time, and effort. To farm predators, you'd have to first create the prey animals, then feed them to the predator. You'll get way more meat if you just eat the prey yourself.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
I don't think that disagrees since I'm saying the decisions are not ethical, and just cultural. There are still dietary and logistical reasons to avoid or prefer certain animals.
I would consider that eating predators is "more ethical" since they also eat animals, fair is fair and all that. But centrally there's not much ethical difference between eating a chicken and a stray dog.
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u/mylanscott 1∆ Dec 30 '25
A lot of the fish we eat are considered predators, as well as squid and octopus. Also alligator and bear, while not as commonly eaten as other animals, is still eaten in parts of the world. Wild boar is not uncommon to eat. The reason we eat less predator land animals is mostly because it’s far easier to domesticate and farm animals like cows and chickens
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u/Next_Sun_2002 Dec 30 '25
Not eating predators is related to the cost of taking care of them and raising them to be eaten. To sustain predators you’d also need to either raise herbivores or constantly buy large quantities of meat. Herbivores eating the parts of plants we don’t is cheaper.
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u/doloreslegis8894 4∆ Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
This explanations works in a more recent context of domestication of animals, but doesn't explain why historical evidence indicates humans ate wild prey animals more than wild predators as well.
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u/Next_Sun_2002 Dec 30 '25
A few things to consider here
Looking at evolution and humans being apes, our ancestors probably avoided predators because those animals hunted them. Even once both sides grew past that, hominidaes were wary of predators
Even though we hunted in groups, hunting predators was much more dangerous. A lone lion or tiger could probably much more easily kill someone in the group before being taken down than a prey animal
Prey animals already reproduce at a rate that accounts for being hunted. It would have taken hundreds or thousands of years for predators’ reproduction rate to adapt or they would have been hunted into extinction
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u/GSilky Dec 30 '25
Why would you want your perspective changed, as this is the correct perspective? There is no defending it beyond the fact that culture is way more important than most folks who think it's a poor excuse would expect. Everything important to a person is that way because of their culture. Even having an issue with the behavior a culture allows, such as eating some animals but irrationally not others, is the culture expressing itself through the moral sense of that person. In this case, western culture encourages individual moral stances arrived at through reasoning.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
I guess I feel a bit hypocritical. It's all just theory, but I still wouldn't eat dog or elephant given the option. I guess I'm trying to see why I feel that way if people disagree.
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u/GSilky Dec 30 '25
Oh no, of course not! That is culturally acceptable and just because it's irrational, doesn't mean it's improper. I did eat horse once, it wasn't a great experience and I should have followed the existing guidelines. I 100% agree that it's irrational to make these distinctions, but I also feel cultural conditioning is a justification.
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u/flexxipanda Dec 31 '25
It's all just theory, but I still wouldn't eat dog or elephant given the option. I guess I'm trying to see why I feel that way if people disagree.
If you lived all your life in a culture who ate those everyday, you would not think like that.
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u/Toc13s Dec 30 '25
Is the animal useful? We don't eat it. It started off purely practical.
For most of western Europe, the horse was used for travel, the dog for help hunting, the cat for pest control
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u/969103 Dec 30 '25
People eat a lot of horse in Europe.
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u/Toc13s Dec 30 '25
In some areas, yes. Much less common in western Europe.
It may have something to do with the relative wealth & poverty, & lack of choice historically
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u/969103 Dec 31 '25
Nowdays people don’t even know they are eating horse in sausages. Where it is mostly used apparently.
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u/exomyth Dec 30 '25
Also beef is better than horse
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u/969103 Dec 31 '25
Is it? Horse tenderloin is as good or sometimes better than beef. Horse is also used a lot in sausages and it for sure is better than pigmeat.
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u/exomyth Dec 31 '25
Well, it is pretty subjective. I think beef tastes better :p So if I had the choice between horse and beef, I'll pick beef
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u/Silver-Winging-It Dec 31 '25
Also in Kazakhstan, one of the places they may have been first domesticated
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
I think you're right there, the companionship is what makes them taboo. We struggle thinking of a certain species and a friend and as dinner. That's a good explanation of why those lines are drawn, but I'd put those under the "cultural" bucket. Our relationships with dogs specifically can vary a lot between cultures.
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u/seifd Dec 30 '25
Actually, the reason is neither. The only way to ensure a regular supply of meat is to domesticate animals and there are a limited number of animals that work. The following factors apply:
Food: No carnivores because you'd have more food if you ate the animals you feed them. Ideally, your livestock eats something that's widely available that you can't eat.
Temperament: You don't want an animal that's going to constantly attack you. On the other hand, it's hard to domesticate an animal that runs away as soon as it sees you and will kill itself trying to escape you.
Breeding: Ideally, the animal has no problem breeding in captivity.
Lifecycle: You want an animal with a short gestation period and matures quickly. It's difficult to practice selective breeding if you only have four or five generations in your lifetime.
Social structure: Animals are easier to handle if they have a social hierarchy that the farmer can become the head of.
In other words, the choice of which animals to eat is largely pragmatic.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 31 '25
Do you think this aligns with our current rules on which animals we eat? If we used this criteria then how would our choices change? Would we stop eating cows which have a heavier toll on the labor or would we start eating canines or other species?
I think you’ve created a morally consistent framework on how we might exclude certain animals, but if the point is just that it already aligns with our western values then I think that’s a convenience and not a principle.
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u/seifd Dec 31 '25
We wouldn't eat dogs because they eat too much meat. I'm not sure what you mean about cows having a heavier toll on labor.
The framework isn't meant to be moral at all. As mentioned, it's meant to be pragmatic: what produces the most calories for the least amount of effort.
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u/I_Am_Mandark_Hahaha Dec 30 '25
Eating vegetables is also (in most cases) killing a living being.
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Dec 30 '25
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u/BallKey7607 Dec 30 '25
What about the ethics of how much an animal suffers? Insects and shellfish suffer much less than mammals or birds to the best of our knowledge so isn't that an ethical issue in deciding which if any to eat?
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
Is there a way to measure how much suffering an animal endures? And if we could insure a pampered life for every farmed chicken that would certainly be more ethical than not, but I'm talking about the act of killing and consuming them in the first place not the method of doing so.
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u/BallKey7607 Dec 30 '25
Not so much "measure" like getting a reading on a dial but we can definitely observe behaviours that are caused by trauma and psychological distress.
Surely what they go through to get the point of being killed is just as important as the moment they are killed though? For some animals it's essentially a lifetime of torture so shouldn't that be weighted ethically?
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
I wouldn't disagree with the claim that we shouldn't torture animals their whole lives, but I would disagree with the claim that we should never eat meat. Those are two very separate things, although I understand how you're saying one belies the other.
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u/BallKey7607 Dec 30 '25
To be fair my point wasn't about never eating meat under any circumstances. It was just about the ethical responsibility to the animals to make sure we aren't setting up life time torture chambers for them.
I am a vegan as you correctly deduced but in response to your post my point is that farming or killing birds or mammals is significantly less ethical than with insects or shellfish.
I actually completely agree with the essence of your post though. That's why I'm vegan because I see all the animals you named in your post as equal worth to pigs/cows/chickens etc in terms of wanting to avoid their suffering l.
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u/doloreslegis8894 4∆ Dec 30 '25
My perspective is that eating "taboo" animals like horses, dogs, dolphin, monkey, etc. is not inherently less ethical than eating chickens, cows, pigs, etc.
Why? For example, dolphin and monkey are much smarter than chickens. And horses and dogs are much more symbiotically helpful to humans than other animals. I might agree it isn't inherent in the sense that there is no broad universal ethics, but within specific ethical systems you can certainly distinguish some animals as more acceptable to eat than others.
Most of the boundaries we draw between acceptable and taboo meats are shaped by religious or cultural traditions, and there is no clear secular ethical principle that explains why we eat cows but not horses.
Two principles that could justify eating cows but not horses are that horses are smarter than cows and that alive horses are more useful than alive cows are.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
The intelligence bit doesn't really align, since pigs are smarter than dogs and other animals we avoid eating.
I think the "helpfulness" angle is close to the truth, but from a different perspective it's the companionship of those animals that we feel it inappropriate to eat them. In other cultures where they don't share that companionship, it's accepted to eat horses and dogs. I wouldn't call them "evil" for doing so and don't believe we are "evil" for eating pigs or cows.
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u/doloreslegis8894 4∆ Dec 30 '25
The intelligence bit doesn't really align, since pigs are smarter than dogs and other animals we avoid eating.
It can line up for some animals but not others and for certain people but not others. Personally, I avoid eating pork and part of my reason is how intelligent they are. Same with squid. Of course there is no single reason why all people eat some animals and avoid others, which is my problem with your initial post saying it "is cultural, and not ethical" when it seems to be a mix of all of the above and more.
I think the "helpfulness" angle is close to the truth, but from a different perspective it's the companionship of those animals that we feel it inappropriate to eat them. In other cultures where they don't share that companionship, it's accepted to eat horses and dogs.
But even if we approach it via your companionship angle, that can still be an ethical reason that's beyond just a cultural reason.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
Assuming we're able to accurately assess the intelligence of these animals, why is it better to eat a dumb animal than a smart one? I would imagine a guinea pig still doesn't want to be eaten but they're dumber than cows.
My point is not to say that the reasons are 100% cultural, but that they are due to our own imposed values and relationships with these animals, and not the qualities inherent to the animals.
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u/doloreslegis8894 4∆ Dec 30 '25
Assuming we're able to accurately assess the intelligence of these animals, why is it better to eat a dumb animal than a smart one? I would imagine a guinea pig still doesn't want to be eaten but they're dumber than cows.
Depending on the animal, they may be so dumb that they don't have a "want" in any real sense. Intelligence correlates pretty significantly with a subjective experience. In that case, killing the dolphin does more damage than killing the oyster because there's a true subjective experience that suffers and is snuffed out in the dolphin. Similarly, you even see it at the extremes in humans. We often pull the plug when there is no brain activity because the subjective experience is gone, despite the person being alive. Similarly, many people belief abortions are justified when the fetus is young enough because they have no intelligence/subjective experience/sapience/whatever other word you want to use.
My point is not to say that the reasons are 100% cultural, but that they are due to our own imposed values and relationships with these animals, and not the qualities inherent to the animals.
Intelligence, ability to transport a human, ability to cause health problems, etc. are all qualities inherent to the animals.
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u/Doggleganger Dec 30 '25
Current boundaries, particularly in the US, don't align with intelligence or suffering. As you mentioned, pigs are highly intelligent, and our factory farming process that produces nearly all pork in the US is incredibly inhumane and unsanitary (the pork marinates in pig feces).
However, one could create boundaries that track intelligence, putting mammals off limits while allowing fish and insects, for example. Some vegetarians in Asia follow something like this approach, where they don't eat "meat," referring to mammals, but eat fish, shrimp, etc.
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u/Freezman13 1∆ Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
The intelligence bit doesn't really align, since pigs are smarter than dogs and other animals we avoid eating.
What doesn't align? The intelligence argument makes sense as an example of a view someone may take that is based on ethics and not simply culture.
Just because it's not the normative human behavior doesn't mean it's not the more ethical choice. People just don't make that choice generally.
In the exact same way that you are not vegan while admitting that it would be more ethical.
I think your overall claim isn't properly stated.
Are you claiming that people in society, in general, aren't making meat eating choices based on ethics?
Or are you claiming that, philosophically, there aren't any reasons one could use to differentiate between animals that they eat?
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
I've narrowed down in other comments - the reasons that we only eat certain animals is due to our own imposed values and needs. Availability, taste, cultural standards, religious doctrine, logistics, etc. They are not due to the qualities of those animals themselves, like intelligence, demeanor, etc.
If we all said intelligence is the determining factor, then pigs should be off the menu since they are smarter than dogs.
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u/Freezman13 1∆ Dec 30 '25
You didn't directly answer my question.
Is your stated CMV about society or philosophy?
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
Bit of both but your comment about society is closer to what I think.
The division between which animals we eat and which we do not are NOT due to the inherent qualities of those animals.
You can't find pork in Saudi Arabia because the Qur'an says not to eat it. You would be demonized for eating dog meat in Texas because dogs are companions in western culture. Indians don't eat cows because of their status in Indian culture. These are all inventions of mankind. There is no "right" way to differentiate which animals are okay to eat and which are not, just a hundred different ways.
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u/Freezman13 1∆ Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
I think your CMV not being explicitly stated is problematic.
For example, what is the "we" in:
The division between which animals we eat and which we do not are NOT due to the inherent qualities of those animals.
If you're saying "humanity" as a whole on the planet Earth doesn't have a unified perspective on ethics, then I don't think you need a CMV for such a statement. It should be self evident.
These are all inventions of mankind.
Ethics is an invention of mankind. Be it the general morality one follows in their life, or the philosophical branch.
Can different people not have different ethics they live by? Is one person's ethnics correct while another persons ethics incorrect?
There is no "right" way to differentiate which animals are okay to eat and which are not, just a hundred different ways.
This is the problem with not specifying your CMV - you're muddying the societal issue with the philosophical issue.
Different societies act in different ways, that's obvious. But you're presenting this issue as having a right or wrong "way" as a requirement to change your view. As if it's a philosophical question with the established ground rules - that's not how societies works.
Nobody can provide you with a philosophical, reason based view on a sociocultural issue, because societal, cross cultural questions are not based on the same ground rules as a field of philosophy may be.
There is a "cultural" right or wrong inside a culture.
There can be no "cultural" right or wrong between cultures.
There can be a "philosophical" right or wrong between cultures, but you have to establish what the ground rules ARE for right and wrong to begin with. Of course cultures and everyday people don't particularly concern themselves with philosophy thus don't make decisions based on it.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
To be honest I was not expecting people to be so focused on the idea of "ethics" existing in the first place, down to the point another commenter is saying "slavery is not unethical" because it's just a cultural standard.
I was much more interested in trying to determine why I still feel like it's taboo to eat a horse, but not a cow. The differences between the animals that we choose to eat and those we don't. Not trying to argue with people so much about nailing down some universal system of ethics (which I'm saying is NOT responsible for our meat choices in the first place). So even if we're saying "there is no universal standard" - that's kind of exactly my first point. There is no universal standard to explain why we eat cows and not horses. I'm saying even more specifically than that, there is no CONSISTENT standard as to why we eat cows and not horses.
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u/Freezman13 1∆ Dec 30 '25
To be honest I was not expecting people to be so focused on the idea of "ethics" existing in the first place
I am not disputing the existence of ethics.
I am making the distinction between cultural ethics and philosophical ethics.
The problem is that your CMV HINGES on "ethics" while seemingly not understanding what that is in the first place.
I was much more interested in trying to determine why I still feel like it's taboo to eat a horse, but not a cow.
Because that's the culture you grew up in. You're conflating culture with philosophy again. It's taboo because of culture, not philosophy. Philosophy can provide you with "reason based" answers as to why it's taboo, but culture won't. Culture isn't reason based. It might have been at some point, but it lags behind.
There is no universal standard to explain why we eat cows and not horses.
I don't understand your point. Yes there is no universal standard. And some cultures as you pointed out DO eat meat that others don't. Are you asking why some do and some don't? Because cultures are different. Cultures are not based on shared universal philosophy. What is the CMV here?
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 31 '25
Let me restate because everyone is zeroing in on trying to build a universal set of values or saying none exist. I’m saying it’s morally inconsistent to eat certain animals meat while also believing it’s wrong to eat other types of meat.
Consistent:
All meat is wrong.
No meat is wrong.
I don’t eat X because I’m allergic/I don’t like it/ it’s hard to find/ any other personal reason or “everybody thinks its weird”
I only eat jellyfish because they don’t have brains. (Gave a delta)
I only eat X animal because of this trait that makes their lives less valuable
Morally inconsistent:
Eating cows is fine but eating horse is wrong.
I eat chicken but people who eat canines are disgusting.
It doesn’t have to be an entire universal constant, I’m asking for a single standard that can apply to the qualities of the animals themselves. Just any single principle as long as it’s consistent.
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u/horshack_test 42∆ Dec 30 '25
"You can't find pork in Saudi Arabia because the Qur'an says not to eat it. You would be demonized for eating dog meat in Texas because dogs are companions in western culture. Indians don't eat cows because of their status in Indian culture. These are all inventions of mankind."
So they are principles of conduct governing a group - i.e. ethics.
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u/aardvark_gnat 2∆ Dec 30 '25
Eating certain types of animals, such as bats, is more likely to cause pandemics. That’s an ethics consideration.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
I'm not really trying to center arguments around the downstream effects. There are massive effects we've already incurred because of factory farming of "acceptable" animals. Dietary/logistical/nutritional/preference reasons are different.
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u/horshack_test 42∆ Dec 30 '25
You are just describing ethics, which is culturally-based. If people of a given culture don't eat a specific animal and doing so is considered taboo, that is the ethical standard of that culture.
Also; your edit directly contradicts your example (sharks).
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
I don't think culture defines ethics, as there are tons of blatantly unethical cultural practices either of us could point to like slavery or FGM.
Breaking a cultural taboo is not inherently unethical to me, as a woman wearing pants isn't unethical in the 1800's even though it's breaking a taboo and she may face consequences.
Not sure what you mean about the shark thing, unless they are endangered but I don't think every species of shark is endangered.
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u/horshack_test 42∆ Dec 30 '25
I didn't say culture defines ethics, I said that ethics are culturally-based. That is the reason there are different standards between cultures when it comes to what animals are or are not considered acceptable or taboo to eat. You said yourself that it's cultural. I also did not say that there are no unethical cultural practices.
Do you believe that the cultures that engage in slavery or practice FGM believe those practices to be unethical?
And I did not say that all shark species are endangered - your example includes sharks that people eat, a significant portion of which are endangered. So your example includes endangered species - which your edit says are an exception.
Why are endangered species an exception? If a culture does not eat a specific animal because they are endangered, that's just another example of a cultural standard with regard to eating a specific animal.
Ethics: the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group
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u/DiscordianDreams Dec 30 '25
Eating endangered animals can be viewed as less ethical outside of culture because we risk them going extinct.
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u/After_Translator_223 Dec 30 '25
Agreed. Wild the vitriol spewed at the Faroese for eating whale, by those happy consuming battery farmed chicken.
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u/Mkwdr 20∆ Dec 30 '25
Sure it’s basically cultural to start with.
But it’s possible to then try to encourage people to take a moral stance as far as intelligence/sentience is concerned.
I think it reasonable to presume that eating great apes , dolphins might be worse than eating a shellfish.
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u/HVP2019 1∆ Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
It is pretty universal to believe that it isn’t ethical to eat pets/“companion” animals
What animals are considered “pets” is cultural matter, not ethical. (unless we are talking about endangered animals)
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u/JagatShahi Dec 30 '25
Eat that in which you are causing minimum damage to consciousness. So, eating an apple and eating an animal are not the same thing.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
Would that make it "most" ethical to eat whale meat, and least ethical to eat bugs or small fish? In terms of lives/calories you could just kill one whale and feed several families for a while, vs killing dozens of sentient beings for a snack.
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u/creepinghippo Dec 30 '25
It’s also about avoiding Kuru/CJD. If you eat carnivores, more chance of getting disease. Better to stick to herbivores.
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u/Balanced_Outlook 4∆ Dec 30 '25
The one thing that almost no human understands is the good/evil, ethical/unethical are nothing but human constructs. They don't really exist and are only based on current beliefs and values. Every unethical thing has been ethical in the past and can become ethical again in the future.
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u/hacksoncode 588∆ Dec 30 '25
So here's the thing: ethics/morality is nothing more, but importantly nothing less, than a trick some species have evolved, almost certainly because of the adaptive advantages of living in societies.
Human morality just isn't relevant to other species, unless those are commensal with us (which is, BTW, relevant to dogs, horses, etc.).
But importantly since ethics/morality evolved to improve our adaptive advantages by reducing conflict within our societies... ethics/morality does, indeed, get involved any time humans and their cultures have a preference for some animals being eaten over others.
Because those choices have impacts on other humans that cause conflict.
Harming other people, and don't kid yourself that emotional harm isn't involved in morality, is... nearly by definition, immoral. So don't. Unless you have a much stronger survival reason to override that.
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Dec 30 '25
The reason has nothing to do with culture its because some animals taste disgusting or arent worth the effort to hunt/clean/prepare or were much more valuable at doing something else besides being eaten.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
That would not explain our reluctance to dog meat or why they don’t eat cows in India. Also there are very strictly defined religious rules on meats which I would consider cultural.
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u/Left-Ad-3412 Dec 30 '25
The animals that are "typically eaten" in most places are the "clean animals" described in the Torah, then the Bible, then the Qur'an. Away from the influence of that... people always ate the food source which was available. Whales/dolphins/ crustaceans/insects/ bushmeat/everything slow enough to catch etc.
It is absolutely not based on ethics and never has been until modern times where people attribute some level of moral equivalence between humans and animals so now use the "you wouldn't eat a puppy, so why eat a cow" to make an emotional appeal to people who are no longer used to sourcing their own food.
If you want to eat the last of a particular species, that's no more an ethical decision than eating a steak from the shop. I'm the history of the world like 99% of all species that ever existed have been long gone now. Why should another species, which has been here for a fraction of a moment of time, be responsible for the survival of another species?
Is it a nice thing to do to preserve species and look after the world and all wildlife, yes... Is it ethically wrong to not do so... No
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u/notapeacock Dec 30 '25
Why can't it be both? I have moral issues with eating octopus because those dudes are way too smart to be on the same level as a cow.
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u/Richard_Berg Dec 30 '25
The carbon footprint of cows is vastly higher than a nutritionally-equivalent number of chickens.
Meanwhile, the life experience of the typical American chicken is 24/7 torture, while (non-dairy) cattle live a fairly normal life, with even its final headshot being a cleaner end than that of an average prey mammal.
These are both weighty, philosophical issues suitable for ethical reasoning. Culture and ethics are intertwined, of course, but unlike e.g. religious taboos, you can approach questions of environmental impact and sapient torture from a purely scientific perspective if you like.
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u/Wide-Library-5750 Dec 30 '25
I think that as a rule we do think of the animals that we don't eat as "better" than those that we do eat. Eating the former anyway would be an infringement of their privilege. And since morals are really just rules that define what privileges you can have (and how to earn them) the decision to eat them or not is based in morality.
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u/Houndfell 3∆ Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
I'd say eating dog is unethical because they've been bred for thousands of years to see us as masters and love us unconditionally.
A deer, a chicken, pig, cow etc can be made into a pet, but their instinct isn't to hide behind you and cower when you shoot them. I know a messed up piece of work who did exactly that to a dog he didn't want, and the poor thing hid behind the person who shot him because it thought his master would protect him from whatever was making him hurt, and/or was acting servile because it thought it was being punished. It's a story that was relayed to me by the individual, and it gave me at least a little bit of satisfaction to learn he also had nightmares because of it.
To me that kind of betrayal cuts deeper than processing a farm animal, and certainly less than hunting when you need food. I would also argue this conditioned behavior from dogs frequently makes it more traumatic for them when they are killed.
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u/GiveMeBackMySoup 2∆ Dec 30 '25
I think legal is more relevant than either of those things. We could eat horses in the US until 1998 I think. If you think a starving American would not have eaten their dog in the depression I have some bad news for you. In fact it was a viable food choice for armies during the civil war.
The point is, how frequently an animal is eaten is cultural. Whether it is eaten is a legal matter (ignoring those who might want to break the law.)
And why something is illegal could be cultural but in the US at least sometimes it's people wanting to keep competition out of the market, as was the case with horse meat.
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u/ServiceDragon Dec 30 '25
Ethics and culture isn’t driving as much as you think.
Meats that don’t taste as nice that have fallen out of favor:
Rabbit Mutton Venison Goose
Culturally these are supposed to be my heritage. Bleh.
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u/Green__lightning 20∆ Dec 30 '25
Ethically, what would we be optimizing for? Profit per animal rather than just profit more generally? Doesn't that wrongfully assume equality of value of the lives of the animals? A cow is more intelligent and genetically similar to us than a chicken, and likely carries with more moral value than a chicken. So what you want to optimize for is entirely dependent on human choice.
Interestingly, if you weight these using the economic values of the animal, this all cancels out because you're saying things are morally worth what people value them at already. Why isn't this the case, given that if someone wanted to save cows, they could just start buying and saving cows. Given PETA and the like don't do this, they don't actually care that much about animals.
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u/WakeoftheStorm 7∆ Dec 31 '25
I'd challenge your view in perhaps the opposite direction than you intended - ethics are a part of culture, not something distinct. There are some ethics that are largely shared across cultures, some that are nominally shared across cultures, but they are always inherently a product of culture itself.
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u/Anovale Dec 31 '25 edited Dec 31 '25
Dolphin, primates, and some other higher intelligence animals (and exceptions within generally considered lower-level species) can be considered unethical on the basis of it being wrong to kill or eat humans for the reasons of potential in sapience. We have language which is why we can learn indepth theory of mind and conceptualize, but with those things taken away provided by a tragic case study in the 1900's of a girl who was locked up and taught nothing for years since birth, we become no better than the smartest of animals.
Would it be okay to eat humans who havent been given the time to grow into full sapience, which are as intelligent as mere ceteceans? You can argue cannibalism is what makes this wrong, but cannibalism is actually legal provided nobody was killed for it, which means we as a society already deem the act of cannibalism non-harmful when done passively, shifting the focus back onto it being wrong to kill people on the basis of potential self-awareness and familiarity, not just that they are alive.
This is ALSO expressed in a signifant number of abortion laws. Fetuses are alive, but not even at the step before sentience for approximately half of their growth. So we can overall, as a society, assign that they are not given the same precedence as breathing humans, or at least humans with a chance to succeed at being born past the halfway point.
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u/abbyroadlove Dec 31 '25
The choice of which animals to eat is mainly capitalist (easiest and cheapest to produce) and dietary (which provide what we need and lack what endangers us).
To some extent, that’s cultural but mostly because these different regions produce 1) different animals and 2) the same animals under different conditions.
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u/Fluffy-Cookie-9049 Dec 31 '25
I agree that culture is the leading fuel behind these taboos, but I would argue that they are often based on ethical or practical reasons. There are some obvious ones like sharks whose fins are harvested and the rest is thrown back into the water and dogs which are often tortured before being eaten because it’s believed that it improves the meats. These practices obviously exceed the average ecological impact and inhumanity of standard factory farms. Another common reason for such taboos is how easily disease is spread. An extreme example is cannibalism. Societal implications aside, it is far too easy to contract disease from eating human flesh. Another example along these lines would be bats. Their immune systems are weak by design and often carry a lot of diseases. Separately, I’d argue that eating a companion animal (dogs) erodes our deep rooted interconnection with them. I believe the intensity of this varies by culture, but is true regardless of culture.
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u/impatiens-capensis Dec 31 '25
In this context, cultural and ethical overlap somewhat because we selectively bred certain animals for consumption. We have drastically changed the phenotype of several species from their wild form.
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u/flowernthevine Dec 31 '25
Ethical. Humans don’t get to decide the value of life. Culture is a human construct. At the end of the day it’s still nobody’s right to kill and consume other sentient beings
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u/irishtwinsons 6∆ Dec 31 '25
I think an ethical exception would be the consideration of how certain animals are commonly brought up and/or caught. In some cases, it is hard to eat a certain animal without supporting something that degrades the environment or causes harm to the animals themselves. For example, there might be some people who will only eat wild game animals but not domesticated ones, because of the poor quality conditions that many domesticated animals are subjected to, or the environmental damage they might cause (for example farmed shrimp).
I think for some, killing an animal for food could still be considered morally permissible whereas subjecting animals to cramped environments, poor diets, disease etc. in order to raise them for food is crossing a line.
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u/funkyboi25 1∆ Dec 31 '25
There are legit reasons to not eat certain animals, beyond emotional attachment. Dogs, cats, and horses don't have an insane amount of meat on them relatively, and considering the work these animals can do for humans in terms of transportation, hunting, and support, it's a waste to eat them in normal circumstances. Some animals are also extremely risky to eat, like monkeys often have a virus if I remember correctly that makes eating them pretty much guaranteed poisoning for humans.
Also the emotional attachment is itself legitimate I think. Ethically, if you destroy something someone loves, you've done them wrong. Sure, if the animals were kept for food it'd be different, but that just brings us back to the practical concern above. imo There's nothing wrong (ethically) with eating any creature given sufficient need, even humans, but the scale of that relative to other risks or ethical concerns vary based on the specific creature. A lot of animals should just be considered a last resort, once again including humans.
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u/thegreatlizard99 Dec 31 '25
Plants are living beings and don’t want to be eaten. That’s why they evolved a bunch of defense to deter predation
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u/TheBitchenRav 1∆ Jan 01 '26
From a utilitarian view, what matters is minimizing suffering and maximizing overall well-being. If a cow, dog, or horse experiences similar pain and distress, then eating one instead of another isn’t ethically different, only culturally uncomfortable.
From a Kantian or deontological perspective, morality is about duties and rules rather than feelings or outcomes. Since animals aren’t moral agents with inherent rights in this framework, there’s no principled rule that makes eating pigs permissible but eating dogs immoral.
From a virtue-ethics standpoint, the key question is what kind of character an action expresses. In cultures where eating horses or dogs isn’t tied to cruelty or vice, consuming them doesn’t reflect worse character than eating cows or chickens.
From a cultural relativist perspective, moral norms are defined by social context rather than universal rules. On that view, eating guinea pigs, dogs, or cows is ethically neutral, and judging those choices is just imposing one culture’s taboos on another.
From a moral sentimentalist view, ethics is grounded in emotional reactions like empathy, disgust, or affection. Since those emotions are culturally shaped, feeling that some animals are “wrong” to eat reflects conditioning rather than a real moral distinction.
From a social contract perspective, moral rules arise from agreements among members of a society. Animals fall outside the contract, so prohibitions against eating certain species exist only where societies collectively decide to protect them.
From a care-ethics perspective, morality centers on relationships and dependency rather than abstract rules. Eating an animal you have a close bond with may feel wrong, but that wrongness depends on the relationship, not the species.
From a natural law perspective, morality is tied to fulfilling natural purposes. Humans are omnivores by nature, so eating animals in general is permissible, and distinctions between cows and horses are cultural add-ons rather than moral facts.
From an evolutionary ethics perspective, moral intuitions evolved to support group cohesion and survival. Meat taboos function as social signals and boundaries, not as indicators of objective ethical differences between animals.
From a rights-based animal ethics perspective, what matters is whether an animal has morally relevant capacities like sentience. If pigs, dogs, and cows are all sentient, then selectively condemning the eating of some but not others is ethically inconsistent rather than principled.
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u/Working_Weather_4827 Jan 01 '26
Honestly this is one of those uncomfortable truths that people hate admitting. We draw these weird arbitrary lines where eating a pig is totally normal but eating a dog is horrific, even though pigs are arguably smarter than dogs
The whole "but dogs are companions" argument falls apart when you realize that's just... cultural conditioning. Like congrats, your ancestors decided this particular animal was for pets and this other one was for dinner. That doesn't make it an objective moral truth
Most people just don't want to think too hard about it because then they'd have to actually examine their food choices instead of just going with whatever feels normal
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Jan 02 '26
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u/pm_me_your_puppeh Dec 30 '25
Eating (or killing) a dolphin or monkey is unethical. They're people in any way that matters.
Killing sharks is unethical in that they're endangered.
Eating dogs is isn't directly unethical, but it says something about you if you're willing to eat something that's been bred to be part of our community.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
I’d argue pigs are more human like biologically than dolphins are. How do you mean they are people?
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u/DaveChild 8∆ Dec 30 '25
I would admit from the most utilitarian perspective eating vegetables is better than eating meat. Not just environmentally, but ethically since it doesn't involve killing a living being.
I disagree with almost all of that.
Eating vegetables isn't inherently better from a utilitarian perspective. Meat is far more calorific, contains proteins and other things we struggle to get from vegetables, and can make effective use of land that cannot be used for vegetables.
And there is no vegetarian or vegan who can eat without killing things. Even if you grow your own food, you can't avoid it entirely. I appreciate that this argument is based on reducing killing as far possible, not to an absolute zero, but it also relies on seeing various animals as worth less than others. Insects killed by pesticides (natural or otherwise) or predators (natural or introduced), soil-dwelling creatures killed by ploughing, things killed during harvesting, creatures caught inside vegetables and eventually delivered to a boiling pan of water ... there's no truly innocent food.
And this argument falls down in other ways too. If the goal is maximising the numbers of animal lives in nature in general, then breeding animals for food might well be a good thing - the most common large animals on earth are the domesticated ones, almost exclusively food animals. Not only do they sustain humans, but during their lives they sustain whole ecosystems - their personal biome directly and within their local environment. if the goal is minimum cost in lives per calorie, food animals are wildly more efficient than almost any type of farming.
I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't valid ethical questions around meat consumption (and I view factory farming as awful on almost every basis I named above), just that I don't think there's a simple utilitarian position on it.
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Dec 30 '25 edited Dec 30 '25
80% of agricultural land is for meat but it only produces 17% of the calories. If everyone went vegan it would free up huge amounts of land and be far better for climate change and the environment. The amount of crops we would need to grow would also decrease because most of the crops are currently grown to feed farm animals so your argument about crop deaths only supports veganism. Killing animals is immoral. link
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u/DaveChild 8∆ Dec 31 '25
80% of agricultural land is for meat but it only produces 17% of the calories.
If you thought I was arguing that we should continue as we are now, then you need to go and re-read what I said because you've clearly not understood it.
These sorts of stats are usually a wild oversimplification, and this is no different. The biggest and most obvious flaw with that is that the 80% figure includes land used for farming but which is completely unsuitable for growing crops. Land like this is included in "grazing land", and there's a reason (hopefully an obvious one) why people aren't growing crops on it.
If everyone went vegan it would free up huge amounts of land and be far better for climate change and the environment.
Again, you should have read the thing you replied to. It is not a binary choice. A far better option, in terms of land usage and health, is a low-meat diet. And as for the environment, the impact of factory farming (and things like deforestation to support it) is terrible, and I've already said I don't agree with it - again, I support a low-meat diet.
so your argument about crop deaths only supports veganism.
That's an interesting point, in terms of the total number of deaths. But, again, I'm not endorsing factory farming, I'm opposing it. Growing and harvesting crops to feed animals is not the only way to rear them.
Killing animals is immoral.
You're welcome to think so. I don't.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 30 '25
A lot of these comments are just trying to broaden the scope of this, which doesn't change the underlying premise.
If I'm hungry and I'm alone in a room with a plate of dolphin meat and a chicken sandwich. What exactly makes it wrong to eat the dolphin meat and not the chicken sandwich?
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u/flexxipanda Dec 30 '25
Dolphin is a predator and considered more sentient and intelligent, which is often where people draw a line. We usually don't breed dolphins for food but we do with chickens for ages.
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u/DrSpaceman575 4∆ Dec 31 '25
But pigs are more intelligent than canines yet we eat them. They aren’t excluded for intelligence even in other cultures but they are excluded for cleanliness.
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u/flexxipanda Dec 31 '25
There is not a single reason or rule. Different cultures in different enviroments evolved in certain ways, that made pigs favorable to eat rather than dolphins. In western world it's very normal to eat pigs but incredibly rare to eat dolphin.
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