This is not the first time I think about this topic and it’s not going to be the last either. When I was in school, one day I asked my grandfather why he chose to be vegetarian. His answer was simple — at some point in his childhood, he stopped it as a personal choice and never liked it again. He didn’t tell me about any moral lessons, nor did I ask him about it.

But later, I had a bad feeling about killing an animal to eat and decided to be vegetarian. It didn’t last long. In fact, my sister, who tried to follow me at that time, stuck with that plan, but not me. Anyway, till I joined college, meat was not a regular part of my diet. It was just cooked on special occasions.

But later when I joined college, I got easy access to a non-vegetarian diet. It was very easy for me to get addicted to that taste. After that, many times I felt bad about it, but reasons like protein needs and social acceptance of the meat-based diet supported me in continuing it. Here you can see one fact — when the majority of people accept something as correct, it is easy for us to consider that as a good thing.

Recently I got a chance to discuss this topic with one of my friends. He is a vegetarian and, in a fun way, I was teasing him about it. Then he asked me a question: what do you think about the morality behind following a non-vegetarian diet? It was a productive argument, for a while at least. I told him the following.

We could never justify that killing an animal to eat is morally correct in ideal terms, but the fact is that historically not everyone could afford a vegetarian diet due to various economic and geographical reasons. For example, drought-prone and desert areas or very cold environments were not good for growing plant-based food. So people there depended on a meat-based diet. But today that is not the case — in a lot of places it is rather a cultural choice.

I added that I chose the non-vegetarian diet for two reasons: one is the ease of meeting my daily protein needs, and the second is the addiction to the taste. There is nothing much to discuss about it further, since I am intentionally choosing an action for comfort, even though I consider it morally incorrect.

Then I asked him what he thought about eating meat when it is clinically synthesised without hurting any form of life. His answer was that he still wouldn’t accept it, because if people eat some form of meat, it will motivate them to kill and eat other animals indirectly. He said it would happen due to psychological reasons.

But if you think about it clearly, it’s not a problem with meat, but a problem with people who can’t differentiate good from bad. You don’t ban knives because some people use them as weapons. For a while the conversation circled around this same point with different analogies. It was no longer a productive argument, so we moved past that conversation to some other topic.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about this. Apart from what other people think, I myself consider this a morally incorrect thing. Then why am I not even trying to prevent myself from doing it? After thinking about it for some time, I knew that it had something to do with the social acceptance of the meat-based diet, and also that in modern culture we motivate people to try and experience everything.

Then I had a long conversation with Gemini about this topic. Before coming to a conclusion, I want to share a few facts and related events from my life.

The typical broiler chicken, which is genetically mutated to produce meat, has a lifespan of 5 to 8 years, but we kill them in 5 to 7 weeks. Male egg-breed chickens, which have a natural lifespan of 8 to 10 years, are killed on the very first day since either they are the wrong breed for the egg industry or they don’t produce economically profitable meat. Even while they live, they suffer a lot due to the conditions in which they are kept. Each time I stand in a chicken shop and buy a chicken, I wonder whether this suffering is necessary. But it doesn’t affect me the same way when I order something where all these cruelties are hidden from us.

If you want to know something that suffers more than chickens, you should look at the life of a fish. Whether naturally caught or industrially farmed, each suffers its own set of cruelties. When fish are captured from the deep sea and pulled up, they suffer tremendously for hours. They are also kept in an iced environment before being killed, while they are still conscious.

Then there is cattle, sheep, and other animals. Compared to the above two cases, these animals live significantly better lives while they are alive. But while being taken to the slaughterhouse, they experience tremendous fear and stress, which has been proven in many studies. A goat that can live 12 to 15 years is killed in 14 to 24 months. Beef cattle that can live 15 to 20 years are also killed in 14 to 24 months.

I grew up in a village and used to cry when a calf died in my home. But later, life made me accept these things as normal. So I wanted to ask myself, is all this suffering necessary when there are other options available to us?

There are a lot of plant-based diet options which could help us reduce these cruelties at least. All we need to do is learn and adapt to different and less cruel ways of living. We could choose not to kill an animal just to satisfy our taste buds.

There are also a lot of animals suffering in the name of medical and research purposes. In a world where we can simulate so much, I hope that in the future we could simulate the whole human anatomy to avoid these kinds of issues.

Later when I thought about it, even his psychological argument makes some sense. But I think it should be resolved using technology, education, awareness and laws. When we can produce meat or nutritious food in a lab using healthy and non-cruel ways, then we could bring strict guidelines to avoid killing for meat. But till then we could only use the education and awareness part, but not the law part.

A typical argument is that these animals are bred and brought up by us for our needs. But still, it doesn’t justify this cruelty. Assume that some higher form of life comes to Earth and finds that humans are a good source of nutritious food for them. For the first few years they hunted and ate humans, then later, due to shortage, they started breeding humans for their diet. Would you accept this cruelty with peace of mind? If not, then how can we accept the situation above?

I am not saying we are all sinners for doing the above things. We have done a lot of ignorant and cruel things throughout history, and after realising some of them, we tried to correct ourselves. I think in general, humans want to live a morally correct, good life — at least the majority of us do. But the problem is that there is no universal scale of morality for everyone. Each and every one of us has our own set of values for good and bad. All we have to do is learn and reconsider them throughout our lives. Everyone can’t change overnight from one way of life to another, but the least we could do is try.

I think this is one of the important things we need to consider in our lives. As a society, we need to move more and more towards a less cruel world not only for us but also for other living beings. I hope both technology and society can work together to achieve this. After all, we have the power to think and act accordingly — which is not the case for other animals.