I don't disagree with any of that and never have.
I have never believed that being a vegetarian was healthier. To be honest, I made the decision to stop eating meat while tripping on hallucinogens in 1982. I actually didn't even have a word for it and had no plan about whether it was for a day or a year or more. It just became a habit. Now it's so much more common, it's less interesting. But originally it was like a Rorschach of human guilt. If I said I didn't eat meat, people would instantly launch into a soliloquy on how they thought eating meat was healthy or eating meat was moral or whatever.
Strangely, after 27 years together, my wife decided to become a vegetarian. But for the first 26 years we were together she wasn't. So it's not like it's a core identity thing or core moral issue for me. I don't really care whether she is or isn't vegetarian and I don't actually care *that* much whether I am.
I *often* think about introducing some meat into my diet. Where I live now, in a massive island of protected lands, I don't know any hunters or farmers locally. If I still lived in a place where I had a lot of friends who were hunters or farmers, I would try to get meat from them. I know there are commercial sources of humanely raised meat, I just haven't made the effort.
One friend of mine who is now a vegan, for the decade before that only ate meat he killed himself (former combat Marine in Iraq).
The one part of the article's argument that makes sense to me is that there is no cruelty to allowing an animal a good, free, life up until the moment it is suddenly killed by the hunter or the farmer. That is a much less cruel death than most animals will experience in nature and the most honest relationship with that animal.
What put me off in that article was the nonsense about a moral duty to eat animals so that they can increase in numbers and how humans have rights and animals don't (based on what) that I thought was idiotic.
Eating Meat Made Us Human
I think it is natural for humans to eat meat. It's like the raw food thing. Humans can survive on raw food, but it was cooking that unlocked the nutrients that let us grow the big brains that let us dominate the planet. I think meat is like that.
Some humans crave it more than others and I think that's part habit and part biology. I do well without meat, but I really crave dairy. From a moral/ethical/cruelty point of view, I don't think there is a huge difference between eating dairy and eating milk. Also, I kill animals all the time in countless ways. Every vegetarian and vegan does. Drive down the highway and you're killing insects in large numbers (though as studies have shown, not in numbers as large as 50 years ago). My vegetarian food results in habitat destruction. The windows on my house kill a few birds a year. And so on.
The word "natural" is a problem. What does it mean? But in some sense, it is natural for humans to grow to a population of 10 billion and crowd out thousands of other species to extinction. Any species without the powers of self-reflection that we have would naturally do that. Locusts do not consider whether their population and eating habits are "natural." To me, "natural" is not the key question. The key question is "sustainable."
Locusts go through boom and bust. The boom populations are not sustainable. If humans were still a small tribe with a population of 500,000 spread throughout a small portion of Africa, we could do almost anything we anything we wanted short of nuclear war without serious moral issues.
So... I might start eating meat next month (I mean that really, not theoretically, I have been thinking about adding a bit in, it's mostly a question of finding a source I trust), but I definitely will not be swinging by MacDonald's four times a week for a factory-raised cow-based Big Mac.
In any case, I've heard that eating at restaurants a lot leads to higher mortality.
