Last week, a friend asked us a very important question that deserves serious consideration. As a vegetarian, he asked us why we choose to eat meat. Why do we intentionally decide to kill an animal for food when we know there is another way that can provide equal or possibly better nutrition? For the sake of this argument we’re going to go with the assumption that a vegetarian diet is nutritionally healthier than an omnivorous diet, although that is a debate for another time.

To answer this, I believe I need to state that my goal for participating in this challenge is to better understand the natural balance of the world and where I fit in it to help create a more sustainable earth. With that in mind, in the natural state of the world, an animal, let’s say a deer, is born and lives and dies. This is simple, irrefutable fact. I have two choices in the matter, I can kill the deer or not.

If I choose to NOT kill the deer it will still die. Perhaps we can say that it is killed slowly and brutally by a pack of wolves, who have no choice but to eat meat to survive. Or it dies of starvation because deer are over-populated in that area because there are no predators. Or it’s habitat gets destroyed and it dies of thirst. The one way that deer will not die, is of old age.

By not personally killing that deer myself, I have removed myself from the ecosystem and washed my hands of it’s blood. I am no longer responsible for it’s suffering. Or am I? No matter what I choose to do about the matter, the deer is going to die. If I decide to just eat vegetables and grain, am I no longer contributing to the suffering of animals?

To understand this, I need to define suffering and I need to know what causes animals to suffer. Let’s define suffering as a slow and painful death. Given this definition, what causes animal to die slow and painful deaths? As I said before, a death in the wild is more often than not, slow and painful. Evolutionary Biologist, Richard Dawkins said that “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation”. And while some causes for this are completely natural (the wolf). Some are not, take habitat destruction. Habitat loss is in fact the primary cause for species endangerment (Sources 1,2) and the number one cause of habitat loss is agriculture and farming (Sources 3,4). Part of it is the sheer amount of land that agriculture uses, part of it is the pesticides that are used on them, and part of it is the actual killing of animals done by farmers protecting their crops. Corn, Soy, Wheat, these things take up the majority of US agricultural land. While I will grant that the vast majority of these three products goes to the feeding of livestock (the system I am against), if everyone was vegetarian and we instead farmed something that humans directly consumed we would still require that land for agriculture and farming. And habitats would still be destroyed. And the deer will still suffer.

And no matter what I choose to eat, I am responsible for my planet. Now I could argue that by hunting the deer myself, it has a better chance of a faster and less painful death, but I won’t go down that road because at the end of the day that deer will still be dead. And it will not thank me for ending it’s life quickly either. But by returning to a hunter-gatherer way of life, I will absolutely be fighting against the agricultural system (perpetrated by meat-eaters and vegetarians alike) that is the primary reason for species endangerment around the world. And thus, I will be doing more to help create a more sustainable earth than I would be by simply choosing not to participate in the natural process of life and death. I will be making steps to understand my place in that process. Which is my goal.

As all hunters know, in order to hunt a deer, you become highly intimate with their lives. Hunters as a group have an invested interest in making sure that the deer as a species continue to be healthy, more so perhaps that any other group. I can not prevent the deer’s death in any way, for death comes for us all no matter what we eat. But I can learn more about how I can make that deer’s life a better life in the wild AND kill it in a way that causes the least suffering and respects the life it gives.

Perhaps, if there was a way where you could totally remove humans from the ecosystem of the planet and sustain ourselves without affecting that ecosystem in anyway, it would be the more ethical choice. But I do not believe there currently is a way to do that. And even if there was, I would rather live and die as a part of the natural system of Earth, than live an alien on my own world.