The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, is the best book I've read this year. It profoundly changed the way I look at things. I also found Sperm Wars to be very enlightening, ditto Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.

There are a lot of documentaries (Earthlings, Dominion) or books (Eating Animals, Fast Food Nation) on animal agriculture that would give you a better counterpoint to #1 than I will in this comment. Or just Google image search "factory farm", "battery cage", "gestation crate".

If #2 justified animal agriculture it could also be used to justify human slavery, provided you intentionally bred humans for that purpose.

To be honest I don't fully understand your argument. You seem to think a species that is being opressed by us, kept in factory farms and killed for our sensory pleasure - that this is a beautiful relationship?

Maybe I'm being trolled? If not - I don't think you would say the same after watching Earthlings https://vimeo.com/209647801 or after reading Eating Animals [2].

>I also find it a bit presumptuous that you think you know what will be considered immoral in the future.

It's already considered immoral today by leading moral philosophers and other great thinkers, such as Peter Singer, Richard Dawkins[0], Einstein, Carl Sagan, Prof Brian Greene and many more. All I'm saying is that I think the majority of people in the future will adopt this view. Star Trek certainly protrayed this view [1].

Anyway, I'm not here to convince you - I can't. Only you can convince yourself. All I can do is present you with research and other information and encourage you to do your own research on the realities of the large scale meat industry. But I can fully understand that it's just easier not do that and just continue to tell oneself that we humans have a beautiful relationship with animals that we opress and exploit.

Change is hard... but 'refactoring' oneself is rewarding ;)

Anyway, thanks for making the effort to reply and for having a dialog.

[0] Vegan lifestyle is morally superior - Richard Dawkins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgmjh7bh7Ks

[1] Star Trek - 'We no longer enslave animals for food purposes' https://youtu.be/sS7NRtEJBcA?t=31s

[2] https://smile.amazon.com/Eating-Animals-Jonathan-Safran-Foer... or wait for the documentary to be released hat is being produced by Natalie Portman.

- How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/06...
- Beethoven As I Knew Him by Anton Felix Schindler http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-As-I-Knew-Him/dp/0486292320
- Soul Of A New Machine (It's about hardware!) and Mountains Beyond Mountains, both by Tracy Kidder
- Eating Animals by Jonathan Safron Foer

That's only because we're exploiting other living species, which are much less able to defend themselves than we are.

A society should be judged by how it treats its weakest members, and if you ask me, that's the battery hens and mass-farmed pigs in their crowded "flats". The atrociously low price of meat is actually not at all a mark of civilisation, but rather of barbarism towards animals. Animals which, might i add, consistently turn out to be more intelligent that we originally thought.

Everybody should read Eating Animals by J.S. Foer, it's surprisingly level-headed and non-ranty, but even so, it's hard to ignore what goes on in the food industry.

The reason the Inuit can eat an diet consisting only of meat while remaining healthy is that it matches their lifestyle. A big problem for health in western society is the mismatch between those two, I don't think you can blame either one in isolation. We don't do a whole lot, but we eat a load of sugary stuff. This is a big part of Michael Pollan's critique on our diet, it is a very interesting read.

Besides, there are the obvious other health-related reasons to not eat factory-farmed meat, which most of our meat is. For that I can only recommend reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Saffran Foer. It was what pushed me over the line into becoming a vegetarian.

I'm surprised and happy to see a big outlet like the Rolling Stone doing such an extensive feature on the meat topic. Yes, they present it completely biased and it's clear what the motivations of the publisher here are, but I think it's important to finally get visibility on what meat consumption actually means.

It's fascinating to see that people who want to eat meat are okay with the fact that we're so detached from what it actually is. The objectification of everything in this world is definitely playing a part in this, we just remove the moral context of the products we buy so we don't have to think about it, problem solved.

I eat meat, but I am struggling with where I buy it, what I pay for it and how much I eat it.

I recommend reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Saffran Foer, where he leaves the decision up to you but is providing you with interesting thought experiments (why not eat dog meat?) and information so you can make up your own mind. It is unfortunately written about the American meat industry, I'd love to see exposure like that on European countries as well.